CHAPTER II.
The one virtue that may be said to have characterised the twentieth century and to have redeemed it from utter worthlessness was a devotion to the cause of progress. True it was material progress that was chiefly sought, but it was urged by the economic school (and not without force) that intellectual and moral progress would necessarily accompany each advance of the comforts and conveniences of life. In the United States, at all events, the one duty inculcated on every child from its earliest years was that of advancing the material welfare of the world. This was our rule of life; this our religious and moral code; this stood for honour, patriotism, duty and all those fine abstractions which really do seem to have influenced the actions of our grandfathers. Now the profession that most lends itself to triumphs over nature and shows in a practical manner the advances made by man is undoubtedly that of engineering. Consequently it is not surprising that in an age when the standards of duty were such as I have described this profession should have been the resort of almost every active and eager youth in the country. All who could do so became engineers; all who could not bewailed their incapacity or misfortune. Hence with all the best intellect of the country or indeed of the world hastening in one direction an amount of progress was made which would have seemed a wild dream to the men of fifty years back. Large buildings were moved from place to place with speed and security. Bridges were constructed across chasms of enormous span in an incredibly short space of time. Tunnelling was carried through mountains and under seas with less expenditure of time and labour than had been required for the puny mouseholes of the first half of the Nineteenth century. The natural force of the tides and of waterfalls, converted into electricity and so conveyed, was applied in unlimited quantity to works which had previously demanded the employment of thousands of men and horses. It was thus that it was found possible by the aid of automatic borers, excavators, and other machinery to excavate the Darien Canal in less than nine months, whereas the earlier work at Panama had occupied eight or nine time that period, and a dozen times as many workmen. The problem of aerial navigation, though frequently assailed, seemed to defy a perfect solution, but even here an approach to success had been attained in the clever "Torpedo Flyers" attached to our ships of war, which from their power of passing through the air in short flights of 400 to 600 yards at great speed obtained the nickname of "Flying Fish," which creature indeed they much resembled.
But 'tis idle for me to recapitulate the wonders, never I fear to be repeated, of this last age of human skill. Suffice it to say that as soon as the unlimited amount and conductibility of the natural forces was realised all efforts were directed to substituting automatic machines for the less efficient and more expensive labour of man. Thus we had automatic implements of agriculture, automatic miners for our minerals, automatic builders, which would run up the walls of a house in twenty-four hours, automatic locomotives requiring neither driver nor stoker, and many more. The attempt to employ automatic letter carriers, waiters, tramcar-conductors, and the like was unsuccessful and soon abandoned, as the event proved that a small modicum of human intelligence was requisite for the proper performance even of these humble offices.
All the foregoing description of the condition of society before the great disaster of 1948 is indeed unnecessary for the information of my own generation; but as that generation is passing away and its successor will be reared under wholly different surroundings it is essential to try to convey some idea of things as they were before that date. Having completed this slight sketch I now proceed to my story proper.