he nineteenth
century as the figure of an idyllic easy-going life. He turned his eyes
to the scene immediately before him again, trying to conceive the big
factories of that intricate maze.

Northward he knew were the potters, makers not only of earthenware and
china, but of the kindred pastes and compounds a subtler mineralogical
chemistry had devised; there were the makers of statuettes and wall
ornaments and much intricate furniture; there too were the factories
where feverishly competitive authors devised their phonograph discourses
and advertisements and arranged the groupings and developments for their
perpetually startling and novel kinematographic dramatic works. Thence,
too, flashed the world-wide messages, the world-wide falsehoods of the
news-tellers, the chargers of the telephonic machines that had replaced
the newspapers of the past.

To the westward beyond the smashed Council House were the voluminous
offices of municipal control and government; and to the eastward,
towards the port, the trading quarters, the huge public markets, the
theatres, houses of resort, betting palaces, miles of billiard saloons,
baseball and football circuses, wild beast rings and the innumerable
temples of the Christian and quasi-Christian sects, the Mahomedans,
Buddhists, Gnostics, Spook Worshippers, the Incubus Worshippers, the
Furniture Worshippers, and so forth; and to the south again a vast
manufacture of textiles, pickles, wines and condiments. And from point
to point tore the countless multitudes along the roaring mechanical
ways. A gigantic hive, of which the winds were tireless servants, and
the ceaseless wind-vanes an appropriate crown and symbol.

He thought of the unprecedented population that had been sucked up by
this sponge of halls and galleries--the thirty-three million lives that
were playing out each its own brief ineffectual drama below him, and the
complacency that the brightness of the day and the space and splendour
of the view, and above all the sense of his own importance had begotten,
dwindled and perished. Looking down from this height over the city
it became at last possible to conceive this overwhelming multitude of
thirty-three millions, the reality of the responsibility he would take
upon himself, the vastness of the human Maelstrom over which his slender
kingship hung.

He tried to figure the individual life. It astonished him to realise how
little the common man had changed in spite of the vis