Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/340

 the planet. The whole of this small world is under one Government; and the character of that Government, prior to the first arrival of our people, had been in a state of slow transition, to meet the altered circumstances of its advancing society. The government lies in the great Assembly of the Pobb-Likk—a body which was composed of two chief divisions of the population, named respectively the Principles and the Accidents. The Principles were there, as the rule, by right only of personal merit as to ability or public usefulness; the Accidents were there by the chancemedley of the lot, quite irrespective of any personal considerations. Happily for the planet's progress there were many more Principles than Accidents. The Principles, in short, were those who turned the world round, and the Accidents were those who were turned round with it.

But the curious part of the arrangement was that the Accidents took precedence of the Principles. The former occupied the highest seats of the Assembly, whence they, in a leisurely and dominating way, surveyed the energetic and striving crowd of Principles beneath. Many of these latter sought, not unsuccessfully, certain minor honours and precedence amongst themselves, which lifted them a little above the indiscriminate mass of their own body, and a step or two upwards towards the high and special elevation of the Accidents. But the pure Accidents up there rather looked down upon these intermediate upstarts, and, in the past especially, had been extremely jealous and exclusive as regarded the admission of mere Principle to the sacred ranks of Accident. But latterly, the growing needs of the