Directing his eyes full upon my face with a concentrated stare that held my attention fixed and unwavering, d'Aragno started, and his harangue proceeded with scarcely a break for four hours, of which here I can only inscribe a few disjointed fragments. "You progressive and enlightened peoples of the important planet known as the Earth have in your own estimation acquired an immense store of knowledge, not only of things terrestrial but also of the entire scheme celestial. Your astronomers talk glibly of the presence of various metals in the Moon, of the luminous rings of Saturn, of artificial canals in Mars; you reckon with accuracy on the times and seasons of the wandering comets which you christen by the names of their discoverers—and yet, and yet you have not learnt our secret, The Secret!...
"On your aerial charts there is marked a tiny planet belonging to our solar system which your scientists, following an absurd method of nomenclature from the venue of classical mythology, have dubbed Meleager. Being small, it is held of no account by your star-gazing wiseacres, whilst the average layman of intelligence has probably never so much as heard its name. Is not that so? Have you yourself any knowledge of its existence? (I shook my head.) Now let me tell you that Meleager is an Earth in miniature; its inhabitants, its natural features, its vegetation, its fauna have all developed under identical conditions in the past, so that, were any traveller from Herthus to be unexpectedly translated thither, he would almost certainly imagine he had only found his way to some hitherto unexplored subtropical region of his own Earth. I am a native of Meleager, and I am moreover one of its small band of citizens who possess its secret, which has been handed down from its original inventors to their successors through countless centuries of time. How, when and by whom The Secret came into existence I know not; and did I know, I should not inform you; but this much I am empowered to say; there is intercommunication of long standing between our small planet and your larger one; or rather, to use exact language, a limited knot of persons in Meleager own the power of visiting your Earth from time to time for certain purposes, one of which I shall presently disclose to you, as it concerns intimately our meeting and conversation this night. It is now five years and more since I have been dwelling in an alien world, making a careful scrutiny in connection with the mission that has been entrusted me by the innermost circle of the ruling caste which alone controls the polity of Meleager. I am, as it were, an ambassador to the Earth, but one whose credentials have never been presented, who has no staff of legation, no chancellery, and whose position is one-sided, for it is unknown to, and unacknowledged by, the countries to which he has been sent. I have been commanded to inquire into and report upon many terrestrial matters of concern to us, but my leading task is being brought to its termination to-day....
"My supreme duty is to choose an earth-born King for our planet. Our constitution, which is the logical outcome of the most deliberate and far-seeing policy for many generations, requires the presence in our midst of a sovereign drawn from another sphere, and that sphere is of necessity the Earth, for we in Meleager hold no communication with any other planet in Cosmos. At intervals, as expediency or necessity may dictate, a new king has to be sought and found by the Meleagrian envoy on the Earth, whose task presents, as you may suppose, extreme, well-nigh insuperable difficulties. I am tied down by certain stringent rules, and to those rules I must strictly adhere. We demand a man of intelligence, a man of good birth and breeding, one of fine presence, and last of all an individual of a fair complexion and with blue eyes. This final condition may strike you as absurd, but then the Meleagrians are a dark race with dark skins and dark eyes and hair, as you may perceive in my own person; and in their fixed opinion their extraneous ruler must be the scion of an immortal stock, a member of the family of the Sun, who alone is worshipped in Meleager. Our priests by the aid of cunning devices and mystical potions, as also by means of the waters of a certain Fountain of Rejuvenation, whose exact locale is only known to our Arch-priest and a few chosen colleagues, can improve both mentally and bodily the individual who is translated and handed over to their care. Nevertheless, the raw material counts for a good deal—as you express it in one of your homely English proverbs: 'One cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear'; and on the same analogy even our skilful ministers of state would be unable to construct the true substance of a Child of the Sun-god out of an inferior Herthian mortal. The nicest caution has therefore to be observed in the work of selection. For nearly three years now I have been busily seeking, and can at last congratulate myself on having obtained the requisite material, the potential dross that will later be converted into pure gold. For some time past I have been on your track without arousing the smallest suspicion in your mind, and now at length I have grasped the favourable, the critical, the final moment in which I claim you for this most exalted, and indeed most sacred office....
"You are thoroughly out of touch with your own age and with your own country in a special degree, and for my purpose your deep-rooted dissatisfaction causes in me on the contrary the most intense satisfaction. You have grown disgusted with the decadence of your Royal House; you are sick of the greed and frivolity of your aristocracy; you abhor the mischievous methods and aims of your unscrupulous demagogues in power; you shrink from the violence and brutishness of your all-powerful mob; you lament the utter incapacity of the few serious and honest politicians who yet survive. You mourn over the industrial devastation and the uglifying of your once-beautiful world; you turn with horror from the blatant arrogance of the ruling gang of financiers, who with the besotted populace mean to involve the whole world in a final sordid struggle for mastery. On all sides you see nothing but rapid change upon change, all for the worse; the rooting-out of all that is good, artistic and ennobling, and the substitution of all that is vile and mercenary....
"You are obsessed with the same hatred of this evil transformation as are we ourselves, the ruling body in Meleager, who utilise your planet now, not as in the past for purposes of imitation and guidance, but for serious warnings as to what to avoid in our own future course of polity. For in Meleager we still set before us as our main striving-point Universal Content, not so-called industrial and educational Progress and the mere amassing of wealth. The happiness of all is, and always has been, the sole aim of our statesmen, and we firmly hold that the various theories of equality that are so advertised and belauded on your Earth are in reality most deadly poisons that are being injected into the corporate mass of humanity. One of the leading saints of your Christian Church has wisely said that in every house are to be found vessels alike formed to honour and to dishonour, yet that, as they are all equally necessary, so viewed in that reasonable light are they all equally honourable. Thus in our government of Meleager do we recognise the clear necessity of the various grades of society which form the total fabric of every healthy and happy state; whilst we reject with scorn and loathing the specious notions that, under the guise of an equality that has no real existence, endeavour to weld all society into one drab dismal detestable whole....
"Nowadays everything that is ordered or orderly you worldlings have set out to destroy. Your barbarian hordes broke up the stable Roman Empire; your fanatical reformers and greedy monarchs destroyed the consolidating features of the Middle Ages, which though very far from being perfect yet presented many illuminating features which we deemed expedient to copy in Meleager. In recent years your death-dealing guns and your proselytising emissaries have destroyed wantonly the vast matured civilisations of China and Japan and Burmah, which are now rapidly casting out all their antique virtues and are fast absorbing all the vice and vulgarity of the West. Every community, howsoever poor or insignificant, yet content to work out its own salvation and be governed by its own ancient laws and customs, and consequently happy and healthy according to its own lights, you have disturbed and dismembered....
"Everywhere and every day the beautiful is retreating before the utilitarian; smoke and noise pollute the greenest and loveliest valleys of Europe and America; dirt and disease increase in spite of your undoubted advances in medical science, whose services are given over to the individual who will pay for them rather than to the community at large. One sees the feeble and the cretinous of your world breeding like flies, whilst those of a better condition and in sound health are found too selfish and too tenacious of their ease to undertake the trouble or expense connected with the rearing of a family. Epidemics continue, and in the form of a gift of Western civilisation are allowed to sweep away whole tribes and nations of wholesome primitive peoples; your most loathsome and yet preventable diseases of contagion still hold sway, either by reason of your own indifference or from false ideals of a prudery that, I confess, wholly passes my own comprehension. Over all your Earth the universal craving for wealth at any cost of morals or self-respect has settled like a blight. All pleasures of the intellect are rapidly ceasing to attract, and the extravagance and debauchery of the ostentatious rich are announced by your odious vassal Press as the sole objects worthy of attainment or imitation to-day....
"You slaughter and exterminate your rare animals and your beautiful birds in order that your women may adorn themselves with their pelts and plumage, and even now in this cold weather I have watched your fine ladies daily walking in your noisy, crowded streets of London, half-naked yet wholly unashamed, with their limbs and bosoms exposed equally to the bitter wind and the lascivious eye of the stranger, whilst masses of costly furs, the spoils of innocent and peaceful animals, are heaped upon their pampered bodies....
"Whither are you being driven in this mad stampede after so-called progress and knowledge? In what morass will this mocking will-o'-the-wisp ultimately entice and overwhelm you?... I see chicanery and disbelief possess your churches and their priests; a clinging to stipends and a craving for personal leadership seem to me to have become the sole guides of such as are themselves supposed to guide their flocks. Everywhere change, restlessness, cynicism, vulgarity, extravagance, crime, hypocrisy, covetousness, greed, cringing, selfishness in every form are rampant; what sensitive mind would not instinctively recoil from contact with such a changing world? Can a nature such as your own endure to be associated with such a mass of passive squalor and of active evil? Are you not more than ready to welcome some chance of escape from such an uncongenial environment?...