o place, had reduced manual
labour to a mere nothing. The waterfalls, the winds and the tides had
become the slaves of man, as steam had once been in the remote ages and
in an infinitely less degree. Intelligently distributed and turned to
account by means of improved machines, as simple as they were ingenious,
this enormous energy freely furnished by nature had long rendered
superfluous every kind of domestic servant and the greater number of
artisans. The voluntary workmen, who still existed, spent barely three
hours a day in the international factories, magnificent co-operative
workshops, in which the productivity of human energy, multiplied
tenfold, and even a hundredfold, surpassed the expectations of their
founders.

This does not mean that the social problem had been thereby solved. In
default of want, it is true, there were no longer any quarrels; wealth
or a competence had become the lot of every man, with the result that
hardly anyone henceforth set any store by them. In default of ugliness,
also, love was scarcely an object of either appreciation or jealousy,
owing to the abundance of pretty women and handsome men who were as
common as blackberries and not difficult to please, in appearance at
least. Thus expelled from its two former principal paths, human desire
rushed with all its might towards the only field which remained open to
it, the conquest of political power, which grew vaster every day owing
to the progress of socialistic centralisation. Overflowing ambition,
swollen all at once with all the evil passions pouring into it alone,
with the covetousness, lust, envious hunger, and hungry envy of
preceding ages, reached at that time an appalling height. It was a
struggle as to who should make himself master of that _summum bonum_,
the State; as to who should make the omnipotence and omniscience of the
Universal State minister to the realisation of his personal programme or
his humanitarian dreams. The result was not, as had been prophesied, a
vast democratic republic. Such an immense outburst of pride could not
fail to set up a new throne, the highest, the mightiest, the most
glorious that has ever been. Besides, inasmuch as the population of the
Single State was reckoned by thousands of millions, universal suffrage
had become impracticable and illusory. To obviate the greater
inconvenience of deliberative assemblies, ten or a hundred times too
numerous, it had been found necessary so to increase the el