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 property. Over the
British Empire and throughout America his ownership was scarcely
disguised, Congress and Parliament were usually regarded as antique,
curious gatherings. And even in the two Empires of Russia and Germany,
the influence of his wealth was conceivably of enormous weight. There,
of course, came problems--possibilities, but, uplifted as he was, even
Russia and Germany seemed sufficiently remote. And of the quality of the
black belt administration, and of what that might mean for him he
thought, after the fashion of his former days, not at all. That it
should hang like a threat over the spacious vision before him could not
enter his nineteenth century mind. But his mind turned at once from the
scenery to the thought of a vanished dread. "What of the yellow peril?"
he asked and Asano made him explain. The Chinese spectre had vanished.
Chinaman and European were at peace. The twentieth century had
discovered with reluctant certainty that the average Chinaman was as
civilised, more moral, and far more intelligent than the average
European serf, and had repeated on a gigantic scale the fraternisation
of Scot and Englishman that happened in the seventeenth century. As
Asano put it; "They thought it over. They found we were white men after
all." Graham turned again to the view and his thoughts took a new
direction.

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 t