CHAPTER II

HOUSING, TRAVEL AND POPULATION QUESTIONS

When every allowance has been made for the material changes which the progress of this century threatens, it is easy to see that certain present-day problems will continue to trouble our successors. Some things which perplex ourselves will, I think, work out their own remedy. Others will remain the subject of solutions not difficult to be imagined in advance.

One chief difficulty which will infallibly confront the immediate future, and even the future that is more remote, arises out of the simple fact that the race of man tends to increase numerically at a speed greater than our devices for its accommodation can quite conveniently cope with. The population of the world not only increases, but increases at compound interest. Nor is this all. Improved sanitation, better habits of life, and the progress of medicine, prolong lives that in the conditions of last century would have been shortened, and the rate of increase is thus further accelerated, as individuals who in different conditions would have died, live on, perhaps reproducing their species, and thus intensifying the population problem. Against these influences may be set the effect of the restrictions imposed by some civilised peoples on the birth rate, which Mr Roosevelt calls "race suicide." These practices, just now increasingly prevalent, retard the rate of increase, but do not at present stop our increase: they alleviate, but do not cure the difficulty of over-population. Artificial physiological checks on population, if I am right in certain other conjectures to be presently developed, will not form part of the permanent morality of the new age, partly because, with more enlightenment, they will be voluntarily abandoned or superseded, and partly because the necessity for them will have disappeared, having worked out its own cure.

But with all this it would be folly to anticipate that the population of the civilised world will not have greatly increased before the end of the period contemplated by the present inquiry: and this brings us face to face with two very important questions--those of housing and transport. Where shall we live, and how shall we move from place to place--above all, how shall we proceed from home to the scene of work and thence home again every day, in the future? Shall we indeed thus move back and forth at all?

The answer to the last question bifurcates somewhat. In the earlier future of (say) twenty or thirty years hence, probably the greatest tendencies will be towards concentration on the one hand and exceedingly rapid transport on the other. What the ultimate practice will be, it should not be difficult to guess when we see how these tendencies are likely to work themselves out.

During the last twenty-five or thirty years of the nineteenth century the tendency of workers in great cities was more and more towards suburban life, men travelling to and from the cities in increasing numbers, to increasing distances, and at increasing speeds. Even mechanics, even labourers and the other humbler wage-earners (to say nothing of clerks not earning much more, but spending their money in a different manner) nowadays travel considerable distances to their work. But in spite of what is complacently regarded (by railway and tramway directors) as rapid conveyance, there is lately manifest an increasing impatience against the time subtracted from men's leisure by the two daily journeys, an impatience very naturally increased in the case of manual workers of both sexes by the utter inadequacy of the legislative control imposed upon railway and tramway companies.

Crowded trams and trains, with desperate men and weak women fighting a daily battle for conveyance before all the cheap trips have been made, inflict a shameful degradation upon the class for which Parliament makes illusory provision in railway and tramway Acts. As a consequence of this difficulty, and also because of the early hour at which the companies are allowed to cease carrying working-folk at the workmen's fare, many men and women are compelled to waste some hours of their scanty leisure every day between the arrival of their trains and the opening of their workshops, a cruelty for which the blame may be pretty equally apportioned to Parliament and the company directors. The result of it is that many of the poor prefer the evil of overcrowding in cities before the greater evil of wasted time and degrading travel. As time goes on, no doubt the monopolists of transportation will be compelled, as their own necessities increase and so bring them under the hand of the legislature, to serve more adequately the necessities of the majority. But even so, and as long as the effective speed of conveyance is limited by the lack of permanent-way space and the necessity for frequent stations, the impatience even now manifested, and manifested chiefly by the class which suffers least from loss of time in travel, will lead to concentration. Taking London as an example, it may be said that the Victorian age was the age of the suburbs. But few people now live in the suburbs of London who can afford to live anywhere else. Either they move right out into the country, seeking a spot on some main line where the greater distance and less-frequent train service is made up for by speedy and uninterrupted journeys; or they come into London and occupy houses or flats within easy reach of their working head-quarters. The suburbs are given over to those who cannot afford either of these expedients, or who, having been brought up there, are retained by a sort of inertia. Ultimately, as the demand for town space becomes intensified, two things will happen. First of all, the restrictions which many cities, ignoring the freedom of New York and Chicago, impose upon the erection of excessively high buildings, will go by the board. The shutting out of sunlight and fresh air will be the subject of compensations to be presently explained, and thirty, forty, fifty or a hundred-storey houses, and houses which perhaps burrow to some distance underground, will, by virtue of the same compensations, house a vast, concentrated population impatient of daily travel. As the demand for homes increases, and even the high buildings cannot cope with it, the cities will push their way outwards, repopulating the rebuilt suburbs. This kind of thing will have a tendency to correct itself. Rents will be high in proportion to position near the centre. But a limit of toleration will be reached, and as certain improvements will have been effected in transport, there will ultimately be a reaction, and people will again go right out to the country, as long as there is any country left.

Before discussing these improvements, however, it will be convenient to examine the conveniences, social and sanitary, of the homes of the new age. The greatest convenience of all, no doubt, will be the modification and partial elimination of the domestic servant. There is every reason to believe that the great difficulties of the servant question as at present experienced will solve themselves, forming in part an instance of the moral changes, accompanying material invention but only partly resulting from it, which the new age is certain to experience. It is usual to lay the blame of the unsatisfactory character and atrocious inefficiency of the domestic servants of our own day on the institution of free education. They are much more due to the absence of any education worthy of the name, and to the imperfect civilisation of modern houses. Thirty-five years or so are but an instant in the life of an institution so overwhelmingly more important in its possibilities than any other subject of legislation as State-compelled education of the people. No one appears to have recognised that character-making, which Herbert Spencer called the most important object which can engage the attention of the legislator, is the only true object of education, free or otherwise. When politicians have talked of the necessity of national education, the argument they have used was that Germans are better chemists than we are. When they praised the usefulness of modern languages it was in terms of commercial utility. "Modern languages, in fact" (a recent critic remarked), "make a good bagman." It is inept to despair of free education because free education has produced no very satisfactory results while conceived of as a process of shoving undesired knowledge into the children of the poor. Looking, as everyone not hidebound by pessimism must look, for a great enlightenment of the law-giving class when the system of party politics, already beginning to show signs of decay, has ceased to hold all legislation in its blighting hand, we have every reason to expect that the true uses of education will be perceived and attained long before the end of the period contemplated when we speak of the new age. And then, one very great factor in the servant question will have been satisfactorily solved, even if other conditions have not conducted us nearly all the way to the solution beforehand.

For, while making every allowance for the evil effects of education, wrongly conceived and improperly administered, on the character of women destined to become servants, it must be allowed that much of what we call the servant difficulty could be cured now, and will unquestionably be cured before long, by inventions capable of abolishing the grievances which lead to it. These grievances are real and remediable. I do not refer to the confinement, restraint and gross lack of consideration on the part of employers which lead young women of the class from which servants are drawn to prefer labour in factories and elsewhere, in conditions far less comfortable, before domestic service; but to our utter lack of ingenuity in removing the irksomeness and degradation of much domestic labour. Some coming inventions calculated to improve the lot of Mary Jane will now be described.

In the first place (as Mr H. G. Wells has pointed out, without apparently being aware that buildings already exist in which some of his ideas have been anticipated), modern rooms, equally with those of all time, seem to have been constructed so as to make it as difficult as possible to keep them clean. Square corners and rectangular junctions of wall and floor, wall and ceiling, will certainly before long be replaced everywhere by curves. But the work of house cleaning will be rendered easy and unlaborious by another invention, already indeed in existence on a large scale, but eventually capable of being rendered portable. I mean a contrivance for applying a vacuum to any desired spot. There is a very ingenious but rather noisy engine already in use for pumping the dust out of carpets, curtains and furniture. In the houses of the future handy contrivances of various shapes, all independent of any engine, will be found, furnished with elastic nozzles on the outside and with some sort of appliance capable of instantly exhausting the air within. Such a utensil wheeled over the floor will remove instantly every particle of dust from the surface and below the surface of the carpet, at the same time picking up any such débris as scraps of paper, pins, and other decidua of the previous day. A similar instrument, differently shaped, will clean the curtains, supposing curtains to be still in use at the time, and will dust the chairs and tables--though there will not be anything like so much dust as there is now, nearly all kinds of combustion being abolished. The kitchen fire will of course be an electric furnace: "o' my word we'll not carry coals." Lighting will all be electric, and no doubt wireless. The abolition of horse traffic in cities, and the use of the vacuum apparatus which will be continuously at work in all streets, keeping them dry and free from mud, will practically remove the necessity for boot brushing, even supposing that we shall still wear boots: every man and woman in dressing will pass a vacuum instrument over his and her clothes and get rid of even the little dust existing--for we shall be more and more intolerant of dirt in any form, having by that time fully realised how dangerous dirt is. The new age will be a clean age. A lady of the year 2000 who could be miraculously transported back to London at the present moment would probably faint (they will not have ceased fainting) at the intolerable disgustingness of what is, I suppose, now one of the cleanest cities in the world, even if the cruelty of employing horses for traction, and the frightful recklessness of allowing them to soil the streets in which people walk, did not overpower her susceptibilities in another way.

Cooking will perhaps not be done at all on any large scale at home, in flat-homes at all events; and in any case, for reasons which will hereafter become apparent, cooking will be a much less disgusting process than it is to-day. In no case will the domestic servant of a hundred years hence be called upon to stand over a roaring fire, laid by herself, and to be cleaned up by herself when done with, in order to cook the family dinner. Every measure of heat--controllable in gradations of ten degrees or so--will be furnished in electrically-fitted receptacles, with or without water jackets or steam jackets: and unquestionably all cooking will be done in hermetically-closed vessels. We shall not much longer do most of our cooking by such a wasteful and unwholesome method as boiling, whereby the important soluble salts of nearly all food are callously thrown away. As, for reasons to be developed hereafter, it is quite certain that animal food will have been wholly abandoned before the end of this century, the débris of the kitchen will be much more manageable than at present, and the kitchen sink will cease to be, during a great part of the day, a place of unapproachable loathsomeness. On the other hand, its conveniences will have been greatly increased. It is difficult to understand how the old-world fashion of (for instance) "washing up" plates and dishes can have endured so long. Of course, in the new age, these utensils will be simply dropped one by one into an automatic receptacle; swilled clean by water delivered with force and charged with nascent oxygen; dried by electric heat; and polished by electric force; being finally oxygen-bathed as a superfluous act of sanitary cleanliness before being sent to table again. And all that has come off the plates will drop through the scullery floor into the destructor beneath to be oxygenated and made away with.

Here we have most of the distasteful elements of domestic service got rid of. Naturally lifts of various kinds, driven by the same force (whatever it is) which lights and warms the house, will be everywhere in evidence. The plan of attaining the upper part of a small house by climbing, on every occasion, a sort of wooden hill, covered with carpet of questionable cleanliness, will of course have been abandoned: it is doubtful whether staircases will be built at all after the next two or three decades. And it is likely that the more refined sentiment of the new age will recoil before the spectacle of menial service at the table. Not because they will despise, but because they will respect, their domestic assistants, hostesses will dislike to have their guests waited upon in a servile manner during meals by plush-breeched flunkeys of the male, or neat-handed Phyllises of the female, sex. Well-arranged houses will have the kitchen on a level with the dining-room, and the dividing wall will be so contrived that a table, ready laid at each course, can be made to slide through it into the presence of the seated guests. An immense amount of running to and fro between kitchen and dining-room, and of lifting food and table-ware into and out of elevators, will thus be obviated, to the vast gastronomic improvement of the meal and the salvation of servants' time.

Naturally the bedrooms of the new age will have many amenities lacking to our own. It is not too much to anticipate that we shall have learned enough of plumbing to be able to connect baths, wash-basins and other necessary fittings with the drains without poisoning ourselves, and the inconvenient modern "wash-stand" with its unreticent adjuncts will decently disappear. It cannot be very long--probably it will only be a few years--before some kind of reasonable control is exercised over the technical education of plumbers. [1]

Thus the bedroom of the new age will be a much more convenient and satisfactory apartment than the one we slept in last night, and another irksome and unelevating part of the domestic work of our servants will be eliminated. But the sleeping-apartments, and indeed all apartments in city homes, will contain yet another very valuable and necessary article of furniture--the oxygenator. Nearly all the unhealthiness and the pinched, weary greyness of town-dwellers to-day could be cured by fresh air. Everyone is familiar with the improvement which can be effected in the health and appearance of a city family by even a short visit to the seaside or the country--an improvement which it happens to be fashionable just now to attribute, in the former case, to the presence of ozone in the sea air. The fact that holiday-makers are able to endure the smell of slowly-decaying seaweed with a dash of putrescent fish about it, which is called "sea-air," without injury, and even to pick up health in the presence of it, is more due to the absence of carbon dioxide and other deleterious gases of the towns than to anything else. The beneficent effects of country air are practically all due to the power possessed by green vegetation of superoxygenating the surrounding air. The atmosphere of cities, or at all events of city homes, will presently be freed from the products of combustion and respiration, and endowed with a slightly-increased proportion of oxygen, by artificial means. And especially in bedrooms, rendered to-day stuffy and unhealthy by the idiotic fear of night air which an effete tradition has handed down to us, will this reform be in evidence. Prudent people to-day insist on large bedroom windows--preferably of the French-door pattern--and keep them wide open all night. But this is attended by inconveniences in cold and wet weather; and while our grandchildren will still keep their windows open all night in all weathers, they will not be content with this alone. There will be a chemical apparatus hidden away in some corner, or built into the wall, which will absorb carbon dioxide and at the same time slowly give off a certain amount of oxygen--just enough to raise the oxygenation of the air to the standard of the best country places. And similar appliances will be at work in the streets of our cities, so that town air will be just as wholesome, just as tonic and invigorating, as country air. If the theory that the presence of ozone (that is, allotropic oxygen) in the sea air is beneficent stand the test of time, no doubt ozonators will form part of these appliances: but in any case, as the high buildings of the new age will keep out the sunlight, electric light, carrying all the ray-activity of sunlight, and just as capable of fostering life and vegetation, will serve the streets. Thus, so far as hygiene goes, town life will be on a par with country life: but many people will prefer the country, and means will have to be provided to render homes in the country compatible with work in the cities. This brings us to the question of transport.

I do not think that people will, within the next hundred years at all events, travel to and from work in flying-machines. But no doubt the system of railway transport will be revolutionised. What makes suburban travel so slow is, not so much lack of speed on the part of the trains, as the necessity for frequent stoppage. You cannot satisfactorily run a train at sixty miles an hour and stop it every minute or so: otherwise sixty miles an hour would be quite fast enough, for some decades at least, to satisfy all requirements of suburban traffic, though it would be, and indeed is, ridiculously inadequate for long-distance travelling. The expense of increased permanent-way hampers railway management, and as there is no possibility of getting more land to increase the number of available tracks, some method will have to be devised for running one train over the top of another--perhaps to the height of several storeys, not necessarily provided with supporting rails: for we may very conceivably have discovered means by which vehicles can be propelled above the ground in some kind of guide-ways, doing away with the great loss of power caused by wheel friction; that is to say, the guides will direct, but not support, the carriages. The clumsy device of locomotive engines will have been dispensed with. Whatever power is employed to drive the trains of the next century will certainly be conveyed to them from central power-houses.

But, as the reader has been already reminded, it is the stoppages which are so wasteful of time on a suburban railway: and they are also wasteful of force. Now in all respects the new age will be economical. One thing that will have to be perfected is the art of getting up speed. Look, as you go home to-night, at the way your train gathers speed on leaving a station. Observe what a long time it is before it can attain its full velocity. A large part of the total time you require in order to reach the suburbs is consumed in this manner. A hundred years hence trains will almost jump to full speed, somewhat as a motor-car jumps to-day. In collecting passengers at suburban stations, the train, a hundred years hence, will perhaps not stop at all. It will only slacken speed a little; but the platform will begin to move as the train approaches, and will run along beside it, at the same speed as the train itself, so that passengers can get in and out as if the train were standing still. When all are aboard, the doors will be closed all together by the guard, and the platform will reverse its motion, and return to its original position ready for the next train.

With trains travelling at quite 200 miles an hour--and certainly nothing less will satisfy the remoter suburbanites of next century--frightful accidents would occur if precautions were not taken. The moment two trains are in the same section of line they will be automatically cut off from the source of power, and their brakes will at the same time bring them to a standstill. A passenger who put his head out of the window of a train travelling at this speed would be blinded and suffocated; so the windows will be glazed, the oxygenators and carbon-dioxide absorbers in each carriage keeping the air sweet, and other suitable appliances adjusting its temperature. There will be no such thing as level crossings; wherever the road crosses the line there will be bridges, provided with an endless moving track (like the automatic staircase at the Crystal Palace), to carry passengers and vehicles across. Of course horses will long since have vanished from the land, except as instruments of the pleasure of a few cranks who affect the manners of that effete period, the year 1900.

And the omnipresence of high-speed vehicles will in itself have eliminated much danger of accident. It is not to be supposed that the unresting march of mechanical improvement will have failed to have its effect on the people. Man himself will have progressed. He will be cleverer in avoiding accidents. Cities will be provided with moving street-ways, always in action at two or more speeds; and we shall have learned to hop on and off the lowest speed from the stationary pavement, and from the lower speeds to the higher, without danger. When streets cross, one rolling roadway will rise in a curve over the other. There will be no vehicular traffic at all in cities of any size; all the transportation will be done by the roads' own motion. In smaller towns, and for getting from one town to another, automatic motor-cars will exist, coin-worked. A man who wishes to travel will step into a motor-car, drop into a slot-machine the coin which represents the hire of the car for the distance he wants to travel, and assume control. Here again the progress of man will come into play. Everyone will know how to drive a motor-car safely. If you doubt it, consider for a moment the position of a man of 1800 suddenly transported into a street of modern London. He would never be able to cross it; the rush of omnibuses, motors and bicycles would confuse and frighten him. Imagine the same man trying to use the underground railways of to-day, or to get up to town from a busy suburb in the morning. He would either be killed out of hand or left behind altogether from sheer inability to enter the train.

We may safely suppose that the ocean ships of a hundred years hence will be driven by energy of some kind transmitted from the shores on either side. It is absolutely unquestionable that no marine engine in the least resembling what we know to-day can meet the requirements of the new age. The expense of driving a steamship increases in such a ratio to its size and speed that the economic limits of steam propulsion are foreseen. Probably the ships of A.D. 2000 will differ entirely in appearance from those we know. Just as road friction is the bugbear of the railway engineer, so water-resistance is the bugbear of the marine engineer. The ships of a hundred years hence will not lie in the water. They will tower above the surface, merely skimming it with their keels, and the only engines they will carry will be those which receive and utilise the energy transmitted to them from the power-houses ashore--perhaps worked by the force of the very tides of the conquered ocean itself.

The housing problem is so intimately and visibly connected in our minds with the growth of population that the more vital entanglement of the latter with the food question is hardly perceptible except to economic experts. The ordinary newspaper reader is not in a position to trace the intimate significance of prices; indeed, he often regards it as rather a good thing that wheat should fetch a good price per quarter, forgetting that low prices for commodities mean increased purchasing power for money, and a better standard of life for the people. When such elementary implications as this are overlooked, it is hardly remarkable that the more obscure connection of population with prices is never thought of. Yet it is obvious that unless the sources of supply increase more rapidly than the consuming population, prices must rise--in other words, the purchasing power of money must diminish. Wages, to some extent, will no doubt rise also, but as competition seriously affects the markets for manufactured goods and machinery, and the increase of population not only tends to raise prices of commodities, but also restricts the rise of wages, relief will have to be found in economies of various sorts. The standard of comfort in working families must improve considerably; partly because the demand for improvement, taking the shape of industrial combination and trade-unionism developed to a high degree, will be more and more clamorous; partly because of public feeling. What is currently called the growth of sentimentalism in modern life is really the development of modern conscience. No doubt the abolition of judicial torture was at one time regarded as a mark of absurd sentimentality; and the opinion has already been expressed that a vast amelioration of public morality is in store for the new age. A great element in the conflict between comfort on the one hand and competition on the other will be economy of means. That is why the new age will, among other things, be an age of economy.

In the matter of food, chiefly, a great saving can be effected. Nothing is more painfully ludicrous--I use the incongruous collocution advisedly--than the spectacle every winter of money being laboriously accumulated for the provision of free meals for the poor, and spent, to a great extent, so wastefully as on meat soups and white bread. The crass ignorance of the poor, who will not touch wholemeal bread, and indeed regard the offer of it as something in the nature of an insult; and who cannot be induced to believe that meat is one of the least satisfactory and most expensive forms of nourishment, is of course responsible in great part for this error. If we would get our nitrogen from pulses, nuts, and use vegetable fats derived from nuts, and bread made from entire wheat-kernels finely ground (instead of being only half ground as in most "brown breads") [2] our "free dinner" charities would be able to feed at least twice or three times as many people for every pound collected as they do at present. But the proposal would probably excite an outcry and we should hear that the poor were being treated as animals and that we fain would fill their bellies with the husks that the swine do eat. But all kinds of influences will tend to eliminate flesh from the dietary of the new age. "Growing sentimentalism," already in arms against the use of animals for highly necessary scientific investigations, will, as it develops, be revolted by the idea of killing for food; and the refinement of the future will come to regard the eating of dead bodies as very little better than cannibalism. Moreover, the constantly increasing demand of the new age upon bodily and nervous energies will call for nourishment suited to their supply. This, and the wastefulness of second-hand food, will banish all flesh from the bill of fare. Fish will be eaten longer than meat. But more than anything else, the need for economy will reform our dinner-tables, and eventually all food will have to be obtained directly from the soil, if we are to have food enough to nourish our overgrown population at all. We shall not be able to afford to waste the ground on pasturage. We must use it to produce cereals, nuts and fruits, which are not only a much more remunerative crop, but will also use up in their assimilation far less nervous and peptic energy--energy which we shall need to make the most of. The cereal foods--products of wheat, barley, maize, and perhaps still (to a certain extent) oats--which will form the staple of our diet, will be partially cooked at the granaries by dry heat; they will need very little treatment at home. Vegetables, cooked, not in the wasteful manner now in vogue, but by conservative methods which will preserve their valuable saline constituents, will have to be prepared in our own kitchens; but pulse in various forms (as pease, lentil flour, etc.) will be supplied to us almost wholly cooked. A cheap, nourishing and delicious dietary will thus be made available.

Finally, the reader will not be unprepared for the opinion that alcohol, as a beverage, must inevitably disappear. Not only because the price of intoxicants is an unproductive expenditure (and we shall have to be more and more thrifty as time goes on) but because the nerves of the new age would never stand them, must all alcoholic beverages be regarded as destined to obsolescence: and the legislative aspect of this question must presently be touched upon. Already a considerable part of the people, in no way influenced by the illogical idea that the abuse of a commodity by one class calls for the abstention from it of another, refrains from alcohol simply because its use inflicts too great a strain on the system. A good many people even now find it necessary to abstain from tea or from coffee for precisely similar reasons; while the highly-organised nervous systems of others find in the latter a stimulant capable of all the advantages of alcohol (and they are many) and not without some of its penalties. I think it quite likely that when alcohol is gone, the nerves of the future may find it necessary to place the sale of tea and of coffee under restrictions similar to those at present inflicted upon the trade in alcohol: and it is quite certain that morphia, cocaine, chloral, perhaps ether, and similar products, will have to be very jealously safeguarded within the next few years.

Differing from many writers, I do not regard this development of the nervous system as a mark of degeneration. On the contrary, it is a part of the great and rapid adaptation which is bound to take place in the constitution of man himself [3] to the rapidly-changing conditions of his environment, his life, and the duties he will have to fulfil. To overlook the certainty of such adaptations is to be blind to all history, and especially to all recent history. The men and women of the new age will differ from ourselves in much the same sort of way as we differ from our great-grandfathers. They will differ more only because the progress of the century which we have lately begun will be so much more rapid and various than those of the century before--itself the period of enormously the greatest changes since the world began to be civilised.