"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