“The trouble with you,” said he, “is that you have no control over the production of your people. You are like the civilized Indians, that once inhabited some of the western parts of your country, who were constantly threatened and invaded and finally exterminated by wild and barbarous neighbors, except that they were physically too weak to help themselves.
“It is true your civilization is now in little danger from foreign savages, but you allow yourselves to be steadily invaded by fresh generations, of them born in your midst, and the crudeness and injustice of your political and social conditions, are such as to give but slight encouragement to the development of the unselfish instincts in anybody. Wealth carries power and power commands respect. Your wealth is distributed without justice, sometimes by accident and to those who are merely lucky, at other times to those who are simply selfish greedy and unscrupulous, and generally least to those who create it, and so luck and greed become prominent objects for your attention and emulation. How very young your race is and how much you have to learn!”
“Mundane Prognostication”—The Profile of Time.
“You said something about a college of “Mundane prognostication,” you have on the moon where you study our affairs and forecast our future. I should be infinitely gratified to know what your learned college has figured out for us—if it is no secret.”
“It is no secret at all,” he answered, “and I shall be glad to give you such insight in your future, as our profiles in their present condition afford.”
With this he drew from a receptacle something like a pocket under his right lower wing, a cylindrical roll of paper three inches in diameter, and ten inches long, exactly resembling a roll of profile paper, such as civil engineers use in plotting the profile of a survey for a railroad. Familiarity with such things together with the idea that he intended handing it to me, caused me almost involuntarily to reach out for it, but he retained it in his own hands and began with great dexterity unrolling it, holding the scroll in his right hand, while with his left he rolled up again the unrolled end. As he held these two rolled ends in his front hands a yard apart with that length of the profile open between them, he used his middle pair of hands to point out the various marks and lines on the paper to which attention was directed. I could not help observing what a vast advantage one has with four hands instead of two. When we hold a profile thus, there is nothing left to point with, but the nose.