into
a remote quarter of the city, where the bulk of the manufactures was
done. On their way the platforms crossed the Thames twice, and passed in
a broad viaduct across one of the great roads that entered the city from
the North. In both cases his impression was swift and in both very vivid.
The river was a broad wrinkled glitter of black sea water, overarched by
buildings, and vanishing either way into a blackness starred with
receding lights. A string of black barges passed seaward, manned by
blue-clad men. The road was a long and very broad and high tunnel, along
which big-wheeled machines drove noiselessly and swiftly. Here, too, the
distinctive blue of the Labour Department was in abundance. The
smoothness of the double tracks, the largeness and the lightness of the
big pneumatic wheels in proportion to the vehicular body, struck Graham
most vividly. One lank and very high carriage with longitudinal metallic
rods hung with the dripping carcasses of many hundred sheep arrested his
attention unduly. Abruptly the edge of the archway cut and blotted out
the picture.

Presently they left the way and descended by a lift and traversed a
passage that sloped downward, and so came to a descending lift again. The
appearance of things changed. Even the pretence of architectural
ornament disappeared, the lights diminished in number and size, the
architecture became more and more massive in proportion to the spaces as
the factory quarters were reached. And in the dusty biscuit-making place
of the potters, among the felspar mills, in the furnace rooms of the
metal workers, among the incandescent lakes of crude Eadhamite, the blue
canvas clothing was on man, woman and child.

Many of these great and dusty galleries were silent avenues of machinery,
endless raked out ashen furnaces testified to the revolutionary
dislocation, but wherever there was work it was being done by slow-moving
workers in blue canvas. The only people not in blue canvas were the
overlookers of the work-places and the orange-clad Labour Police. And
fresh from the flushed faces of the dancing halls, the voluntary vigours
of the business quarter, Graham could note the pinched faces, the feeble
muscles, and weary eyes of many of the latter-day workers. Such as he saw
at work were noticeably inferior in physique to the few gaily dressed
managers and forewomen who were directing their labours. The burly
labourers of the old Victorian times had followed that dray