PRESENT-DAY LIFE.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXII, Issue 7, 19 December 1911, Page 8

PRESENT-DAY LIFE.

A UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR’S SATIRE. DEATH ABOLISHED. Professor Stephen Leacock’s “Nonsense Novels” (Lane, 3s Gd) are deliberate nonsense, and make fine fun of the fashion of modern novels. But this Canadian Professor is a serious man, as befits one of the faculty of McGill University, Montreal, and one is not therefore surprised to come across Tilings which even in their absurdity do throw some light on t!;e way we think and act. And ’ we get most of this in the chapter on “The Man in Asbestos: An Allegory of the Future.” Here satire shows us that we do many needless 1 things, and have many things we ' could do without. , Our Appalling World. “I always had been, I still am, a passionate student of social proli- ; leans. The world of to-day, with its • roaring machinery, the unceasing toil of its working classes, its strife, its poverty, its war, its cruelties, ap- ■ pals me to look at it. 1 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. “1 loved to think of it, and 1 longed to sec it. “So I set about the thing deliberately.” He prepared to sleep for two or three hundred years, and lie did it by reading the comic papers! eating pork pies and doughnuts, and, finally, by reading the editorial pages of the London “Weekly Times”! When lie woke he found himself in a great ■ room which seemed like a muotim. The Ashes toa-CRd Man. “Beside me sat a man. His face was hairless, but neither old' nor young. Ha wore clothes that looked like fine grey ashes of paper that had burnt and kept its shape. He was looking at me quietly, but with no particularly surprise or interest. “ ‘Quick!’ I said, eager to begin; ‘where am I? Who are you? Yvimt year is this? Is it the year 3000, or what is it?’ ” But the man didn’t know. He kept no track of time. “ ‘What was the use of it? You see, after an eliminated death ’ “‘Eliminated death?’ I cried, sitting upright; ‘Good G !’ “ ‘Wiiat was that expression you used?’ queried this man. “ ‘Good G ’ I repeated “ ‘Ah,’ lie said, ‘never heard it before. But 1 said that after we had eliminated Death, and Food, and Change, we had practically got rid of Events, and ’ “ ‘Stop!’ I said, my brain reeling. ‘Tell me one tiling at a time.’ “ ‘What are these clothes made of?’ “ ‘Asbestos,’ answered the man. ‘They last hundreds of years. We have one suit each, and there are billions of them piled up, if anybody [ wants a new one.’ j “ ‘Thank you,’ I answered. ‘Now tell me where 1 am ?’ “ ‘You are in a museum. The ; figures in the cases are specimens like yourself. “ ‘But here,’ he said, ‘if you want really to find out about what is evidently a new epoch to you, get off your platform and come out on Broadway and sit on a bench. You must excuse my ignorance,’ ho continued, ‘as to some of your social customs in the past. When' I took my education I was operated upon for social history, hut the stuff they used was very inferior.’ ” No Traffic, No WorkIn the streets he could not see any conveyances, so he asked the Man in Asbestos, “Where are the street cars and motors?” “ ‘Oh, done away with long ago,’ lie said. ‘How awful they must have been. The noise of them !’ and his asbestos clothes rustled with a shudder. “ ‘But how do yon get about?’ “ ‘Wo don’t,’ ho answered. ‘Why should we? It’s just the same thing being hero as being anywhere else.’ He looked at me with an infinity of weariness in his face.” Ho at once prosaically wondered how these people got backwards and forwards to work. “‘Work!’ said the Asbestos Man. ‘There isn’t any work; it’s finished. The last of it was done centuries ago!’ “ ‘Work died nut of itself. Machinery killed it. If I remember rightly, yon had a certain amount of machinery even in your time. Yon had done very well with steam, made a good -beginning with electricity though I think radial energy had hardly as yet boon put to use. But you found it did you no good. The better your machine tho harder you worked. More things you had the more yon wanted. The pace, of life grew swifter and swifter. Yon cried mil, hut it would not stop. Yon were all caught in the cogs of your own machine. None of you could see the end.’ Conquest of Nature. “ ‘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 j quickly, with a thrill of the old hope jin my veins again. “ ‘Conquered it,’ ho said,’ ‘heat 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 il ! And in your time thousand of millions of people

idled 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 eve 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 take a concentrated pill every year or so, that's all. The whole digestive apparatus, as yon knew it, was a clumsy tiling That had been bloated up like a set of bagpipes through Die evolution of its use!’ ” They used it afterwards to store knowledge—by operation ! Tie Asbestos Man then explained bow they abolished the Fashion:*, the Weather, and even the Telephone. He then related how they abolished Death. Old a Germ. “ ‘Yes, you had found diphtheria, md typhoid, and, if I remember rad typhoid, and. if 1 anr right, there vere some outstanding, like scarlet 'over and smallpox, that you called Mtra-microscopic, and which yon were Till hunting for, and others that you didn’t even suspect. Well, we hunted them down one by one and destroyed them. Strange, that it never oceur•:d to any of you that old age was inly a germ! Tt turned out to bo -piite a sample one; but it was so disribated in its action that you never even though of it.’_” After they had dispensed with such details as War and Newspapers the Asbestos Man told of their marvellous system of education. Education by Operation, “ ‘Education in our day is done by surgery. bStrange'that in your time nobody’ realised that education was ■.imply a, surgical operation—the simple 'System of opening The side of the •.krill and engrafting into it a piece of prepared brain. ' At first, of course, brains of dead people, and that was ghastly’—here the Man in Asbestos Tnuldered like a '.loaf—‘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 lot in poetry or foreign languages or history, rr anything else that one cared to have/” Then The traveller went on to make inquiries, and found to his amazement that in this land men and women were alike, and that there were no children! But this was enough for him. “Give me hack,” he cried, “the old life of danger and stress, with its hard toil and its hitter dhances, and its heartbreaks. I see its value! know its worth!”