S. I

The houses were never high enough to satisfy them; they kept on making
them still higher and built them of thirty or forty storeys: with
offices, shops, banks, societies one above another; they dug cellars and
tunnels ever deeper downwards.

Fifteen millions of men laboured in a giant town by the light of beacons
which shed forth their glare both day and night. No light of heaven
pierced through the smoke of the factories with which the town was girt,
but sometimes the red disk of a rayless sun might be seen riding in the
black firmament through which iron bridges ploughed their way, and from
which there descended a continual shower of soot and cinders. It was
the most industrial of all the cities in the world and the richest.
Its organisation seemed perfect. None of the ancient aristocratic or
democratic forms remained; everything was subordinated to the interests
of the trusts. This environment gave rise to what anthropologists called
the multi-millionaire type. The men of this type were at once energetic
and frail, capable of great activity in forming mental combinations
and of prolonged labour in offices, but men whose nervous irritability
suffered from hereditary troubles which increased as time went on.

Like all true aristocrats, like the patricians of republican Rome or the
squires of old England, these powerful men affected a great severity
in their habits and customs. They were the ascetics of wealth. At the
meetings of the trusts an observer would have noticed their smooth and
puffy faces, their lantern cheeks, their sunken eyes and wrinkled brows.
With bodies more withered, complexions yellower, lips drier, and eyes