A man falls asleep in his sailing boat one May afternoon and wakes off the coast of Eurasia, a republic where half the cabinet ministers are women, eight jurors of twelve can convict, the courts charge no costs and impose no fines, the prisons have no walls, and the railway tariff fits on a page. He goes from department to department, justice, prisons, the bank, mines, schools, war, railways and the income tax, and reports what he finds with the approval of a man who has seen the other system from the inside. The author was, by every sign, Chris Evans, the California train robber of the 1890s, who had spent more than fifteen years in Folsom Prison; the chapter on the model prison and the anger at railroad rates read differently once you know. Fifty-nine plates by painters including Vasily Vereshchagin and Ilya Repin, spanning 1820 to 1927, show beggars, prisoners, forgotten soldiers and fisher girls, the human cost of the old world the narrator has left behind.