“This deity, however, should never grow ‘jealous.’ His worshippers have at least one sturdy virtue, for among all the millions of them, there kneels not one hypocrite. While the other deities are occasionally scoffed and often neglected, the ‘golden calf’ is always in evidence. But he attends to business, and in all places he hath wonderful potency.
“Genius has quickened the hand of toil,” said Oseba, “but it has not removed the callous, and almost everywhere on the surface of Oliffa the opulence of the mansion tells the wretchedness of the hovel. The owner of the one schemes, the tenant of the other toils. The man who toils, toils for another; the man who ‘schemes’—well, the other fellow goes to him for a cheque at the end of the week. Until the great democracies of the Antipodes were established, every government of the world, regardless of title, style or form, conspired with cunning to rob credulity, with the schemer to rob the toiler.
“I have thus reasoned, my children, that you might realise by ‘looking upon this picture and then upon this,’ that Zelania has introduced to the world a social policy under which the people, in their organised capacity, have secured to the people, in their individual capacity, a fuller measure of the fruits of their mental and physical efforts than was ever enjoyed in any other country under the sun.
“It is not even a policy of the ‘greatest good to the greatest number,’ for, as the purest happiness consists in a participation of the general joy, it is a policy of the greatest good to all.
“Zelania’s motto is: ‘He who earns shall have, and he who strives shall enjoy.’ In this, the people builded better than they knew, and soon Zelania will be the most conspicuously conspicuous spot on Oliffa, and thousands of people will visit her marvellous shores, not more to enjoy the museums of the gods than to study the customs and the character of the first nation of emancipated men.
“Zelania, though she is now the foremost among the world’s social pioneers, was practically wrested from Nature by the present generation of men. The Zelanian Isles were Nature’s last best gift to the noblest race of her noblest creatures—the gods seeming to have waited for a proper tenantry for these more than Elysian fields.
“Zelania, my children, is the John in the Wilderness—the prophesied of old, the prophet of the new. She is the beacon of the present, the divine torch of the future.”
Oh, that is inspiring! Let’s take an amateur “soar.”
To the Goddess of Justice their prayers are read.
To that Goddess Zelanians bow low the head;
For she gave the Zelanians, nor seer nor priest,
She gave them the custom of Galilee’s feast.
For rich though her gifts to the present and past,
She saved for these Britons the “best for the last.”