A Stately Pleasure-Dome Decreed

March 30, 1867, Juneau: The Purchase of Alaska and the End of The Orcish Problem

Orcs were long viewed as the great failure among the races of man: too dim to be architects of their own destiny, too savage and violent to be enslaved alongside Negroes and aboriginals, too large and fearsome to be ignored. In short, they were a doomed race, fit for short-term exploitation and long term genocide. Yet, Orcs held among them, knowledge of their own storied past, of their time of supremact among the steppes of central Asia, when their brightest and most ruthless warlords hammered them into armies worth fearing: the Golden Horde, the Khanates of Genghis and Chagatai, and, especially, the dominion of Kublai Khan, emperor of half the world. 

And so it makes sense that, in trying to solve the tricky social riddle of the so-called Orcish Problem, an appeal to the most famous orc that ever lived would rank highly among the solutions. Beginning in the 17th century, the great politicians, men of industry and philosophers of the West recognized the dangers that a growing Orcish population represented. Orcish clans in the jungles of the Americas, darkest Africa, and aforementioned Russian steppes were of little threat, but industrialization and the spread of European colonial power brought White men, dwarves and elves into direct conflict with primitive orcish tribes, and by the Enlightenment, White orcs, that most problematic of figures were a staple of European cities. 

Unlike the mulatto or the the mestizo, and other degenerate mixes, the White Orc, with his musky ardor, his monstrous tusks, and his beastly strong physique, could neither be broken through the yoke of slavery, nor taught complacency through the presence of a loving family and the strict guidance of the church and the schoolhouse. By the early 19th century, with industry creating vast slums, and social conventions struggling to keep apace, those with Orcish blood comrprised nearly thirty percent of the population of the great metropoles and many feared their ascendancy within a hundred years' time. Thus, the great moral philosophers of the age: Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, William Whewell, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer and others all contributed to the debate over the Orcish Problem. 

Ironically, it was not a great philosopher who solved the issue, rather it was a pair of politicians. Grand Duke Konstantin of the Czarish House of Romanov, in collaboration with American Secretary of State, William Henry Seward, negotiated the sale of the Alaskan region of North America, which Seward then declared to be an American protectorate and a new homeland for the Orcs. Billed as "New Xanadu," after Kublai Khan's summer palace of Shangdu, the idea grew in popularity and the proposed nation grew in size as England, enthused by the prospect of a solution to the Orcish problem, donated large swaths of the Yukon, Northwest Territories, Newfoundland and Labrador to the cause--infertile lands that had space enough for Orcish expansion, but posited no real loss from an economic standpoint. 

In 1876, the forced relocation of North American and European Orcs began en masse. Ships departing for Saraj (formerly Anchorage) in the West, and Khanistan (formerly St. Johns) in the East, were loaded up with Orcish women and children, and the few tractable bulls that could be persuaded. Propaganda promised good jobs, a modicum of political autonomy and the non-interference of men, elves and dwarves in daily life, but the harsh realities of the Polar nation soon belied the rosy picture of an Orcish paradise. As word of New Xanadu's false promise spread back  Europe and America, rioting broke out, orcs met with police resistance and wholesale extermination of Orcs was practiced in more than a few beleaguered cities. 

By February 1881, the forced relocation efforts were declared outmoded and the program officially ended. Many politicians of the time looked out in dismay at the orcs that still infested the slums of London's East End, New York's lower East Side, and Chicago's Southside, but by the end of the century "Seward's Folly" began to show dividends. New Xanadese frontiersmen had discovered gold in Alaska and the Yukon and, with real reason to seek out the icy noman's land, Orcs, now cautious and proprietary about their suddenly valuable nation, encouraged their brethren to join them. By the end of the century, only a fraction of the populations of Europe and America consisted of Orcs. The problem had been well and truly solved.