“I see,” I said after a pause, “that momentous things have happened since my time.  I wish you would let me ask you about it all systematically, and would explain it to me bit by bit.  First, what do you mean by saying that there is no work?”

“Why,” answered my strange acquaintance, “it died out of itself.  Machinery killed it.  If I remember rightly, you had a certain amount of machinery even in your time.  You had done very well with steam, made a good beginning with electricity, though I think radial energy had hardly as yet been put to use.”

I nodded assent.

“But you found it did you no good.  The better your machines, the harder you worked.  The more things you had the more you wanted.  The pace of life grew swifter and swifter.  You cried out, but it would not stop.  You were all caught in the cogs of your own machine.  None of you could see the end.”

“That is quite true,” I said.  “How do you know it all?”

“Oh,” answered the Man in Asbestos, “that part of my education was very well operated—­I see you do not know what I mean.  Never mind, I can tell you that later.  Well, then, there came, probably almost two hundred years after your time, the Era of the Great Conquest of Nature, the final victory of Man and Machinery.”

“They did conquer it?” I asked quickly, with a thrill of the old hope in my veins again.

“Conquered it,” he said, “beat it out!  Fought it to a standstill!  Things came one by one, then faster and faster, in a hundred years it was all done.  In fact, just as soon as mankind turned its energy to decreasing its needs instead of increasing its desires, the whole thing was easy.  Chemical Food came first.  Heavens! the simplicity of it.  And in your time thousands of millions of people tilled and grubbed at the soil from morning till night.  I’ve seen specimens of them—­farmers, they called them.  There’s one in the museum.  After the invention of Chemical Food we piled up enough in the emporiums in a year to last for centuries.  Agriculture went overboard.  Eating and all that goes with it, domestic labour, housework—­all ended.  Nowadays one takes a concentrated pill every year or so, that’s all.  The whole digestive apparatus, as you knew it, was a clumsy thing that had been bloated up like a set of bagpipes through the evolution of its use!”

I could not forbear to interrupt.  “Have you and these people,” I said, “no stomachs—­no apparatus?”

“Of course we have,” he answered, “but we use it to some purpose.  Mine is largely filled with my education—­but there!  I am anticipating again.  Better let me go on as I was.  Chemical Food came first:  that cut off almost one-third of the work, and then came Asbestos Clothes.  That was wonderful!  In one year humanity made enough suits to last for ever and ever.  That, of course, could never have been if it hadn’t been connected with the revolt of women and the fall of Fashion.”