We sat silent for a long time.  I looked about me at the crumbling buildings, the monotone, unchanging sky, and the dreary, empty street.  Here, then, was the fruit of the Conquest, here was the elimination of work, the end of hunger and of cold, the cessation of the hard struggle, the downfall of change and death—­nay, the very millennium of happiness.  And yet, somehow, there seemed something wrong with it all.  I pondered, then I put two or three rapid questions, hardly waiting to reflect upon the answers.

“Is there any war now?”

“Done with centuries ago.  They took to settling international disputes with a slot machine.  After that all foreign dealings were given up.  Why have them?  Everybody thinks foreigners awful.”

“Are there any newspapers now?”

“Newspapers!  What on earth would we want them for?  If we should need them at any time there are thousands of old ones piled up.  But what is in them, anyway; only things that happen, wars and accidents and work and death.  When these went newspapers went too.  Listen,” continued the Man in Asbestos, “you seem to have been something of a social reformer, and yet you don’t understand the new life at all.  You don’t understand how completely all our burdens have disappeared.  Look at it this way.  How used your people to spend all the early part of their lives?”

“Why,” I said, “our first fifteen years or so were spent in getting education.”

“Exactly,” he answered; “now notice how we improved on all that.  Education in our day is done by surgery.  Strange that in your time nobody realised that education was simply a surgical operation.  You hadn’t the sense to see that what you really did was to slowly remodel, curve and convolute the inside of the brain by a long and painful mental operation.  Everything learned was reproduced in a physical difference to the brain.  You knew that, but you didn’t see the full consequences.  Then came the invention of surgical education—­the simple system of opening the side of the skull and engrafting into it a piece of prepared brain.  At first, of course, they had to use, I suppose, the brains of dead people, and that was ghastly”—­here the Man in Asbestos shuddered like a leaf—­“but very soon they found how to make moulds that did just as well.  After that it was a mere nothing; an operation of a few minutes would suffice to let in poetry or foreign languages or history or anything else that one cared to have.  Here, for instance,” he added, pushing back the hair at the side of his head and showing a scar beneath it, “is the mark where I had my spherical trigonometry let in.  That was, I admit, rather painful, but other things, such as English poetry or history, can be inserted absolutely without the least suffering.  When I think of your painful, barbarous methods of education through the ear, I shudder at it.  Oddly enough, we have found lately that for a great many things there is no need to use the head.  We lodge them—­things like philosophy and metaphysics, and so on—­in what used to be the digestive apparatus.  They fill it admirably.”