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!"