“Rum? Don't you think it is beautiful here, to see people living for each other instead of living on each other, and the whole nation like one family, and the country a paradise?”
“Well, that's just it, ma'am, if you won't mind my saying so. That's what I mean by rum.”
“Won't you explain?”
“It doesn't seem real. Every night when I go to sleep, and think that there isn't a thief or a policeman on the whole continent, and only a few harmless homicides, as you call them, that wouldn't hurt a fly, and not a person hungry or cold, and no poor and no rich, and no servants and no masters, and no soldiers, and no—disreputable characters, it seems as if I was going to wake up in the morning and find myself on the Saraband and it all a dream here.”
“Yes, Robert,” I had to own, “that was the way with me, too, for a long while. And even now I have dreams about America and the way matters are there, and I wake myself weeping for fear Altruria isn't true. Robert! You must be honest with me! When you are awake, and it's broad day, and you see how happy every one is here, either working or playing, and the whole land without an ugly place in it, and the lovely villages and the magnificent towns, and everything, does it still seem—rum?”
“It's like that, ma'am, at times. I don't say at all times.”
“And you don't believe that the rest of the world—England and America—will ever be rum, too?”
“I don't see how they can. You see the poor are against it as well as the rich. Everybody wants to have something of his own, and the trouble seems to come from that. I don't suppose it was brought about in a day, Altruria wasn't, ma'am?”
“No, it was whole centuries coming.”
“That was what I understood from that Mr. Chrysostom—Cyril, he wants me to call him, but I can't quite make up my mouth to it—who speaks English, and says he has been in England. He was telling me about it, one day when we were drying the dishes at the refectory together. He says they used to have wars and trusts and trades-unions here in the old days, just as we do now in civilized countries.”