THE ART OF REAL PLEASURE:

THAT NEW PLEASURE, FOR WHICH AN IMPERIAL REWARD WAS OFFERED

1864

Entered, according to Act of Congress. in the year 1864. By Calvin Blanchard, in the Clerks Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District of New York.

VENUS,

QUEEN OF LOVE AND BEAUTY.

As painted by Titian.

Is’nt she charming? Well, imagine her charms increased tenfold, and you will have some idea of the ravishing beauties to whom you are about to be introduced.

And if you can farther imagine these enchanting creatures, with perfect freedom in the embraces of lovers also without fault or blemish, and not the slightest disagreeableness in the case, either before or afterwards, you can get a foretaste of the voluptuous feast to which I have the high felicity to invite you.

Keep your imagination clear, and don’t be afraid of raising it too high.

THE ART OF REAL PLEASURE.

PART FIRST.

Pleasure that IS Pleasure.—the NEW MODE of Enjoyment.

My gay and gallant readers:

I am about to open for you a mine of pleasure, in. comparably richer than you ever dared to hope this world of ours contained. I am going to uncover the long hidden fountain of pure delight, and point out a way as easy as you can wish, to secure the privilege of bathing in that fountain to your entire satisfaction.

Philosophers who have somehow or other secured a reputation for superior wisdom, tell us that life can, at best, be only a sort of half and half of pain and pleasure; that the happiest condition attainable is that of ease or comfort; a condition so wearisome that no man or woman of average feeling or intellect ever endured it without the aid of stimulants either spiritual or spirituous, or some other sort of deviltry. Now if this be so, what’s the use of telling it? What’s the use of philosophizing over it? What’s the use of anything?

Evidently if this stale doctrine be true, any kind of fiction is better than truth and “the creator” has given us very queer proofs of “His” wisdom and goodness.

But it’s not true. It is only the time-sanctioned nonsense of the grave and solemn fools who tag after old Granny Habit, and I undertake to upset the whole thing. I am going to exhibit, and minutely describe, pure delight—pleasure fully and completely satisfying to all the senses, with nothing unpleasant in the case; and I further undertake to show how that pleasure can be obtained. Mark this promise well, and hold me strictly to its fulfillment.

However strange and wonderful my description, or rather narrative shall appear, I promise not to go beyond the exact truth in any essential particular.

Read my book through, and then criticise it as severely as you please.

And now, without further preliminary, imagine yourself and myself in a palace (a real one, mind you, not a baseless “castle in the air”) as much more splendid and agreeable than the Tuilleries or Windsor Castle, as you can clearly conceive. Don’t be afraid of overdoing the picture; it’s as much as the most brilliant intellect can do to come up to it.

The Grand Saloon of this palace is just comfortably filled with ladies and gentlemen. The ladies are all as beautiful as they could be, had almighty ingenuity and immaculate taste been exerted to the utmost in their creation; and all the gentlemen are as agreeable and every way as complete and perfect as though they had been made to the ladies’ order.

The dresses of both ladies and gentlemen are of very light material, but richer and more beautiful than the finest tissues of India or Cachmere, and their fashion is perfectly graceful and easy.

The chief, or, Grand Artist, as he is entitled, enters, and exchanges salutes with the company.

We are not at a ball; we are only at an assembly, such as takes place every evening. But if we please to dance, as some of us generally do, we have only to touch a spring, and music, incomparably more rapturous than king or emperor ever heard, fills this magnificent hall; nor does the music come from cat-gut scrapers and brass-mouthing cheek-splitters; science has obviated all that.

Here I wish to draw particular attention to n friend of mine; a poet. As he has long been my companion, the glories we behold are not unexpected by him; still, he is not fully prepared for all their concomitants. He has written sonnets on “love-constancy,” “family joys,” and all that sort of thing. But he is nor in a fair way to be converted to the doctrine of universal love, if for no other reason than his inability to choose between the ravishing beauties who, with the utmost freedom, entwine their arms around him, and me, and the other gentlemen, not omitting the Grand Artist himself. They ply us with glances from eyes so brilliant that we feel in a perfect glow of love; their attractions are so equal, that there is absolutely no difference in them; we would just as soon touch and take, as choose, with the non-essential and mere passing exception about to be named.

These beautiful houris permit us to encircle their fair forms without the intervention of either iron or whalebone. They tempt us to snatch such ravishing kisses; we impress those kisses on their taper hands, their ivory necks, their honeyed lips, their voluptuous bosoms.

Their dancing is far more graceful than that of Taglioni or Elsler. Their voices are sweeter than the finest tones of the flute.

And jealousy is banished hence; here, as I have already said, there is no positive inferiority. If the dark-eyed brunette pleases us first, the azure-eyed blonde delights us next, and so on through the whole charming variety. And as the tastes of both ladies and gentlemen are equally varied, it comes right all round. We talk as sociably with our partners about our gallantries with others, as we dilate on the aroma of different roses, or the flavor of various wines and fruits.

Amid scenes like these, the hour for retirement steals on unawares. As the silver-toned bells chime that hour, evening zephyrs more balmy than ever wafted o’er Ceylon or Araby in times long passed, breathe through harp-strings of ravishing tone, sending soft love music through tasteful and elegant apartments, sacred to Venus’ crowning joys, where perfect men and perfect women, in rapturous freedom, beget their kind, by night or by day, as they feel most inclination.

And now comes the grand excitement of the evening—taking partners for the night. All being equally loveable, the style of beauty that will please our present taste is the only question to be decided; and it happened now, as it generally does, that before half the party can make a selection, or get mated, the rest are so mutually and promiscuously enraptured with each other as to be unable to tell which lady or gentleman charms them the most and the question has to be decided by lottery.

Before the sweet sports began I perceived that a blue-eyed houri had decided the choice of my friend the poet and I knew beforehand as the sequel will show, that he had decided hers. They were the first couple that retired.

As to myself, I was so absorbed in beholding and helping on the enjoyment of others that I remained in the saloon till the lots were all drawn.

The nymph who fell to my share had hazel-brown eyes. Her ringlets fell over a neck and shoulders of matchless form and symmetry. Her breasts were of a charmingness surpassing all description and so was every part of her; she was absolute perfection.

A glance in each others eyes assured us that chance had been as kind to us as choice could have been—more kind, if anything; for there seemed to be additional piquancy in chance itself, where choice could have been founded only on a passing fancy.

Talk of love-constancy? there can be no such thing, till each is constant to all, and all are constant to each. Talk of the family tie? that tie will be either a galling fetter or a rope of sand, till it includes the whole human family. Say or sing “There’s no place like home?” there can be no place like home, till there is no place but home in all the world.

The apartment to which my charmer conducts me is of ample size, and perfectly ventilated. The ceiling presents the appearance of a canopy of flowers, wherein nestle Cupids, painted after models far more lovely than Grecian or Roman artist ever conceived. On the walls, Venus and her favorites are pictured to the life, as Goddesses and Gods do at length really exist; and we see them in all their charmingness, and in the most rapturous conditions. These apartments are sealed to all who have not attained to ripe puberty; the example of parents does not now introduce mere children to withering prematurity.

At one end of our chamber, pure water sparkles in chrystal baths; our bed occupies the centre. It is of elastic, spongy material, filled with air, which we can change at pleasure. It has a small, peculiar under covering spread in the center for a special purpose; and across its foot-rail hang sheets of finest linen—the only upper covering that is ever needed. Its toute ensemble is so arranged and coloured, that it presents the appearance of a bed of roses; and she who now, in most exquisite gracefulness, reclines thereon, is incomparably sweeter than all the roses in the universe.

A cushion of the finest velvet sustains her lovely form at an angle that displays all her charms, leaving nothing to be desired but their enjoyment.

When I devote myself to love, I also devote myself to worship; with me, love is inseparable from adoration; woman is my beau ideal of perfection.

I kneel to my divinity; I kiss her feet, with a fervency no saint ever felt, except, perhaps, approximately, while in ecstasies before the Virgin’s shrine.

Oh! how women love to be worshipped; it is a positive necessity of their nature; it a at the bottom of what is so ill-temperedly censured as coquetry. Tyranny has made kneeling the attitude of debasement; but there can be no debasement in kneeling to the concentrate incarnation of all that is adorable—to woman; the bravest heroes and wisest men the world has ever seen, have been woman worshippers.

My Goddess presents her hand; ale offers it so naively; she displays it so artistically artless. I press that fairy hand in both my own, and cover it with kisses. Then, in an ecstasy, I clasp her in my arms, and drink delicious nectar from her ruby lips

Her ivory neck and shoulders next receive my kisses; but I shower them most profusely, and press them longest, on her fragrant bosom; whilst my ardent hands rove instinctively to where love most powerfully invites—to the very fountain of life and bliss overflowing with quintessent amour.

Into that pure fountain, love’s ready agent—nature’s most wonderful instrumentality eagerly plunges; now we feel the unspeakable raptures of love’s glorious consummation; now we know what enchantment really is. But description can give only a very faint idea of the exquisite bliss of love’s crowning act with this enchanting creature; its thrill through every nerve and sinew; its voluptuous prolongation; its ecstatic reciprocalness.

She is just in the right condition for loving; so am I. All-powerful Nature irresistibly invites to it. Our passions, completely unshackled, and unprovoked either by opposition, or abnormal stimulation, sweetly urge us on; we freely give ourselves up to pleasure’s full sway; we revel in such pure delight, as can alone beget human beings worthy their high name, and an honour to their exalted nature.

We achieve love’s critical acme both together. Our ecstasies are simultaneous, full, and mutual. Our whole being is wrought up to such blissfulness as the most fortunate voluptuaries of past ages experienced only a slight approximation to.

After the grateful refreshment of the bath, we resign ourselves to sleep in each others arms, our hearts in happiest accord with The Great Universal Heart, and glowing with unfeigned admiration for The Real Omnipotency, wherein we “live, move, and have our being;” wherein we completely achieve our happiness, and spontaneously do our part in accomplishing the glorious end and aim of all existence.

PART SECOND.

SCENES WE WOULD ALL LIKE TO BE IN.

But I must hasten to tell you about my friend the poet; what he experienced this happy night.

We met early next morning among the fairy bowers. His countenance was one radiant sparkle of joy with just the least possible tinge of shame; just enough to tell that his philosophy had proved a failure and he had made up his mind to confess it.

I told him of my loves and he told me of his. But when he came to the end of the consummation of his joys, he broke off so queerly that I suspected something which he wished to keep back had happened, and so expressed myself.

“Come, my friend,” said I, “out with it. I have confessed many mistakes, and I assure you that however much it mortified me to do so, I felt a great deal better for it afterwards.”

This gave him courage.

“Well,” said he, “after I had taken the bath which, by the by, had such an exhilarating effect that I felt almost as gallant as at first, I said to my charmer in a tone that probably smacked a little of jealousy—‘Tomorrow night, my love, I suppose you will be as happy in the arms of another as you have just now been in mine.’”

“‘Not quite so soon as that,’ she replied. “‘At least I don’t feel just now as though I should. But this is the worst possible time to decide the question. Whenever nature does again prompt me to the love-play, she will probably tempt me to change partners, judging from former experiences. My dear friend, I love variety in nothing so much as in love; and such is the taste of a very large majority of people; probably of all. There are a few who profess constancy, as they call it; but whether they practice it or not, nobody takes the trouble to inquire. Perhaps you are one of the constants. If so, I will to-morrow introduce you to a lady of that profession, who looks for all the world just like me. Do you think she will content you?’

“‘For life! for ever!’ I exclaimed.

“‘Meanwhile,’ she continued, ‘there are two couches in our apartment. On this one I shall repose. Behind yon curtain you will find another, provided for just such accidents as seem to have happened here to-night. Choose in which of these beds you will dream of your partner for life.’

“And so you sneaked away to the lonely conch behind the curtain, I suppose,” said I; “I don’t wonder you feel ashamed to confess it.”

“No, my friend,” said he, “without a moment’s hesitation, I chose the bed whereon she had already reclined with a grace that would have tempted a saint from “Paradise” if he had a spark of manhood remaining. But just out of curiosity, I took a peep behind the curtain at the other bed. From appearances, it had never been tumbled, and I don’t believe it ever will be.”

“It’s probably tumbled out of the room before now,” said I, “for it was placed there at my suggestion, expressly for the purpose it has so happily served. But here comes the lady, who will give you all further information you may need in the matter, and she is attended by another who appears to be her second self. It’s your ‘partner for life,’ I’ll be bound. I wish you joy, my dear friend. Good morning.”

When the fashionables come to buy this book, I hope they will not light on this part of it. What! ladies and gentlemen taking the air before sunrise, the morning after a soiree? The gentlemen will be expected to yawn and stretch in bed, and complain of the headache till 11 o’clock at the earliest; and then crawl languidly forth to enquire of the servant or the family doctor how Miss or Mrs. feels after their fatigues; and it will be considered ‘positively vulgaw’ for a lady to get over those fatigues without a day’s nursing, and a dose of rhubarb and magnesia, or a seidlitz powder at the very least.

But I have a world of wonders to relate, and can not dwell longer on this one just now. I promise to make all clear, however, before I have done.

The palace I have already described is only one—the largest one—that helps to compose the City of Palaces—the Capitol of the world. The world itself is laid off into townships, in the centre of each of which there is a palace, inhabited by the people, equal except in dimensions, to that wherein resides the Grand Artist or his assistants. There is not in the whole world a single private or isolated residence, not one of those narrow abodes of jealousy and ennui, wherein people used to pray, and swear, and fret themselves to death “all for the best.”

All labor that is in the slightest degree repulsive is done by machinery. Motors far more effective than steam, and unattended by anything disagreeable, are in perfectly successful operation.

Science and art have stilled tempests, quelled volcanoes, sufficiently equilibrated thermal action between the equator and the poles, and sufficiently introduced luminous action at the latter.

All the marshes and deserts are in a state of high cultivation. ‘The atmosphere is everywhere perfectly salubrious. Sickness is no more. Death itself is practically abolished. Everybody lives as long as they want to; they live till repetition wears out all conceivable variety, and then resign themselves to everlasting forgetfulness with as little pain and regret as they go to sleep every night.

Now, don’t pronounce this impossible. If you do, you will make as big fools of yourselves as did the Esquimaux on being told that such places as Paris, London, and New York existed; and that steamboats, railroads, and telegraphs were in successful operation. I tell you that electro-magnetism and kindred science had scarcely begun to be developed in the nineteenth century.

But here comes a messenger, not a servant, but a sylph, as beautiful as any to whom I have introduced you,

“His Highness, the Grand Artist, will reserve a seat for you beside him at breakfast.”

Behold me seated at the table, next to the ruler of the world.

Such a breakfast—one that so delighted the taste and suited digestion, you, reader, never sat down to; the best hotels now furnish no meals at all comparable to it. The bread, the wine, the vegetables, and the cookery, were exactly what the highest science and art had decided were calculated to give life just the desirable length, and qualify it for being desirable. Meat furnished no part of the repast, and I hardly need to add, that all the ladies and gentlemen freely helped themselves without the annoyance of waiters.

After breakfast, the Grand Artist said to me, “My friend, I am going to tell you something that is a great puzzle to us. Perfection does not yet reign quite everywhere; there is one little plague spot, a very little one, only an old-fashioned ‘quarter section,’ wherein it seems as though all the old-worldishness is concentrated. The horrible stink of the place prevents ingress, whether by land or air and it is enveloped in a mist too thick for the sharpest eyesight, aided by the strongest glasses, to penetrate.”

“Will your Highness consign this ‘quarter section’ nuisance to my control?” I asked.

“Most willingly;” was the response.

“Where is it? I will take the management of it instantly.”

“We will show you the spot, and second you in your undertaking,” replied twenty voices at once.

We started right off, and were within smelling distance of the place in less than an hour. Its stench was indeed terrible even to myself, who had only quite recently become unused to it; of course, it was intolerable to my companions, none of whom had ever experienced more than its slightest sniff. It was what the most austere saints of the “Dark Ages! Called the “odour of sanctity.” People generated and kept it up by neglecting and abusing their corporiety supposed benefit of their “mentality” or ‘”souls.” It smelt like the suds in which the chemise of honest old maids and old bachelors had been washed. It was the effluvia of humanity’s life principle, putrefied through deprivation from use. You, reader, constantly smell it more or less, but habit has made it “second nature,” and so you don’t mind it, unless you happen to be so uncommonly sensitive and nice as to be considered “cynical,” or at least “ odd.”

Before starting, I had provided myself with a large flask of whiskey, of which I now took a good swig, and invited my companions to do the same.

“We can’t drink this horrid stuff,” said they, “it’s only used in chemistry.”

“Down with it,” said I, “unless you mean to back out of your undertaking. Our forefathers very often had recourse to a much worse article than this. It did them a great deal of harm, but more good. A night’s drunkenness, even when it came to that, was far better for their health than a night of sleepless sorrowing. It was an excellent guardian against malaria, and just the thing for a very trying emergency.”

After we had drank ourselves into that condition in which we would have assaulted the “Devil” himself, we made a rush for the centre of the infernal “quarter section.”

“There’s the core of this nasty ulcer,” said I, pointing to ten strange looking creatures, huddled together in a very narrow concern; and we seized and dragged them out, in little more time than it has taken to write it. At first, we thought they were stone dead; but a close examination showed that they were only very fast asleep.

Our dash into the place was followed by a current of the pure surrounding air, and the change was immediately and most agreeably perceptible. In ten minutes, the foggyness had wholly disappeared and very little of the old fashioned scent remained, except on the strange creatures, and a plentiful shower of perfumery soon made them endurable.

To guard against contagion, some of our party who had kept to the windward, suggested the plan of fumigating the creatures with tobacco—an article which, like whiskey, was still used in chemistry. This suggestion created roars of laughter; for at the distance of half a mile to the leeward it was unmistakably evident that they were but too well saturated with that abomination.

We telegraphed the news of our success to the Capitol, and the Grand Artist dispatched a corps of engineers, whose ingenious and powerful machinery took the creatures we had found, together with the concern in which we found them, to the City of Palaces.

And what, reader, do you suppose that concern was? It was neither more nor less than an old fashioned “homestead.” It was such a house as people lived in at the epoch of “civilization,” who did not occupy a more uncomfortable one in some crowded, dirty, plague-breeding city. It was a fair sample of the “sweet homes” wherein people prayed, and swore, and fretted themselves to death, whilst breeding slaves, knaves, skin-flints, hypocrites, and fools, and multiplying victims for war, pestilence, famine, the alms house, the brothel, the prison, and the gallows.

Our entire City of Palaces was a perfect triumph. The sky was almost darkened, by balloons, with their cars full of ladies and gentlemen, really divine—anxious to get a sight at our trophy.—Never before since the Good Time set in, had curiosity been at so high a pitch, enthusiasm so great, excitement so intense. The scene was magnificent beyond description.

The creatures we had discovered resembled the human beings that had at length been created about as nearly as the “What Is It?” resembled the people who used to pay Barnum their quarters for a look at it. Their toggery was as inconvenient and uncomfortable as possible, and seemed chiefly intended to increase their ugliness. Curiosity prompted certain of the bystanders to strip it off, and the most laughable mistakes were made in putting it on again; it was next to impossible to get the hang of it.

The savans, to whose further examination we committed these singular creatures, decided that they were human beings of a very ancient typo, and undoubtedly belonged to that class which radicals (those who had some foresight of real progress) characterized as “old fogies.” The proof seemed to show that they had bemuddled their brains over social fossilization till they had, through constant sympathy with their own morbidness, attained the most complete, sound, and orthodox state of petrifaction that admitted of any life at all; in which condition nature, by one of her strange freaks, had, as if to punish their obstinacy, fixed them.

In the pocket of No. 1 was found a receipt in full for a year’s preaching, and a sermon in favour of total depravity, original sin, and all but universal damnation. It didn’t take much fumbling among old records to prove him an “orthodox parson.”

The pockets a No. 2 were crammed with printed debates; a fair sample of which was one as to whether “God” ever made any special communication to a certain very ancient individual named “Moses.” A pamphlet was also found on this fellow, containing a vast quantity of reason and argument, going to show that people would be as well off as they are capable of becoming, if they would generally disbelieve “The Bible,” turn the “gospel shops” into common school houses, stick to gold, silver, and copper money; divide the world into 60-acre lots, or “quarter sections,” to be owned exclusively by cultivators, keep the game of caucus and ballot-box or “rotation in office” in full play, and either get married or get along somehow without sexual gratification. No. 2 was evidently an out and out “infidel” of the dryest kind—a thorough “red republican.”

That No. 3 was a professor of “moral philosophy” was quickly decided. On his person were found a well-read volume entitled “The Riches of Poverty and Benefits of Affliction,” and the millionth treatise to prove that if everybody would subdue their most vehement natural passions, “do as they would be done by,” and “be content with little,” (with about a thousandth part of what they instinctively crave) the height of earthly perfection would be attained.

No. 4 had a ring on his finger with the initials S. A. D. On this abominable creature were found notes of a stump speech, slowing in most bunkum rhetoric, that “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” that “the tree of liberty must be ever and anon watered with human blood;” that “majority rule is the utmost possible freedom and the highest law;” that in accordance with this liberty and this law, “the weaker have no rights which the stronger are bound to respect;” and finally that majorityism is “ the noblest system of government ever devised by mortals,” or devisable by them.

No. 5 had a single piece of evidence as to his profession, but that was conclusive. It consisted in a law decision, that the good of society requires a woman to remain the wife of a husband who beats her every day with a cudgel “‘no thicker than his thumb,” gets constantly drunk on her earnings, and whips his and her children into the street to beg, steal, go to the poor-house, or minister to a certain unmentionable depravity to which grave and reverend debauchees were principally addicted, till they became old enough for pimps or prostitutes.

There was sufficient evidence on No. 6 to prove him a political economist, who contended that “marriage” in accordance with the foregoing law decision was the great safeguard from licentiousness, and the best possible guaranty for the rights of women and children; and that, but for the constraint on sexual freedom which such marriage imposed, the world would soon be overpopulated.

“Is it possible,” exclaimed several of the company, their angelic countenances pale with horror, “that the people from which we are descended were ever subjected to such politicians, such lawyers, such moralists, and such religionists?”

“Yes,” replied I, “the thing in but too painfully evident.”

“But how could such infernalism be enforced? Surely, it could not be spontanized, like our system,” remarked a ravishing beauty who evidently spoke the feelings of all the other ladies present.

“Let us continue the examination,” said I, “and see if we cannot solve the question by that means.”

Nos. 7, 8, 9, and 10 proved to be a soldier, a constable, a jailer, and a hangman.

Scarcely had the examination been completed when the four last subjects of it went into convulsions and died; their constitutions were too abnormal to endure such a sudden introduction to pure surroundings.

To preserve the six remaining old fogies from a similar fate, we crammed their mouths full of the strongest tobacco we had, filled their noses with some of it powdered into “ snuff,” placed them back in their homestead, burnt lot of brimstone therein, and tightly closed the doors and windows.

These strange creatures, and the adventure of myself and companions were the all-absorbing topic; supper was almost neglected; and the usual soiree dwindled to little more that a conversation club.

But the enchanting game of partners for the night was not omitted. I caught a glimpse of my poetic friend with his arm very close around the waist of the of the lady he had fallen so vehemently in love with from description, and simultaneously perceived that the fair creature he had spent his first love night with, was trying her most bewitching seductions on me. As nothing could suit me better, I hastened to reciprocate her advances, remarking, in order that she might not be disappointed in any part of her expectations, that her amiable companionship alone was the pleasure I counted on this time, having so recently been satisfied in more exciting loves.

“My dear friend,” she exclaimed, pressing both my hands in her own, “our feelings are perfectly reciprocal. A full course of love once a week is sufficient for me, and I am a little suspicious that my last one will satisfy me for a twelvemonth. Shall we retire?”

“With all my heart,” I eagerly replied; and away we tripped to her private apartment.

We talked awhile about the old world folks, but the conversation very soon changed to that all-absorbing theme, which I need hardly to say was love. “Do you know,” said she, “that now the passions are completely enfranchised, lovers give way to a very strong natural propensity, most blissful to indulge, which used to be but rarely hinted at either in verse or prose?”

“If it’s a fair question,” said I, “did my young friend, the poet, indulge in this dainty blissfulness?”

“You may be quite sure he did,” she replied; “A man like him never spent a night with a woman like me without that enjoyment; the thing would be impossible; unless, as in the present case, it is but sociability and friendship that is desired.”

“Well, well,” said I, “I did’nt think the fellow would go that length the first time. He is bolder and even more passionate than I thought he was.”

“His passion did a great deal,” said she, “but his boldness seconded his passion so feebly, that he would not have accomplished his object but for a little timely assistance from myself. Never in my life before was I so highly amused. Again and again was he brought up almost to the right point, where his virgin coyness held him in check, till I was, as he thought, fast asleep. Then, * * If his passion had not completely subjugated his reason, he could not have supposed any woman capable of remaining asleep, whilst being so strongly loved as I was. I indulged him till his ecstasies were as high as 1 dared to let them go for fear he would swoon, or otherwise injure himself, and them changed my position so that he had to desist; taking care to do so, without letting him suspect that I knew what he had been about.

In the morning, the conflict between his mauvaise honte and the powerful inclination recommenced. I watched my opportunity, and, just at the right time, I volunteered the little sweet force necessary to overcome the resistance he was so reluctantly exerting, help him to what women are as delighted to give as men are to receive, and make that gift as rich as it possibly could be.”

“And you didn’t let on—didn’t even hint that you knew what he thought you did not know. Did you?”

“Perhaps I did, for I felt very roguish about it, I must confess, and when he was kissing me good morning, I said—my friend, when you and your ‘partner for life” come to enjoy the ‘honey moon,” don’t reverse the order of that enjoyment.”

“And how about these would be ‘partners for life’—these ‘constants’—does constancy now, in reality, ever stick to its profession?”

“Yes, the same as it always did. Constancy means uncommon constancy to love itself, and, therefore, uncommon inconstancy to any one object of it. When people used to bind themselves to each other for life, it was generally the case that they who did so in the coldest and most conventional manner, stuck to each other the longest. By far the greatest number of divorces and separations took place among those cooing doves who had vowed eternal constancy with most ardour while they were tying on their chords.”

“Do you know,” said she, “that I am writing a series of love tales? I am going to give my experiences with some fifty or sixty different gallants, suppressing the names, of course, and I assure you that my adventure with the young poet will not be omitted.”

“I long to read your book,” I said, “for if it is well written, as I doubt not it will be, it will possess all the piquancy of a book of gallantry, without being associated with such books in the Dismal Ages. Then, a gallant tale always included brothers disgraced, husbands wronged and exposed to ridicule, and women or girls taken advantage of.

“Charles The Second was called the ‘Merry Monarch;’ and what did he do that made him so merry? Why, he spent his time in seducing barmaids and servant girls; often lavishing a diamond ring or a gold watch (at the nation’s expense) on some wench that had long been the enjoyment of unwashed clowns. His Majesty was lucky if he did’nt get lousy or catch the itch: and it is quite that both he and his noble associates, and all others like them, often aught something a great deal worse than both.

“Kings and emperors very often freely mingled the royal semen with that of ostlers or boot blacks. As to their mistresses, on whom they conferred titles of nobility, they were generally the wives of sated husbands; their stale favors were bought for a price, like any other commodity; and that was all the reciprocalness there was in the case. Now, all being perfectly healthy, and perfectly clean, there is nothing to be either feared or disgusted at in the matter of free gallantry; and, as women are situated beyond the possibility of being wronged, I should think your book would be the very acme of delightful reading; your stories will be incomparably more piquant than the spiciest of those written by Brantome, Boccaccio, or even Margaret of Navarre.”

“Will you please tell me some of those tales?” said she, “it may give me some useful hints in the arrangement of mine.”

“A good idea,” said I. “Well, let me see, which one shall I tell first? ‘There’s the ‘Stratagem by which a Woman enabled her Gallant to escape, when her Husband, who was blind of an eye, thought to surprise them together.’ Then there’s the ‘Trick put by a Mercer of Paris on an Old Woman, to conceal his Intrigue with her daughter.’ The next I remember, is this: —‘A Gentleman finds his cruel Fair One in the arms of her Groom, and is cured at once of his Love.’ Bit I must begin somewhere, and will therefore tell you the story of the man who, in spite of the best safeguards that ‘law’ and ‘morality’ afforded, accidentally made his own wife an adultress, and himself the most ridiculous of cuckolds.

“There was in the country of Allez, a person named Bornet, who had married a virtuous wife, and held her honour and reputation dear, * * *

though he desired that his wife should be faithful to him, he did not choose to be equally bound to her; in fact, he made love to his servant, though all the good he could got by the change was the pleasure attending a diversity of viands. He had neighbour, much of his own sort, named Sandras, a tailor by trade, with whom he was on terms of such close friendship, that everything was common between them except the wife. Bornet declared the design he had formed upon servant-girl to his friend, who not only approved of it, but did what he could for its success, in hopes of having a finger in the pie. But the servant would not hear of such a thing, and finding herself persecuted on all sides, she complained to her mistress, and begged to be allowed to go home to her relations, as she could no longer endure her master’s importunity. The mistress, who have this opportunity of reproaching him, and showing that it was not without reason she had suspected him. With this view she induced the servant to finesse with her master, give him hopes by degrees, and finally promise to let him come to bed to her in her mistress’s wardrobe. ‘The rest you may leave to me,’ she said. ‘I will take care that you shall not be troubled at all, provided you let me know the night he is to come to you, and that you do not breathe a syllable of the matter to any one living.”

“The girl faithfully obeyed her mistress’s instructions, and her master was so delighted that he hastened at once to impart this good news to his friend, who begged that, since he had been concerned in the bargain, he should also partake of the pleasure. This being agreed to, and the hour being come, the master went to bed, as he supposed, with the servant; but the mistress had taken her place, and received him, not as a wife, but as a bashful and frightened maid; and she played her part so well, that he never suspected anything. I cannot tell you which of the two felt the greater satisfaction, he in the belief that he was cheating-his wife, or she in the belief that she was cheating her husband.

“After he had remained with her not so long as he wished, but as long as he could, for he showed symptoms of an old married man, he went out of doors to his friend who was younger and more vigorous, and told him what a fine treat he had just had. ‘You know what you promised me,’ said the friend. ‘Well, be quick, then,’ said the master, ‘for fear she gets up, or my wife wants her.’ The friend lost no time, but took the unoccupied place beside the supposed servant, who, thinking he was her husband, let him do whatever he liked without a word said on either side. He made a much longer business of it than the husband, greatly to the surprise of the wife, who was not accustomed to be so well regaled. However, she took it all patiently, comforting herself with the thought of what she would say to him in the morning, and how she would make game of him. The friend got out of bed towards daybreak, but not without taking the stirrup cup. During this ceremony he drew from her finger the ring with which her husband had wedded her, a thing which the women of that country preserve with great superstition, thinking highly of a woman who keeps it till death; on the other hand, one who has had the mischance to lose it is looked upon as having given her faith to another than her husband.

When the friend had rejoined the husband, the latter asked him what he thought of his bedfellow. ‘Never was a better,’ replied the friend; ‘and if I had not been afraid of being surprised by daylight, I should not have come away her so soon.’ That said, they went to bed and slept as quietly as they could. In the morning, when they were dressing, the husband perceived on his friend’s finger the ring, which looked very like that he had given his wife when he married her. He asked who had given him that ring, and was astounded to bear that he had taken it from the servant’s finger, “Oh Lord! have I made a cuckold of myself, without my wife’s knowing it? cried the husband, his head against the wall. The friend suggested for his consolation that possibly his wife might have given the ring overnight to the servant to keep.

“Home goes the husband, and finds his wife looking handsomer and gayer than usual, delighted as she was to have hindered her servant from committing a sin, and to have convicted her husband without any more inconvenience to herself than to have passed a night without sleeping. The husband, seeing her in such good spirits, said to himself ‘She would not look so merry if she knew what has happened.’ Falling into chat with her upon indifferent matters, he took her hand, and saw that the ring she always wore was not upon her finger. Aghast, and with a trembling voice, he asked her what she had done with it. ‘This gave her the opportunity she was on the watch for to let loose upon him, and she seized it with avidity.

“‘O, you most abominable of men’ she said, ‘from whom do you suppose you took it? You thought you had it from the servant. You thought it was for her you did more than you ever did for me. The first time you came to bed to her, I thought you made as much of her as it was possible to do; but after you left the room and came again the second time, it seemed as though you were the very demon of incontinence. What infatuation has possessed you to praise me so much, you wretch? You have had me long enough, and never cared about me. Is it the beauty and plumpness of your servant that made the pleasure seem so sweet to you? No, base man, it was the fire of your own disorderly lust that makes you so blindly in love in love with the servant, that in the furious fit you were in, I believe you would have taken a she-goat with a nightcap for a fine girl. It is high time, husband, that you should mend your ways, and content yourself with me who am your wife and, as you know, an honest woman, as much as you did when you mistook me for a vicious woman. My only object in the matter has been to withdraw you from vice, so that in our old days we may live in amity and repose of conscience; for if you choose to continue the life you have led hitherto, I would rather we should separate than that I should see you daily treading the path that leads to bell, and at the same time using up your body and your substance. But if you resolve to behave better, and to fear God and keep his commandments, I am willing to forget the past, as I trust God will forgive the ingratitude I am guilty of in not loving him as much as I ought.’

“If ever a man was confounded and horrified, it was the poor husband. It was bad enough to think that he had forsaken his wife, who was fair, chaste and virtuous, and overflowing with affection for him, for a woman who did not love him; but it was infinitely worse when he represented to himself that he had been so unlucky as to make her quit the path of virtue, in spite of herself, and without knowing it, to share with another the pleasures which should have been his alone, and to have forged for himself the horns of perpetual mockery. Seeing, however, that his wife was already angry enough about his intended intrigue with the servant, he did not dare to tell her of the villainous trick he had played upon herself. He implored her pardon, promised to make, amends for the past by the strictest propriety of conduct in future, and gave her back her ring, which he had taken from his friend, whom he begged not to say a word of what had happened. But as everything whispered in the ear is by-and-by proclaimed from the house-top, the adventure became public at last, and people called him a cuckold, without any regard for his wife’s feelings.”

“Pray,” said the lady, “to whom are we indebted for this precious bit of literary spice?”

“The origin of the story is rather obscure,” I replied. “We can trace it to the fabliau of Le Meunier d’Alens; it occurs in the facetiae of Poggio, in Sachetti, in the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, and in the Heptameron of Margaret, Queen of Navarre.”

Several hundred years thereafter. A somewhat similar affair occurred on board a steamboat. “A gentleman,” says the relator, “had made arrangement for the chambermaid to come to his stateroom; after the other passengers had turned in and the lights were extinguished, he left his door ajar, for her to enter. The next room to his was occupied by a very respectable married couple. The lady being taken short in the night slipped out without waking her husband, also leaving the door ajar. On returning, she took the wrong door, and closed it after her; the maid entered the other door, and whilst she was wondering at the coldness of her reception, the wife was being too well entertained to remain long ignorant of her part of the mistake. Such a time you never saw. The scene was so pitiful that I came off without wanting to see how it terminated.

“What seems most incredible in Dismal Age literature is the fact that people generally made sport of marriage, and, in their most popular novels and plays, ridiculed it to the lowest degree, yet held it to be ordained of ‘God,’ or else the most sacred and important of civil institutions. Nothing in the great religious, moral, political, and social hodge-podge, seems to me to be quite so absurd as this,” remarked the lady.

“Begging your pardon, my love,” said I, “I believe I can point out something in that wilderness of inconsistency a little more absurd, and a good deal more abominable. All the gods, goddesses, demi-gods, and demi-goddesses, held up for worship in ‘civilized’ ages, were begotten out of wedlock. Moreover, the Jewish God, afterwards adopted by the Christians, had, according to the ‘Holy Writ,’ three special favourites:—Abraham, David, and Solomon, The first twice introduced his wife to certain lecherous old kings for his sister, each time receiving large rewards for her prostitution. The second, whom he told, on divine authority, was a man after God’s own heart, ordered a husband to be sent where he would certainly be killed, in order to get possession of that husband’s wife. The third, all the Christian boys and girls were taught to consider the wisest man that had been or could be; they were taught that Jehovah [the man after his own heart had the impudence to nickname him Jah] himself said so. Yet that man had 700 wives and 800 concubines, A 699th part of that man’s offence would have consigned him to the penitentiary, according to a law which these same boys and girls were taught to respect, and bound to observe when they became men and women

“Can it be possible that our ancestors were thus ignorant, inconsistent, and debased?” observed the lady; “but I know they were. I am well enough versed in antiquity to be assured of that. And they didn’t seem to entertain the idea of positive pleasure; and, in fact, such a thing was scarcely known to them. For instance, their pleasantest method of voyaging or journeying was scarcely comfortable ; it gave so little positive enjoyment that when they had fair weather during a trip across the sea, they grumbled all the way, and never thanked ‘God’ for it; but if they had a storm that came near sending them to ‘Davy Jones’s locker,’ how joyously and profusely they sent forth their praises to the brave captain, the faithful crew, and their ‘Heavenly Father.’ It was the storm that these poor wretches really thanked; it broke monotony; than which nothing is loss endurable; no wonder they ran into the idea that pain and evil were necessary. Also, in their amours, as they could have no variety without stealing it, they concluded that it was theft and not change that gave those amours their piquancy. The wise man has laid it down as an axiom that ‘stolen waters—meaning ladies’ favors unlawfully obtained—are sweet, and that settled the question with them. But I think I could instantly have put an end to their philosophy. I was lately reading in Count Grammont’s Amours of Charles the Second and his Court, how the lords and ladies of that gayest Court of the Dismal Age, descended to the position of quack mediciners, fortune-tellers, and orange girls, in order to gratify their lustfulness, and to dispel their ennui. How one of those ladies ‘shewed her leg above the knee,’ whereat the numerous lords and gentlemen present were ready to prostrate themselves in order to adore its beauty! How the duke was sitting next to her [Lady Chesterfield] * * * no one could see his arm below the elbow. * * The duke was so much disturbed that he almost undressed my lady in pulling away his hands;—all which was delightfully piquant because it involved slyness and theft, as was supposed. But if that duke was alive now, and could get his hand under my crinoline, without theft, intrigue, or meanness of any sort, don’t you think he would be better pleased than he was when fumbling like a pick-pocket beneath the thick draggled skirts and old fashion-scented chemise of Lady Chesterfield? And if King Charles’ courtiers could see my leg, don’t you think they would be convinced that there was such a thing as positive pleasure?” she added, giving me a glance from her sparkling eyes that sent thrills of inexpressible delight through my whole frame.

“I believe,” said I, “that if King Solomon himself were in my place, just at this moment, his Majesty would swoon with delight, confess his famous proverb about ‘stolen waters’ to be the offspring of a low, contemptible, and wretchedly depraved taste, and own that his other saw about all being ‘vanity and vexation,’ was the braying of an ass. I don’t believe there ever was a Jew, Turk, Pagan, or Christian, who would not eagerly part for ever with wives, concubines, mistresses, sly pieces, and all, for a single night with yourself, or any other woman who now exists.”

“And I had rather be killed this moment,” said the beauty, shuddering, “than endure a night with any Pagan, Mahommedan, Israelite, or Christian, that ever lived, judging from the best portraits and most reliable histories of them.”

Next day the Grand Artist determined to restore the six remaining old fogies to their consciousness; and in such a way as to afford us a great treat.

The people were early notified of his plan, and the balloons were soon in readiness.

‘The six sleepers were placed in His Highness’s balloon ear; the ladies and gentlemen were quickly seated in this and the other balloon cars, and up we went.

At just the height that afforded the most favorable view, the sleepers were placed so as to face that view, and the galvanic battery was applied to them. Its first shock fully restored them to their senses.

“Where are we?” they all faintly ejaculated, staring around in utter astonishment.

“Why, in Heaven to be sure,” I answered.

“But I don’t see God,” said the parson,

“Yes you do,” replied the Grand Artist, “Put the other o into that ‘Word’ as you should do, and look again.” [“And the Word was God.” St. John.]

“Poh! I do’nt believe in God,” interrupted the bewildered skeptic, trembling all over, and scarcely

able to articulate, for fear there was one after all.

“No”, said I, “You skeptics only believe in the Devil with the D omitted, and the word ‘necessary’ prefixed. Skeptics and moralists, by trying to reconcile mankind with ‘necessary evil’ have been a greater bar to the perfection you now behold, than the blindest fanatics that ever mumbled a creed.”

By this time the old fogies had discovered that they were in the flesh, and their courage revived according.

“But what we mainly insisted on was ‘duty;’—we exhorted people to do as they would be done by, and tried to compel the refractory to observe our golden rule; you can’t object to duty or ‘the golden rule,’ anyhow,” stammered the moralist.

“Duty and the Golden Rule are as different as any two things can be,” said I. “You violated the golden rule to the utmost possible extent; we thoroughly practice it, As to ‘ duty,’ it is a word utterly without sense; it is pure cant; it may now be seen in a very ancient dictionary in our great Museum, But it is out of use, and forever will be.

Duty, or, as it was sometimes called, ‘self-denial,’ was double and twisted self-deception. No man or woman ever acted on the duty principle; they never absolutely denied themselves any gratification whatever. All they did in the case was to choose according to their temperaments or other circumstances; between this and that gratification, or what they supposed was, or would be such. All the ‘moral philosophy’ that has ever been preached, written, or sung, practically sums up in the soliloquy of the fox who couldn’t get the grapes. All the praise bestowed on ‘self-denial’ was justly due to ignorance of the means of self-gratification. Here, in ‘Heaven,’ we don’t follow virtue even for virtue’s sake; simply because ignorance with respect to physical law is so thoroughly abolished that there is no necessity for doing so. Nature, through art, has at length provided the means of following our own inclinations to the benefit instead of injury of each other. We go by the law that we feel is from our maker, but which ‘duty’ so long and so mischievously opposed.

No sooner was the subject of “ duty” introduced, than all the “old fogies” began chewing their tobacco as if to make up for centuries of lost time.

We had especially provided spittoons for their accommodation, but they paid little regard to them, spitting all over the velvet carpet till the ladies began to heave at the stomach.

“Sorry tobacco is so offensive to the company, “said the parson; and the whole dirty gang similarly apologised, at the same time squirting their spittle overboard in such a shower that we had to telegraph down for the people to stand from under.

It was now the lawyer’s turn.

“What!” he exclaimed, “surely you don’t mean what you say about duty! Why, duty is the fundamental principle of civil law, that only preservative from utter licentiousness and anarchy. You haven’t abolished all statutes, I hope; and what is the use of them, except to compel people to perform their duties? What would the world come to, if evil-minded people were not thus compelled? What would society be if everybody was let loose from all constraint?”

“Why, just what you see it is,” answered I.

“Yes, just what you see it is,” repeated a nymph of ravishing beauty, ensconcing herself most bewitchingly in the arms of her lover.“ There are no evil-minded people in the world now, and never were, for that matter,” she continued; “The worst desires ever entertained were, at bottom, for happiness. All the evil in the case arose from ignorance as to method; but that is all got along with now, you see.”

By this time the gammon laboratory of the politician was in working order.

“Is this a monarchy or a democracy ” he asked, eagerly scanning the rich field for official theft and swindling, which the prospect all around seemed to present, and hurriedly demanding to see The Constitution.

“For mercy’s sake,” said I, don’t mention The Constitution. It was the most deceptive and mischievous swindle ever palmed off on human folly. According to the, Constitution, government and people were required to act, not according to current circumstances, but according to past conditions. The Constitution was the rule (strange that Hoyle should have omitted it), according to which demagogues or political gamblers played their most atrocious game of Caucus and Ballot-Box; national spoliation being the stakes. Even in common gambling when bets ran high, the losers, rather than disgorge, often used dirks and revolvers, instead of cards and dice. So, in the game of Caucus and Ballot Box. When one set of demagogues won the pilfering of a nation’s treasury for a long time hand, running, so soon as luck changed sides, Armstrong guns and iron-clad steam rams wound up the play. Monarchy used to be bad enough, but Caucus and Ballot Box—alias Constitutionalism—was the shortest cut to ruin that a nation ever took. It was a perfect liberty-mockery. It made the people the tools for placing in power this or that nominee for their own spoliation, for from one to four years, and then gave a new and ungorged horde of political vampires their turn; for quick ‘rotation in office’ was one of The Constitution’s fundamental principles. No people ever endured The Constitution and its Caucus and Ballot Box long at a time.”

“But the long and short of it is, that there never was a ‘Constitution.’ Your so-called ‘Constitution,” and its correlate, named ‘elective franchise,’ were as pure delusions as were your ‘immaterial,’ ‘God,’ and your ‘supernatural’ ‘religion.’ One party said ‘the ‘Constitution’ was this; the other party said it was that, and the ‘elective franchise’ practically dwindled down into scatteringly throwing your ballots into the box as vainly as if you had thrown them into the fire, or drawing in the traces of the nominators, who had no other aim than theft, and whose nominees, were they ever so well inclined, could do nothing but ‘pave hell’ with good intentions.’ It was under the most honest of the ‘elected,’ that the people suffered most; the elect, who were stupid enough to be sincere in such a scheme, were sure to be the most foolish, and foolishness was the cause of all the suffering that ever was or ever could be. When either party became dissatisfied with their luck at the constitutional game of caucus and ballot-box, and were strong enough to refuse to abide by their losses at that game, what availed the ‘Constitution?’ Did it not then, and in that case, always prove to be a myth? Did it not invariably, and times without number, serve those who, in time of need, leaned on it for support, as falsely as they would have been served if they had leaned on their own shadows?”

“No,” said the politician; “I maintain that the Constitution long guarded the United States from such oppression and wrong as Spain, Russia, and other non-constitutional countries were subjected to.”

“And I maintain,” said I, “that it was superior natural position, and superior advantages as to physical science and art, that gave the United States all the good they possessed more than other countries. As to majorityism, could it have been honestly carried into practice, the result would have proved that the powers below in this world, like the powers below, in the ‘world to come,’ are by far the most dreadful.”

“If mankind had only been governed by reason, all would have been well,” chimed in the skeptic.

“Alas, for poor, impotent reason,” said I, “Reason does very little, except to choose between these and those circumstances, and try to acquiesce under them. It is instinct—desire—passion, that pushes ahead, whilst science and art clear the way.”

“Perhaps our new friends would like to be taken back to their wives and children, or have their families sent for,” said one of the ladies, pityingly.

“At this suggestion, the poor old fogies most heartily wished their dear wives and children had a separate maintenance provided, and that the moral law was consigned to the “Devil.” In fact, there was not one of them who could be safely trusted with his neighbor’s wife or daughter, provided she was willing, or could, by the most unfair means be made so, and there was a bed, sofa, or sly hay-cock handy. How lustfully they gazed on the ravishing beauties before them—how recklessly they committed the kind of adultery most severely censured in Scripture [See Mathew, V. 28.] I leave the reader to imagine.

“Don’t put yourselves to any inconvenience on account of our families,” said the unbeliever.

“Oh no; there’s no hurry in the case,” quickly added the others.

“Who is the Emperor, King, President or Overseer of this magnificent country?” asked the political economist.

“I can answer for him,” replied the Grand Artist.

“I should think you had more business on hand than half the world could attend to. How do you manage to preserve any kind of order amidst such outrageous and anarchical principles?—principles and practices which to put down used to require an extensive police, and magistracy, backed by immense armies?”

“And what success did your police, magistracy and armies achieve?” asked the Grand Artist. “Did not every sort of irregularity and atrociousness grow up under them, and, ever and anon, burst into carnivals unsurpassably horrible? If I had to see to all the details of government, there could not be the order and magnificence and universal well-being there is, by a dreadful odds. It’s an easier matter to conduct the affairs of this country, vast and well-regulated as it is, than it used to be to manage a school district. The social machine once right, can by no possibility get wrong. Right is now immutably established on selfishness, the greatest bugbear of the Dismal Ages, and on positive knowledge, which our silly forefathers so feared would lead to atheism.

“Rulers are now wide awake to the great truth that the best—the only way to secure their own welfare is to secure the welfare of all; they have got into the way of doing that all-important thing, and they can no more got out of it than the planets can break from their orbits.

“It used to be thought impossible—“utopian”—that the present magnificent system of universal good could be realized; only a few could form a clear preconception of it, and that preconception was sneered at as mere theory—as if there could be theory to what was impossible in practice! But were it not that history tells us how the old system of universal wrong and evil was instituted and kept up, not one of us could understand it, or believe it possible.—How could we imagine that mankind ever composed armies—in some instances ‘en masse’—to rob, maim and slaughter, instead of enriching, preserving, and gratifying each other? that they would ‘enlist’ and combine to freeze, starve, break the limbs, knock out the brains, and rip up the bowels of their fellow-men, instead of enlisting and combining to have all they want as long as they please.

“A few hundred ‘Hell’-hounds could combine, and thus create a center of infernal motion that all the world had to follow, nolens-volens. We cannot imagine a stranger—a more impossible thing, than that mankind’s leaders should have been so long in discovering the present social system—discovering that it would be incomparably easier, and infinitely more profitable for themselves, to form a center of “Heavenly” motion—an immutable system of freedom-perfecting statics and dynamics, than to keep up their murderous hodge-podge of social wrong, misery, and revolution

With the people, this reciprocalness of interests is a creed; and reliance of their leaders, whom they know cannot betray them, is a habit that can no more be overcome than gravitation can be abolished.

In astro-physics, all revolves around a mathematical points—a mere nothing. In social physics, the head or center of all, though absolutely indispensible, and absolutely necessary—though seeming to wield an almighty influence, has not much to do himself; infinitely loss than, at first sight, would be supposed. The great social machine runs spontanously, as I have just remarked. It always did, for that matter; but now, its spontaneity has accomplished its end—the production of harmony, and perfect, universal and immutable freedom.”

“Still,” said the politician, “I can’t but think that, it would he safer to have a constitutional check on the ambition or caprice of rulers; see what horrors they perpetrated in Spain, France, Turkey, and wherever there was no Constitution!”

Here the whole assembly, except the old fogies, simultaneously burst into the most singular laugh that I ever heard; a laugh that instantly ended in silent gloom.

“Did the rulers of Spain, Italy, Dahomey, or any other country, ever perpetrate anything so cruel, unjust, tyrannical, and utterly abhorrent as secession?” replied the Grand Artist. The Constitution was a parasitical fungus that sprouted out of mysticism and moralism, after the legitimate tree, absolutism, was cut down. The most opposite factions in demagoguery clung to the “Constitution” as the most opposite sects of Protestantism did to the ‘Bible;’ and they all claimed to be the bulwarks of ‘Civilization’; whereas, they were the clogs, the very Nemesis to all that was good in that distracted compound.”

“But did not civilization flourish most gloriously in Protestant America, and under demagoguery: as you call it?” retorted the politician.

“If all the good that material art was the means of, had been deducted from civilization,” said the Grand Artist, “what would have remained? It was material art that did all the good then, and it is material art that has eliminated everything but good.”

“But are the people free here? Do they enjoy freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free trade, and, above all, mental freedom?” inquired the politician.

“We don’t know anything about ‘mental freedom’ here; with us everything is physical, or functional of physicalness. The people are free to do everything except to destroy their own freedom. They were free to do little else than that in the Dismal Ages. Now, without the exercise of any arbitrary power, they are not free to beget children under such circumstances as to populate the world with beings either ‘totally depraved,’ or in the slightest degree faulty. They are not free to poison their child, and, through them, unborn generations, with unwholesome food; nor to spoil their blood, and rot their lungs, and soften their brains, with bad air. They are not free, as they used to be, to build houses and public conveyances apparently for that especial purpose. They are not free to carry raw material four thousand miles, to be manufactured and brought back at their expense, whilst they go barefooted, and work like mules to pay that expense. The people have every liberty except that which, according to the old story, the apostate angels’ fought so desperately fore—the liberty to go to ‘hell, ‘drag all their connections thither, and entail damnation on posterity. It is now just as impossible for people to do wrong as it is for matter to disobey the law of gravitation.”

“And what power decides under what conditions the people shall be begotten, what they shall eat and drink, what they shall wear—beg pardon, I see they wear next to nothing—what houses they shall live in, what conveyances they shall go in, and everything else?” asked the infidel.

“The scientists and artists, whose business it is to discover the best solutions of these questions, and see those discoveries put in practice,” was His Highness’s reply.

“Are you at liberty to kiss me, my dear?” asked the parson, of a little girl not yet in her teens.

“No, sir,” she mildly answered with a pleasant smile.

“And why not” continued the parson,

“Because I don’t want to,” was the naive and perfectly unsophisticated reply.

“Here,” said the parson, “I’ve got you. This little girl has hurt my feelings; don’t you call that wrong? Can you pretend that all is now good and right?”

“If it wasn’t for hurting your feelings again,” answered the Grand Artist, “ I would remind you that you are not a part of the perfection in question, but an accident that can go no further, and can’t last long.”

“But if she had kissed me, she would not have hurt my feelings,” rejoined the parson.

“But she would have hurt her own feelings, and that would have been quite as bad, would it not?” I replied. “The apostles of ‘self-denial’ did not take into their calculation the fact that self-injury is just as injurious as any other injury. They approved of self-injury to any extent short of instant self-killing, and that they considered worse than ten thousand other murders, and absolutely unpardonable.”

“Well, how do you manage so as to always avoid the alternative of injuring either self or somebody else?” asked the moralist.

“By a rule of universal application. By a religio-political system, based on material art, that embraces the whole world; no narrower system could do that,” replied the Grand Artist.

“The whole world” exclaimed all the old fogies, in chorus.

“Yes, the whole world,” answered the Grand Artist.“ My friend—pointing to me—told the literal truth when he said you were in Heaven. You are in Heaven on Earth. You have seen ‘God’; at least, you have seen as much of Omnipotent Goodness as can be taken in at one view. You have also seen the ‘glorified saints,’ and now we will introduce you to the ‘holy angels,’ hoping you will find their ‘ministrations’ pleasant and ‘edifying.’”

“Yes, I think our friends had better be introduced into one of our infant schools,” suggested several of the company almost simultaneously, and the balloon was thereupon lowered, so that we alighted in the midst of one of those schools, situated in a flowery mead, tastefully shaded with trees, where the children, real flesh and blood “angels ” recited the following lesson of the “Primary Catechism:”—

Question. Wherein consists the value of all existence?

Answer. Tn happiness.

Q. To what should all human endeavour, therefore, aim?

A. To the acquisition, perfection, and sufficient prolongation of happiness.

Q. How do you know that happiness is rightly the sole object for which you should strive?

A. I feel it to be so. I cannot desire anything else. Besides, there is nothing else worth living for.

Q. Is it right for you to strive to promote only your own happiness?

A. It is.

Q. How do you know it to be right?

A. From the fact that it is impossible for me voluntarily to strive for anything else

Q. What guaranty have mankind always had, that perfect and sufficiently lasting happiness as to the individual, and perfect and eternal happiness as to the species, were attainable?

A. Almighty Nature’s; whose highest consciousness and intelligence man is. The seed, the hope, the glimmering foreknowledge, of the great harvest of happiness which we are now reaping, nature planted in man, when, through development, she first rough-created him; and so deep, that it never could be uprooted, but must necessarily come, as it now has, to full maturity, to complete verification, where, in virtue of nature’s law of laws, it must remain, as inexhaustible as the race of man is eternal; as perpetual as is the equilibrium of the celestial spheroids.

Q. During the age of mystery, “morality,” and wretchedness, when man was in his primitive imperfection, in his physical and therefore intellectual heterogeneity—what name did his bewildered imagination give to the object of his individual existence?

A. Eternal

Q. Wherein consisted his mistake?

A. In not comprehending the Social Organism, or collective man—The Eternal Being to whom alone eternal happiness can be happiness; and in not knowing that temporal happiness could be made to last long enough to be quite sufficient for the temporal beings, which, through nature’s law of individual change, successively constitute eternal

Q. What were mystery, morality, and their correlative polities?

A. The parasitical social fungus that almost overwhelmed science and art in the Dismal Ages, and usurped the name of “civilization.”

Q. How do you know that our present harvest of perfect happiness is inexhaustible, and that our race is fixed in eternal happiness?

A. The laws of intellectuality follow those of physicalness, on which they depend; and the Social Organi smis now as harmoniously, and therefore as permanently, as adjusted to all in its connection as is the solar system. Man’s—nature’s—spontaneous yearning for satisfaction has, aided by all in the connection, produced in a world of man, that necessarily eternal order of man that necessarily answers to the equilibrium which gravitation has, thus aided, produced in the planetary world. The eternal happiness of collective man, and the perfect and sufficiently lasting happiness of individual man are, therefore, as assured as is the order of the celestial spheroids.

Q. In what relation do you stand toward all mankind?

A. All mankind, from the first inseparably, though for a long time heterogeneously connected, are now happily, a harmoniously organized whole; of which I am a part, in as strict sympathy with all the other parts, as the most minute tissues of my body are in sympathy with all the rest of it

Q. It seems then, that you cannot do an act which will promote your own happiness, without simultaneously doing one which must promote the good of all mankind; nor can you do an act fraught with evil to others, which will not surely redound to your own hurt, and this is the case with every human being. Do you comprehend all this?

A. As easily as I understand that my whole body shares the sensation of dissatisfaction caused by the prick of a needle on the end of my little finger, or that of satisfaction, caused by the contact of my palate with food; or that of delight, caused by my eyes beholding, my cars hearing, and my brains understanding, the pleasure which all around me experience.

Q. But though you are as really, you are not as closely connected with the rest of mankind, as the parts of your body are with yourself. How does the body politic immediately bring its all-sufficient power to bear in preventing wrong action?

A. By means of that body’s nerves and brain—its Scientific Discoverers and Directors. By means of these, I acquire the aid of the whole force of the body politic and of all else in the connection, and am thus enabled to shape my actions in accordance with the Social Organism’s welfare, and simultaneously with the welfare of every part of it, necessarily including myself. My functions, like those of the mass of mankind, are special; those of a few, but naturally sufficient number, are general.

Q. Are you and your compeers who compose the mass of mankind, then, but mere blind followers of your superiors?

A. Blind? no, indeed. Our understandings, and particularly our feelings, are constantly wide awake to the results which acting in accordance with the directions of our social functionaries produces. For the rest, we have no superiors in any arbitrary sense of the word

Q. But what guaranty have you that these functionaries will not misguide you, or shape your action for their own special benefit?

A. They can no more be benefited by injuring us, than my individual nerves and brain can be benefited by damaging my muscles; and they know it. They know that our wretchedness would necessitate their misery; that their misery would be deeper and keener than ours; that the only difference between their woes and ours would be that theirs would be gilded and ours but varnished. We, the masses, have the same guaranty that our Scientific Discoverers and Directors will not wrong us, that my hand has, that my nerves and brain will not misdirect it into the fire.

As the lesson ended, fairy-like music, both vocal and instrumental, charmed the old fogies for the first time. In fact, the singing of these angelic children affected even myself more pleasantly than any melody I had yet heard.

You see,” said the Grand Artist, to the old fogies, “that the general principles of our system are so plain that children comprehend them. But did any one ever understand anything whatever respecting your so-called system, except that it made people as miserable as the physical science and art therein stealthily contained would allow them to be? Why, there was more written to try to explain the ‘religion’ and ‘law’ that you expected every man and woman to act up to, than any one of them could have read in a thousand years. You further see that now, all do right without compulsion; you expected they would, in ‘Heaven,’ did you not?”

Of course; for we didn’t expect people would carry their evil desires to Heaven,” answered the parson.

“Nor have they done so,” said His Highness; “for the very good reason that they never had any evil desires. Evil desires are an absolute impossibility. ‘The ‘Devil’ himself could not desire anymore than happiness. Jeff. Davis and his traitorous gang desired nothing more nor less than happiness; but they ignorantly took the wrong, the worst possible, way, like all other ‘smart’ fools, to get it. The whole Social Organism now takes care of its parts, and does it perfectly. Nothing short of the combined power of this great whole can do this. The stupidest asses that ever lived showed their blindest stupidity in exhorting people individually to reform themselves; they might better have insisted that every individual man and woman should build their own railroad and steamship. The strangest thing to us now is, how people could have been long in discovering that the only evil was want the only remedy the satisfaction of that want, with just the exertion requisite to give due pleasurableness to satisfaction.”

“Apropos of this,” said I, “permit me to relate how our pious ancestors laid their stupid blunders to the charge of their ‘God.’ For instance:—City railroad corporations piled on extortion and imposition till the people, unable to endure any more, smashed the cars and tore up the rails, killing and wounding scores of men and number of women and children. ‘God has taught unscrupulous greed of gain a good lesson,’ drawled the long-visaged, hypocritical scoundrels, who pocketed the Lobby’s bribes to legislate these very roads, with all their inducements to wrong, into existence.

When Secession, with its unprecedented horrors, broke out, ‘had not God, in his inscrutable wisdom, visited us with this great calamity, we should have fallen into a condition lower than the Chinese, through too much prosperity,’ said a notable mouthpiece of the very politicians, whose inscrutable knavery and foolishness were at the bottom of the whole thing.

‘The Bull Run defeat was, in the workings of ‘divine providence,’ ‘all for the best it necesitated the President’s emancipation policy;’ was a favourite tune which cant gave out for stupidity to sing. And stupidity couldn’t see that it was that most undivine of all providences, stupidity itself, which prevented emancipation from unnecessitating the Bull Run slaughter. And this canting, hypocritical, miserable optimism went on thus till the Good Time put an end to it.

“I hardly think the old maids of those days believed it all for the best; even the silliest of them didn’t feel as though it was, I’ll be bound,” added one of the ladies.

This remark threw a shade of sadness over all the company except the old fogies; but these depraved wretches grinned; some of them laughed outright at this allusion to the most unfortunate victims of Dismal Age cruelty.

“Well, my sweet child,” said the parson, addressing the little girl he had asked to kiss him; “here’s a gold dollar for you, to buy candy with; are we friends now?”

“What in the world is it?” asked several young lads and lasses, huddling around the curiosity.

As I perceived that most of the older members of the society present were as ignorant as the children were as to this gold dollar, I told them that it was the money of the Dismal Ages. That had the out and out democrats had the exclusive management of the “currency,” only half the people in the world would have been engaged in the production of property of actual value, whilst the other half were engaged in making these dollars, or their equivalents in silver and copper, to measure actual value with. ‘To do these out and outers justice, however, it must be stated that; in their day, paper did not represent useful, ornamental, and amusing productions, but am army of shinplaster barons and their retainers, whose most useful business was to contrive how to carry on the cheat of shuffling the gold about, so that it should be at the point where paper demanded it, until such a rush of paper was made at some such point that it would be less profitable to these barons and their retainers to have the gold there than to withdraw it altogether, and burst up, or “fail.” The only other certain basis of paper money in the Dismal Ages was whole territories richly manured by human blood, brains, bones, and sinews! through war!!

After a delicious dinner, produced as if by enchantment, in the sumptuous eating saloon of the palace, they visited many other palaces, the bureaus of departments, libraries, museums, gymnasiums, theatres, schools, and the Grand Temple, where the glorious Gospel of Science was preached (on this temple the truly Catholic inscription was, “Ars Antium Hominorum Salvator est); and last, and most interesting of all, the nurseries.

‘The lying-in apartments of these were very far superior to the accouchement chambers of queens and empresses in days of accommodations for all children were incomparably better than any royal progeny had ever been provided with. Parents had no individual responsibility on account of their off-spring. Mothers nursed their young as long as they pleased, and both fathers and mothers could gratify their taste for child-fondling whenever they felt so inclined, without being kept awake nights by squalling young ones, and without being saturated with a liquid, smelling very different from rose-water, and with semi liquids, most abominably resembling custard and blanc mange. Fondling one’s own darlings, it hardly need be observed, was a pleasure which fathers were never quite perfectly assured of, but if that was any satisfaction, it could now be enjoyed more confidently than ever it could be in the Dismal Ages; as mothers, when free, invariably put the father’s mark on the child. But this is scarcely worth mentioning, for, in reality, it is not of the slightest consequence.

How incalculably expensive all this must be,” observed the political economist.

“Expensive? why, it costs just nothing at ally replied the Grand Artist. ‘The cost of a thing is the pains taken to produce it. ‘The perfection you behold is, as you see, produced by clear pleasure. The ‘Hell’ system was, indeed, expensive. In 1862, and for some years thereafter, the demagogue-phase of infernalism (being in one of its periodical crises) cost the United States alone, more than it would to have established ‘Heaven’ on earth.”

“But I should think the world would be overpopulated with such facilities for propagation as you have established,” remarked the political economist.

“Did you never observe,” answered I, “that, even in the Dismal Ages, those in the lowest scale of humanity, begat twice as many children as did those in the highest. Without going into minute particulars, I tell you now, as I always did, that Nature’s—the Almighty’s—means are adequate to produce the greatest ends, that she signifies through man, her highest organ of desire.”

“How were the masses educated up to the point of adopting your form of government?” asked the politician.

“Ay, it must have taken a long course of schooling and free discussion, to enlighten them to that degree,” continued the skeptic.

“Educating the ‘masses’ and indiscriminate free discussion, had precious little to do in the matter,” said the Grand Artist. “The masses, even now, understand no more about religion and government in the concrete, than the cabin passengers in the Great Eastern knew how to build and navigate that magnificent steamer. ‘The masses follow leader inevitably as the planets revolve around the sun’s centre. Long before these leaders had become fully convinced that by no possible trickery could they acquire any good at the expense of the body-politic, the scientists and artists were on hand with the rudiments of the great system you now see in universally successful operation.”

“And how was supernaturalism got out of the People’s heads?” asked the skeptic.

“They never had it in,” replied the Grand Artist. “They blindly received as religion a sophistically-woven tissue of impossibleness, of course without proof, and they rejected all such nonsense for the Religion of Science, so soon as the clergy preached the latter instead of the former. I tell you that the people follow leaders; as naturally as sheep follow the bell-weather. Unbelievers, by arguing as they did, against supernaturalism, impliedly admitted that there was such a thing; they admitted that people believed it—thought of it—had some knowledge of it.”

“Well,” said the skeptic, impatiently, “pray tell us how the people’s leaders found the right path.”

“You shall know this all in good time,” replied the Grand Artist.

But free-love was what the old fogies were most horrified at.

“It’s very clear that you don’t believe in future punishment, or you wouldn’t give your passions the reins, as you do,” said the parson.

“Of course we don’t believe in future punishment,” I replied; “I fully admit your premises, but can’t see the justice of your conclusion. Did the fear of eternal Hell-fire, even when it was most firmly entertained, prevent the most orthodox teachers of that horrible doctrine from giving their passions the reins? If the company would like to hear it, I will tell a story apropos of this, that was written in the Dismal Ages by Boccaccio. It forms part of The Decameron.”

“Oh, for decency’s sake, if you have any left, don’t mention The Decameron,” said the parson.

The parson’s answer raised a suspicion in my mind.

“My Reverend friend,” said I, “will you please to favor me with your autograph?”

The hypocrite wrote it on a scrap of paper which I presented. Instantly, I recognised the handwriting and the name. This very parson had, when I was in my former state, publishing books at No. 30 Ann Street, New York, wrote to me for The Decameron, and he charged me so strictly to send it “carefully sealed from impertinent curiosity,” that I remembered the circumstance.

“Do tell us the story,” said the gentlemen. “Oh, do, please tell us this story about the olden time,” chimed in half a dozen ladies at once.

After whispering something in the parson’s ear, which, the reader can easily guess, kept his reverence quiet, I began as follows:—

Ladies and Gentlemen—

I shall not tell the story verbatim; the outlines will be quite sufficient for my present purpose.

In order to fully understand what I am going to relate, you must know that “once upon a time” people were so completely besotted by the fear of future punishment, that thousands retired to the deserts to wear out their lives in fasting, prayer, and love-mortification. Love-indulgence was considered so exceedingly dangerous to the “soul’s” everlasting welfare, that many instances of “self-emasculation” took place. “The Messiah” had given out that this was highly commendable; he almost as good as said that it was a perfect assurance of a place in the “Kingdom of Heaven.”

A young Mahommedan girl, all innocence and simplicity, who lived near the confines of Christendom, got her devotion, fear, and curiosity, so aroused by the reports she heard of the Christians, and how they served God in the wilderness, that she boldly determined to find out whether or not there was a better and surer way to salvation than the one she had been taught to believe in.

Early one morning young Alibech stole away from her parents, and at night asked and obtained admittance to the cell of a very pious hermit named Rusticus. She told him that, inspired by God, she had come to learn the Christian way to Heaven

Before I proceed further, Ladies and Gentlemen, I must inform you that it was a prevalent maxim with the fathers of the Christian Church, that the merit of resisting love-gratification depended on the strength of the temptation thereto. To such an extent was this theory carried into practice, that, says Gibbon, “The virgins of the warm climate of Africa permitted priests and deacons to share their bed, and gloried amidst the flames in their unsullied purity.” But notwithstanding their glorying, and in spite of “Hell’s hot jurisdiction,” the historian just named informs us that the flesh conquered spirit so often that the temptation experiment had to be given up.

But to go on with the story:

No sooner did the devout Rusticus behold the fair Alibech, than ho considered her the special providence of God, and he resolved to improve so favorable an opportunity for letting the Devil know how utterly he despised, and how little he feared him.

But while he was contriving how to manage in putting his experiment into operation, the Devil assaulted him so violently, that, instead of discipline and holy thoughts, he found himself ruminating on the youth and beauty of the fair pilgrim, and devising by what means he should satisfy the desires she raised in him.

He told Alibech that serving God was the most delightful thing imaginable, Alibech answered that she had heard so. He further told her that it consisted in putting the Devil into Hell. The juvenile Mahometan readily swallowed this, for she had been taught that the Devil was God’s mortal enemy.

Her zeal and curiosity were now aroused to the highest pitch, and she requested Rusticus to show her the soul saving process without further delay.

The hermit did not wait to be asked a second time.

“Follow my example,” he said, taking off his clothes, and kneeling down before her in the attitude of prayer. The tone and manner of the hypocrite were go devout, that Alibech was completely overpowered, and obeyed unhesitatingly.

Now place yourself close up in front of me,” said the holy father.

As the innocent Alibech obeyed, she perceived that something attached to Rusticus was exercising in a manner most wonderful.

“What is that” she exclaimed, all astonishment.

My child,” impatiently answered the hermit, “that is the Devil by which I am beset, and unless you assist me to put him into Hell, I believe I shall die instantly; so excruciating are the torments to which he is subjecting me.

As Alibech had been taught that the Devil beset almost everybody, the mere fact of his fastening upon the hermit, did not surprise her. * *

The first lessons in Christianism, as taught by St. Rusticus, were very painful to so young a girl as Alibech. But the pious exhortations of her holy accomplice kept her spirits up, and she finally acknowledged that putting the Devil into Hell was more pleasant than anything else she had ever experienced; besides, it had the advantage of saving two souls at once.

In spite of the hypocritical affectation of the old fogies, I perceived that their abnormal tastes were highly gratified by this tale; at the same time there was no mistaking the disgust which all the rest of the company manifested for the deep hypocrisy, heartless treachery, and all but “total depravity,” that prevailed in the Moral ages.

“If the fear of ‘Hell’ had been wholly out of the question, ” observed one of the gentlemen, “I don’t see how that hypocritical old Christian, Rusticus, could bear the thoughts of doing what he did, well knowing, that, as mankind were then situated, it would be pretty sure to bring disgrace and ruin on an innocent young girl.”

The parson, in a very mild and subdued tone, ventured to remark that Rusticus was a Catholic, and didn’t deserve the name of Christian ; that Gibbon was a prejudiced infidel, and Boccaccio only a mere story-teller.

“Well,” said I, “but Lot and his daughters were not Catholics, nor in your estimation was the account of their actions, written by an infidel, or a mere story-teller; yet those actions were incomparably more abominable than those of Alibech and Rusticus, and their narrator leaves it to be fairly inferred that ‘God’ sanctioned them. — Moreover, the story of Lot and his daughters is utterly void of literary merit: it is unmitigated bawdiness and most horrible blasphemy. Yet Protestants spent an incalculable amount of money in supplying innocent young men and women with the book that contained that story, and many others almost as nasty.”

“Why is it that there are now three or four women to one man?” asked the political economist.

“Because natural supply is necessarily adequate to demand,” answered the Grand Artist. “Foolish, short-sighted old fogyism long obstructed the operation of this law, but it could not always do so. Nature is at last disenthralled; all her resources are brought into play, and both ends meet, as the saying used to be; and she makes just so many women more than men and has through her crowning method, art placed the sexual relations on such # footing, that it, is not necessary for men to violate their strongest feelings and forego their most positive rights, nor for women to gratify such feelings and grant such rights, when to do so would entail on themselves long years of loathsome and most painful disease, nor when it world inflict slow murder on their unborn progeny. Women abhor sexual connection with men during the catamenial flow; they had to be abnormally urged to it, after the first months of pregnancy; and it generally produced the loathsome whites, and the terrible woes of prolapsus uteri if their husbands cohabited with them within six weeks after childbirth.

“And now, gentlemen, (addressing all the old fogies) I ask, did you not violate your wives in some, if not all of these respects, and with results quite as dreadful as those I have described?”

Notwithstanding this home-thrust at the so-called marriage institution, the poor old fogies hung down their heads in profound silence.

Sexual intercourse at any time daring lactation Was most repugnant to woman, and highly injurious both to her and the child,” continued the Grand Artist, “And now, gentlemen, I will put one more question in consideration of the many you have put to me, and you may answer it at your leisure, as it will require some calculation. If you had monogamically married your stallions to your mares, and your bulls to your cows, how much would your colts and calves have been worth? or, if you had sowed the same seed on the same ground year after year, how long would your crops have been worth gathering? Nature abhors nothing so much as sameness! and that abhorrence is intense or passive in proportion to highness or lowness in the scale of being. Be sure you take this into your calculation, and don’t forget that what nature most intensely abhors, she necessarily and inevitably most severely punishes.”

“Mankind have never been such fools as to suppose that any part of nature except themselves could thrive in that covert of bawdiness—that hotbed of crime, vice, disease, and all that is foul and morbific—that condition most falsely named marriage. There never was a pure, inviolate ‘legal’ marriage; almost every such marriage was continual adultery, according to the rule laid down by the very authority from whence it claimed to be derived, Almost every ‘married’ man and woman did lust after others with a perfect looseness; the very purest of moral men and women did sometimes thus ‘commit adultery’ and render their marriage contract null and void theoretically, and the most degrading of possible connections, in consequence of not being nullified practically.

“As you have so little to do,” asked the persistent moralist, “pray how do you spend your time so as to keep out of that debasement into which too much material prosperity plunged the upper classes of the society to which we belonged?”

“Your question is such a vexatious jumble,” answered his Highness, “that it will take much time and more patience to unravel it, for a clear answer. In the first place, your ‘too much material prosperity’ consisted in a surplus of ‘money’ or property valued by the money standard (instead of by its actual worth) with a dreadful scantiness of pleasant means for spending it. And almost the only competition among your upper classes was for the possession of this so-called ‘money,’ and this delusive wealth, or to outdo each other in ever-changing fashion, and in vexatious, ridiculous, and unsatisfactory show. To ‘kill time,’ therefore, your upper classes crammed their stomachs with unwholesome food, generally at most unseasonable hours, besotted their brains with liquors more or less abominable, and stupefied themselves, and brought swift destruction on what little health and beauty they possessed, by chewing, smoking, and snuffing just the nastiest weed to be found in the vegetable kingdom. The richest men, and the most royal princes stupefied themselves, during a great portion of their time, substantially to a level with the dirtiest beggars that could afford to suck a tobacco pipe. The ‘rich’ who could not endure life thus, and by varying its monotony by an occasional sea voyage, and a good clearing out spell of sea sickness, had recourse to gambling, to seducing their neighbour’s wives, to debauching their own servant girls, and committing rape on their slaves. And vast numbers of them contracted a taste altogether too nasty to be mentioned except in medical works or ‘Holy Writ!’” (See Romans I., 26, 27.)

“Suppose,” said one of the ladies, “we show our visitors how rich people now employ their time; and let that answer their question.”

“We now took the old fogies into the work shops, all of which were perfectly free from dust, smoke, and everything annoying or unhealthy, and where little else was necessary to be done except the delightful task of tending and beholding the machinery. There, they saw, at a glance, that although wealth was incomparably more individualized than they ever knew it to be, it created very little rivalry on its own account; just enough to preserve the meum and tuam in the case. Men and women prided themselves almost wholly on their skill and agility in what little there was to do. There was no department of labor wherein the richest capitalists were not to be seen competing for this prize as earnestly as did those who were the smallest stockholders in the world’s great company. No one who is even slightly acquainted with history and common affairs will wonder at this, for it is a well known fact that some Roman Emperors prided themselves chiefly on their skill as equestrians in a dirty circus; and that some English peers have taken more satisfaction in being gazetted for their adroitness in stage driving, than in contemplating their patent of nobility. Does anyone doubt that Lord Stanhope was prouder of his improvements in stereotyping than of his nobility? or that Prince Albert was as jealous of his honour as a good agriculturist, and a powerful chief in the World’s Fair, as of his fame in being the husband of Queen Victoria? See, too, how this principle works even in that most fatiguing of all occupations,—dragging and pumping fire engines; to excel even in this, men who are pretty well off sometimes quit their warm beds during the coldest and stormiest nights of winter.

We now took the old fogies to several agricultural scenes truly heavenly, and then to a silvery lake, at a short distance, where hundreds of ladies and gentlemen were, in all their naked charmingness, competing with each other at swimming. Hard by, a company of equestrians of both sexes, mounted on mares and stallions, far superior to the geldings of former times, (cruelty, even to animals, being now abolished,) were performing feats which threw all the circuses of the olden time into the shade.

“T suppose you have glorious fun at skating and sleigh riding in Winter time, don’t you?” asked the parson,

“People once tried to extract fun out of skating and sleigh riding, and the parsons encouraged them to do so, to keep them away from balls and theatres,” said the grand Artist, “but the world has pretty much done with ice and snow; water seldom freezes even at the north pole in January. We will treat you to a ride there in a balloon car, one of these days. You’ll then see the most gorgeous twilight you ever beheld.”

“Is it possible? Who would have thought it?” exclaimed all the old fogies.

“It was thought possible long before it came to pass!” said I. “Charles Fourier had glorious foresight of it, and the author of Vestiges of Creation gave a strong hint that he thought it would come to pass. And, following these hints, together with those of Oken, and basing himself f