before they reached the walls. Its bed and estuary

scoured and sunken, was now a canal of sea water
and a race of grimy bargemen brought the heavy

materials of trade from the Pool thereby beneath the
very feet of the workers. Faint and dim in the

eastward between earth and sky hung the clustering masts
of the colossalshipping in the Pool. For all the

heavy traffic, for which there was no need of haste,
came in gigantic sailing ships from the ends of the

earth, and the heavy goods for which there was
urgency in mechanical ships of a smaller swifter sort.

And to the south over the hills, came vast aqueducts
with sea water for the sewers and in three separate

directions, ran pallid lines--the roads, stippled with
moving grey specks. On the first occasion that offered

he was determined to go out and see these roads.
That would come after the flying ship he was presently

to try. His attendant officer described them as a pair
of gently curving surfaces a hundred yards wide, each

one for the traffic going in one direction, and made of
a substance called Eadhamite--an artificial substance,.

so far as he could gather, resembling toughened glass.
Along this shot a strange traffic of narrow rubber-shod

vehicles, great single wheels, two and four wheeled
vehicles, sweeping along at velocities of from one to

six miles a minute. Railroads had vanished; a few
embankments remained as rust-crowned trenches here

and there. Some few formed the cores of Eadhamite
ways.

Among the first things to strike his attention had
been the great fleets of advertisement balloons and

kites that receded in irregular vistas northward and
southward along the lines of the aeroplane journeys.

No aeroplanes were to be seen. Their passages had
ceased, and only one little-seeming aeropile circled

high in the blue distance above the Surrey Hills, an
unimpressive soaring speck.

A thing Graham had already learnt, and which he
found very hard to imagine, was that nearly all the

towns in the country, and almost all the villages, had
disappeared. Here and there only, he understood,

some gigantic hotel-like edifice stood amid square
miles of some single cultivation and preserved the

name of a town--as Bournemouth, Wareham, or
Swanage. Yet the officer had speedily convinced him

how inevitable such a change had been. The old
order had dotted the country with farmhouses, and

every two or three miles was the ruling landlord's
estate, and the place of the inn and cobbler, the

grocer's shop and church--the village. Every eight
miles or so was the country town, where lawyer, corn

merchant, wool-stapler, saddler, veterinary surgeon,
doctor, draper, milliner and so forth lived. Every

eight miles--simply because that eight mile marketing
journey, four there and back, was as much as was

comfortable for the farmer. But directly the railways
came into play, and after them the light railways, and

all the swift new motor cars that had replaced waggons
and horses, and so soon as the high roads began to

be made of wood, and rubber, and Eadhamite, and
all sorts of elasticdurable substances--the necessity

of having such frequent market towns disappeared.
And the big towns grew. They drew the worker with

the gravitational force of seemingly endless work, the
employer with their suggestions of an infinite ocean of

labour.
And as the standard of comfort rose, as the complexity

of the mechanism of living increased life in
the country had become more and more costly, or

narrow and impossible. The disappearance of vicar
and squire, the extinction of the general practitioner

by the city specialist, had robbed the village of its last
touch of culture. After telephone, kinematograph

and phonograph had replaced newspaper, book,
schoolmaster, and letter, to live outside the range of

the electric cables was to live an isolated savage. In
the country were neither means of being clothed nor

fed (according to the refined conceptions of the time),
no efficient doctors for an emergency, no company

and no pursuits.
Moreover, mechanical appliances in agriculture

made one engineer the equivalent of thirty labourers.
So, inverting the condition of the city clerk in the

days when London was scarce inhabitable because of
the coaly foulness of its air, the labourers now came

hurrying by road or air to the city and its life and
delights at night to leave it again in the 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, logicalconsequence of

an epoch of invention, was this huge new aggregation
of men. Save London, there were only four other

cities in Britain -- Edinburgh, Portsmouth,
Manchester and Shrewsbury. 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 the people of the

earth. 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 Gdiz, 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 organisatior
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 sufficientlyremote. And of the quality of the
black belt administration, and of what that might mean