“Immensely. You are a wonderful country.”
“That, if I remember, is just what foreigners said to Americans two hundred years ago.” (I like this young girl particularly. She is more intelligent than most of the women one meets here. She is allowed to be, she told me, because she was so much less good-looking than others, which is true. But in this land of dead equality one is grateful for a little intelligence, even if it be served up with ugliness.)
“There is one thing I can not become accustomed to,” I said not wishing to be called to closer account for my impressions, “and that is that there are no church steeples or spires. The absence of them gives such a uniform look to all your cities.”
“Churches? Oh, they went out long ago, you know. Religion, it was found, brought about discussion. It was voted immoral.”
“Yes, I know. Only I thought a few spires or churches might possibly have been preserved in a kind of sentimental pickle, as castles and ruins are kept in England, to add what an old writer calls ‘the necessary element of decay to the landscape.’”
“That was Ruskin, was it not? What a quaint old writer! His books read as if they were written in a dead language. As for the churches, they were all destroyed, you know, in the war between the radicals and the orthodox, and not a stone was left standing. Since then the State has erected these huge Ethical Temples, where all the religions are explained and where the philosophy of ethics is taught the people. The finest of all these temples is the Temple of the Liberators; have you seen it yet?”—she asked.
“I have not, but I should like to do so. Will you be my guide?”
She led me thither.
We soon came to a structure which being smaller, and of fairly good and symmetrical proportions, was a little less hideous than the other temples I had seen. Inside, in the center of the building was a colossal statue—a portrait it is said—of the founder, Henry George. Around the sides of the wall, were niches where portrait busts of the martyrs stand—the nihilists, early anarchists, and socialists who endured persecution and often death in the early days of socialism. A book I noticed was placed near the Henry George statue. It was the socialistic bible “Poverty and Progress” which with a number of other such books forms the chief literature of the people. Once a year, my young friend told me, there is a sacred reading to the people from this book.
As we turned to pursue our way homeward she again began to question me—“But you haven’t told me yet what you think of us—as a country and a people,” she persisted.