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 an
instinct class, with a moral and physical difference of its own--even
with a dialect of its own.
They penetrated downward, ever downward, towards the working places.
Presently they passed underneath one of the streets of the moving ways,
and saw its platforms running on their rails far overhead, and chinks of
white lights between the transverse slits. The factories that were not
working were sparsely lighted; to Graham they and their shrouded aisles
of giant machines seemed plunged in gloom, and even where work was going
on the illumination was far less brilliant than upon the public ways.
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