I could hardly realize that this country had once been the abode of poverty and all of its consequences of ignorance, vice and crime; that here where equal rights, equal opportunities and an equal share in the unlimited abundance which nature places within the easy reach of intelligent labor were the universal and unquestioned law of being, there had once been a grasping and cruel financial and commercial power that condemned the wealth-producing millions to lives of unrequited toil. But such, I was repeatedly told, had been the fact, and Norrena, at this meeting was to give an oral lesson from that period and describe the power that had oppressed and degraded the people in those early ages.
But a short time had gone by since my first meeting with these people and yet I had become thoroughly absorbed in their mental, moral and spiritual life. I felt myself to be to all intents and purposes one of them. What was it that had so entirely taken possession of my consciousness? In all my life I had never felt so completely at home, and at peace with myself and all the world. I was fully satisfied.
Norrena broke in upon my reverie by asking:
"What is it Nequa, that so absorbs your attention that you seem to be utterly oblivious of the presence of this large assemblage of teachers from all parts of the country to talk over the history of the olden time when 'wealth accumulated and men decayed?' Have you forgotten what I told you last evening? Oqua will report the lesson from the Transition Period in English for you and you can afford to give some attention to your old friends, Iola, MacNair, Polaris, Dione and your comrades of the Ice King."
I looked around and found that while I had been musing, our party had all gathered near me without attracting my attention and I said apologetically: "I must have been dreaming."
"Then you were dreaming with your eyes wide open," said Oqua. "I noticed that you seemed to be unusually absorbed. What were you thinking about?"
"I was pondering," I replied, "how it was possible that this country could ever have been cursed with poverty as the normal condition of the masses of the people while the few were rich beyond the dreams of avarice, and held those masses bound by fetters that they could not break."