.
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 Victorian times
had followed the dray horse and all such living force producers, to
extinction; the place of his costly muscles was taken by some
dexterous machine. The latter-day labourer, male as well as female, was
essentially a machine-minder and feeder, a servant and attendant, or an
artist under direction.

The women, in comparison with those Graham remembered, were as a class
distinctly plain and flat-chested. Two hundred years of emancipation
from the moral restraints of Puritanical religion, two hundred years
of city life, had done their work in eliminating the strain of feminine
beauty and vigour from the blue canvas myriads. To be brilliant
physically or mentally, to be in any way attractive or exceptional, had
been and was still a certain way of emancipation to the drudge, a line
of escape to the Pleasure City and its splendours and delights, and
at last to the Euthanasy and peace. To be steadfast against such
inducements was scarcely to be expected of meanly nourished souls. In
the young cities of Graham's former life, the newly aggregated labouring
mass had been a diverse multitude, still stirred by the tradition of
personal honour and a high morality; now it was differentiating into a
distinct class, with a moral and physical diff