_X. -- The Man in Asbestos: An Allegory of the Future_


TO begin with let me admit that I did it on purpose. Perhaps it was
partly from jealousy.

It seemed unfair that other writers should be able at will to drop into
a sleep of four or five hundred years, and to plunge head-first into a
distant future and be a witness of its marvels.

I wanted to do that too.

I always had been, I still am, a passionate student of social problems.
The world of to-day with its roaring machinery, the unceasing toil of
its working classes, its strife, its poverty, its war, its cruelty,
appals me as I look at it. I love to think of the time that must come
some day when man will have conquered nature, and the toil-worn human
race enter upon an era of peace.

I loved to think of it, and I longed to see it.

So I set about the thing deliberately.

What I wanted to do was to fall asleep after the customary fashion, for
two or three hundred years at least, and wake and find myself in the
marvel world of the future.

I made my preparations for the sleep.

I bought all the comic papers that I could find, even the illustrated