Having become familiar with the serene security of the man of acres in other lands, it is curiously interesting to observe that people in Zelania—common and no account as they are in most countries—are held in considerable respect, regardless of their bank accounts, or the social position of their father-in-law.
In most countries, on Oliffa, the people are “moved on” to make room for animals, and, in most countries on Oliffa, the larger the “estate,” the more easily can it be made larger; but in Zelania, when too many people are “out in the cold,” some fellow with a big paddock is requested to “set a price,” and the stray “sheep” are soon comfortably quartered and employed.
Under the old system such “estates” were always held “sacred,” but in Zelania, among the most “sacred” of all recognised rights is the “sacred right” of “man to live”; and it has been discovered that to talk of the “sacred right” of a man to live, without an opportunity to earn something upon which to live, is an insult to God’s noblest creatures; and the graduated land tax has so conciliated the lordly inheritors, that the “blessed” who “hunger and thirst” are not asked to wait for the platter of “charity,” but they are “filled” from the products of their own strong hands.
Here I quote:—
“The Christian Outeroos, my children, all think they are in the world by the special desire and fiat of God, and yet of all the civilised Outeroos, the Zelanians alone have had courage enough to demand standing room on a world where God had placed them.
“They assume to think their deity made the world and then made them to people it, yet most of them have been persuaded that ‘He made the world’ for just a few of them, who are privileged to put up the notice ‘Keep off the grass.’ The Zelanians alone have removed the ‘notice.’
“While to us, my children, so far away, with so long a history behind us, even these measures seem but the cautious experiments of amateurs, they are the most advanced known to the Outeroos; and the Zelanians, in their numerical ‘fewness,’ their national youth, and their splendid isolation, are more courageously grappling with the difficulties that have baffled the noblest statesmanship of all the ages, than any other social group in the world’s progressive history.
“Zelania, my children, is the most unmitigated democracy ever known to the outer world of this planet, yet her people have just gained a glimpse, not a realisation, of human liberty. But the divine flame from the sacred torch is spreading, the public conscience is aroused, the public intellect is alert, and the social train is moving rapidly.
“What the dreamers, the poets, and the academicians of other lands laud as social ideals, the tradesmen, the farmers, and the mechanics of Zelania discuss as every-day matters of practical politics.
“‘Touch not the Lord’s anointed’ hath saved the head of many a despot, and touching appeals for the observance of the ‘sacred rights’—in hoary wrongs—hath larded the ribs of idleness for a very protracted season, but the Zelanians, in the exuberance of a novel situation, are indulging in mental gymnastics, and putting on grey matter—with results.