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Show DOLORES. 79 Capitan, as their chief man was called, sought to cheer the hours, as far as his simple pleasures and uneventful life could interest me, and as I grew to understand the people, they were a strange study to me. The government, if government it might be called, was a pure paternalism ; but repression was unnecessary, because crime could scarcely be said to exist. " At last, said I, the Brotherhood of Man is found. Here. is no scheming of man to supplant his fellow ; here all are equal, and obedience to natural law, with mutual toleration, takes the place of courts and statutes. But I soon saw that in parting with most of the faults of a progressive race, they had parted with many of its virtues and all of its advantages. There was no envy, for there was 110 emulation ; the weak were not trodden down by the strong in a struggle for place, for there was no struggle. There was no caste, for there was neither rank nor wealth ; a dead level of social medi-ocrity took the place of our many distinctions in birth or condition. They had not the petty vices of a trading people, as they had little in-tercourse with the rest of mankind ; nor the faults of a manufacturing town, for every family was its own manufacturer. Political strife never disturbed them, for there was no choice as to the form of gov-ernment, and no energy to change the ruler. The Capitan did not rob his people, for they had nothing worth his taking; the people did not envy their king, for he was poor as themselves. Luxury and its attendant vices they knew not their land sufficed but for a bare existence ; and unchastity was so rare as to be looked upon as a monstrous phenomenon. But their chastity resulted from a lack uf aggressive energy, and a sexual coldness with which kind nature ever blesses an illy nourished and decaying race. No military am-bition disturbed the placid current of their lives ; they scarcely knew how to defend themselves against their savage neighbors, and retir-ing to these rock- defended fastnesses, had left the open country to their foes. " Then I saw that energy is evolved only in conflict; that a vigor-ous combat with evil develops the individual, and that a state from which ambition should be banished to leave the citizen free from conflict, would be a state in which moral vigor would in turn decay, and social stagnation, as a living tomb, swallow up the proudest prod-ucts of the march of mind. With these people one day passed as another. Whether they had a belief in immortality I could never learn ; but they might well ignore it, since even in this world they were dead already. Beyond the narrow horizon of their hills, they |