Page:Lytton - The Coming Race (1871).djvu/273

Rh aspirations towards a better, and higher, and calmer sphere of being, we, the mortals of the upper world, are not trained or fitted to enjoy for long the very happiness of which we dream or to which we aspire.

Now, in this social state of the Vril-ya, it was singular to mark how it contrived to unite and to harmonise into one system nearly all the objects which the various philosophers of the upper world have placed before human hopes as the ideals of a Utopian future. It was a state in which war, with all its calamities, was deemed impossible,—a state in which the freedom of all and each was secured to the uttermost degree, without one of those animosities which make freedom in the upper world depend on the perpetual strife of hostile parties. Here the corruption which debases democracies was as unknown as the disconteuts which undermine the thrones of monarchies. Equality here was not a name; it was a reality. Kiches were not persecuted, because they were not envied. Here those problems connected with the labours of a working class, hitherto insoluble above ground,