morning. The city had
swallowed up humanity; man had entered upon a new stage in his
development. First had come the nomad, the hunter, then had followed the
agriculturist of the agricultural state, whose towns and cities and ports
were but the headquarters and markets of the countryside. And now,
logical consequence of an epoch of invention, was this huge new
aggregation of men.

Such things as these, simple statements of fact though they were to
contemporary men, strained Graham's imagination to picture. And when he
glanced "over beyond there" at the strange things that existed on the
Continent, it failed him altogether.

He had a vision of city beyond city; cities on great plains, cities
beside great rivers, vast cities along the sea margin, cities girdled by
snowy mountains. Over a great part of the earth the English tongue was
spoken; taken together with its Spanish American and Hindoo and Negro and
"Pidgin" dialects, it was the everyday-language of two-thirds of
humanity. On the Continent, save as remote and curious survivals, three
other languages alone held sway--German, which reached to Antioch and
Genoa and jostled Spanish-English at Cadiz; a Gallicised Russian which
met the Indian English in Persia and Kurdistan and the "Pidgin" English
in Pekin; and French still clear and brilliant, the language of lucidity,
which shared the Mediterranean with the Indian English and German and
reached through a negro dialect to the Congo.

And everywhere now through the city-set earth, save in the administered
"black belt" territories of the tropics, the same cosmopolitan social
organisation prevailed, and everywhere from Pole to Equator his property
and his responsibilities extended. The whole world was civilised; the
whole world dwelt in cities; the whole world was his property....

Out of the dim south-west, glittering and strange, voluptuous, and in
some way terrible, shone those Pleasure Cities of which the
kinematograph-phonograph and the old man in the street had spoken.
Strange places reminiscent of the legendary Sybaris, cities of art
and beauty, mercenary art and mercenary beauty, sterile wonderful
cities of motion and music, whither repaired all who profited by the
fierce, inglorious, economic struggle that went on in the glaring
labyrinth below.

Fierce he knew it was. How fierce he could judge from the fact that these
latter-day people referred back to the England of the nineteenth century
as the figure o