"Eating would take up all their time."
"What? Creatures whose frames would begin to dwindle away unless they ate every few hours? Why, they would be able to think of nothing else! Eating would take up all their time! They would barely have leisure to kill one another between meals!"
"No, there's something in that," said poor James.
"Besides, you have invented beings possessing something like intelligence. Have you provided that intelligence simply to be used in eating?"
"Oh no; but—"
"Well, they certainly wouldn't have a chance of using it for any other purpose. Are they to live to eat?"
"Oh no—only to eat to live."
"As soon as they had used their intelligence in eating, what is the next thing they would turn it to?"
"To—er—well, I suppose to finding something for the next meal," said poor James, hopelessly.
"Precisely," said William. "You do not propose a very high standard of achievement for your beings! I presume all these inventions you talk about would have eating as their ultimate object? The best thing for them would be to invent something to render the necessity of eating less frequent; something which would do all the eating for them, and set them at liberty to attempt something else. What inventions were you thinking of?"
"Well the electric telegraph, for instance; an apparatus to enable persons to talk to others long distances off."
"But your people wouldn't have time to talk to those at hand even—they would have to eat. By the way, what do you do with your beings when they die?"
"They become part of the world they lived on."
"Oh! and the others eat them? Ah, very nice! I really begin to like your human beings. Their tastes are so pleasant! Go on."
"Well, as they progressed in civilisation they would make laws."
"What for?"
"To govern themselves by."
"Govern themselves by! But they could govern themselves without laws. What would they want laws for?"
"To prevent their doing wrong," said James.
"But if they were inclined to do right they would not need laws to keep them from doing wrong; while, if they were inclined to do wrong, they would not make such laws. Besides, the necessity of such laws seems to imply that the majority of your humans would have a leaning towards evil-doing?"
"Yes, that would be so."
"Then who would make, and enforce, those laws?"
"The better inclined minority."
"What horrid nonsense! The majority would not let them! No; obviously the majority would make the laws; and the majority being inclined towards evil, the laws would be for the propagation of evil-doing. If the majority of your humans were inclined to swindle their neighbours, the laws would be made in favour of swindlers."
Poor James hastily ran over a few of the laws he had conceived, and expressed a wish to change the conversation.
"Look here, my poor boy," said William, rising, "don't muddle your head with any more of these preposterous plans. Science and Reason utterly confute the possibility of such a world as you describe. To begin with, the world itself could not exist for five minutes; then your people couldn't live in it if
