The stories in this book are in fact one story, that of a society adrift, like a shipwrecked crew upon a raft: fifty million people upon a wet and windy island in the Atlantic Ocean. Half of the inhabitants of Great Britain have been sold a patent medicine of peculiar austerity. Some of the characters in these stories complain of this medicine: but there is a far worse corrective others maintain, namely the Red Pills of Old Uncle Joe. The social medicines of the 'kindly' British spare you from t