ible change in his
conditions. Life and property, indeed, were secure from violence almost
all over the world, zymotic diseases, bacterial diseases of all sorts
had practically vanished, everyone had a sufficiency of food and
clothing, was warmed in the city ways and sheltered from the weather--so
much the almost mechanical progress of science and the physical
organisation of society had accomplished. But the crowd, he was already
beginning to discover, was a crowd still, helpless in the hands of
demagogue and organiser, individually cowardly, individually swayed by
appetite, collectively incalculable. The memory of countless figures in
pale blue canvas came before his mind. Millions of such men and women
below him, he knew, had never been out of the city, had never seen
beyond the little round of unintelligent grudging participation in the
world's business, and unintelligent dissatisfied sharing in its tawdrier
pleasures. He thought of the hopes of his vanished contemporaries,
and for a moment the dream of London in Morris's quaint old _News
from Nowhere_, and the perfect land of Hudson's beautiful _Crystal
Age_--appeared before him in an atmosphere of infinite loss. He thought
of his own hopes.

For in the latter days of that passionate life that lay now so far
behind him, the conception of a free and equal manhood had become a very
real thing to him. He had hoped, as indeed his age had hoped, rashly
taking it for granted, that the sacrifice of the many to the few would
some day cease, that a day was near when every child born of woman
should have a fair and assured chance of happiness. And here, after
two hundred years, the same hope, still unfulfilled, cried passionately
through the city. After two hundred years, he knew, greater than ever,
grown with the city to gigantic proportions, were poverty and helpless
labour and all the sorrows of his time.

Already he knew something of the history of the intervening years.
He had heard now of the moral decay that had followed the collapse of
supernatural religion in the minds of ignoble man, the decline of public
honour, the ascendency of wealth. For men who had lost their belief in
God had still kept their faith in property, and wealth ruled a venial
world.

His Japanese attendant, Asano, in expounding the political history of
the intervening two centuries, drew an apt image from a seed eaten by
insect parasites. First there is the original seed, ripening vigorously
e