_Correliana._ “But you have ruined cities, like old Heraclea, scattered broadcast over the surface of your continents, which bespeak in as plain language the end of folly, envy, hate, and revenge?”
_M. Hollydorf._ “These are visited by pilgrims of curiosity, who in retailing their conjectural wares of relic origin, give no practical heed to cause and effect for the inauguration of an era of educated prevention. Yea more, on their return to the haunts of civilization jostle with indifference living memorials of a misery as abject in servile dependence upon drones, as the slaves who passed a laboring and starving existence in rearing these ruined fanes of delusion for the gratification of ambitious bigotry and despotism.”
_Correliana._ “But you, as men, represent the different nationalities considered to be the most and least susceptible to kindly intelligence; yet each of you, in your degree, have held yourselves, from choice, with few exceptions, amenable to our example. All of your adherents have acknowledged themselves better and happier than they ever expected to be in life. Still, you doubt our ability to enlist, with the simplicity and purity of our example, the affectionate reciprocations of your women? Surely you speak in riddles of enactment and theory, as perplexing as if in discourse you should say, empty barns full of grain. Are there not many others among your learned men equally able to distinguish that purity and goodness are in reality the source of happiness; and from their own experience, that evil results in misery and woe? Then why do your anticipations forbode for our kindly sympathies a distress so dire?”
_M. Hollydorf._ “There are undoubtedly many thousands, if not millions, who would hold themselves as gratefully amenable to your affectionate example as the members of the corps, if they could be subjected to the same experience. For we are in no way better than the well disposed commonalty, and were as heedless before we were attracted by your example, as the generality. Speaking honestly, in my own behalf, for my own disparagement, I rarely, if ever, became disengaged in thought from the instincts of selfishness while in association with the most exalted of our kind. In truth, I never felt in the remotest degree that there was a reality in the reputed second existence advocated by our mythology, and was in no way impressed with an assurance of immortality, until we were imperceptibly led to recognize its impression from the example of yourself and people. But you must recollect that our meeting was under peculiar auspices, which enlisted and absorbed our sympathies to the exclusion of self, as if in premonition of the eventful recompense following in train. No favoring circumstances like those transpiring for our introduction, will be likely to prepossess our people in your undertaking, for their own behoof, if we except the sensational announcement which will herald your origin, in connection with our Animalculan discovery. The impression that will be imparted from your exampled exposition of the effects of Heraclean education will prove as evanescent in the substitution of purity and goodness for the material excitements of instinctive gratification, as the opening imitations of the popular humorist, or lyceum lecturer, who attract the attention of their audiences for an hour with quips and snaffles of idiomatic license, or theories as valueless as shadows. If the proscriptor’s compilations should fail to awaken their thoughtful interest, in their own behalf, with a realizing desire for the inauguration of a system of education for the benefit of succeeding generations, then I fear that your treasured hopes will find in recognition a tardy requital.”