Coketown is devoted to the production of material goods; and there is no good in Coketown that does not derive from this aim. The only enjoyment which those who are inured to the Coketown routine can participate in is mechanical achievement; that is to say, activity along industrial and commercial lines; and the only result of this achievement is--more achievement. It follows that all the standards of Coketown are of a quantitative kind; so many score of machines, so many tons of gew-gaws, so many miles of piping, so many dollars of profit. The opportunities for self-assertion and constructiveness in such a community are practically boundless; and I can never confront the mechanical felicities of a printing plant without realizing how fascinating these opportunities are, and how deeply they satisfy certain elements in our nature. The unfortunate thing about Coketown, however, is that these are the only sort of opportunities that are available; and work whose standards are of a qualitative sort, the work of scholars and artists and scientists, is either frozen out of the community by deliberate ostracism, or is hitched to the machine; the artist, for example, being compelled to sing the praises of Coketown’s goods or to paint the portrait of Coketown’s supreme esthetic achievement--the Self-Made Man. In its pristine state, Coketown is not a complete community. So it is natural that the idolum should have provided certain additions. In the first place, the activities of Coketown, whether they are beneficial or wasteful, satisfy only certain elements in the human makeup; and although much may be done by compulsory education to discipline the younger generation to the machine, and to show them the necessity of doing nothing which would interfere with the continued activity of the machine--for work in Coketown, as Samuel Butler fearfully predicted in Erewhon, is in the main simply attendance upon machinery--here and there the igneous instincts of the workers will break through the solidified layer of habit which the school and the factory have produced, and the arcane energies of the population will flow either into the Country House or into that other simulacrum of the civic life, Broadway.