This, then, is the idolum of Coketown. There are certain features in it which need to be noticed. The first is that there is a certain solid reality in Coketown that remains when all its pretensions and idiocies have been incinerated. An environment that is devoted solely to the production of material goods is obviously no sort of environment for a good community, for life is more than a matter of finding what we shall eat and wherewithal we shall be clothed: it is an interaction with a whole world of landscapes, living creatures and ideas, in comparison with which Coketown is a mere blister on the earth’s surface. Nevertheless, with respect to the business of melting steel and building roads and performing certain essential industrial operations, the aims of Coketown are, up to a certain point, relevant: we have already encountered them in Andreæ’s Christianopolis. There is no need to dismiss the good that lies inside of industrialism because it does not embrace the good that lies beyond it. Up to a certain point, then, using mechanical power rather than human power is good; so is large-scale production, so is the division of labor and division of operation; so is rapid transportation; so is the accurate methodology of the engineer; and so are various other features in the modern industrial world. One might even say a word for efficiency, as against “doing things rather more or less.” Coketown made the horrid mistake of believing that all these things were good in themselves. New factories, for example, drew a bigger population into the city: Coketown did not perceive that, as Plato pointed out, beyond a certain point the city as a social unit would cease to exist. Bigger and better was Coketown’s motto; and it resolutely refused to see that there was no necessary connection between these adjectives. The whole case for and against Coketown rests upon our admission of the phrase “up to a certain point.” Up to a certain point, industrialism is good, especially in its modern, neotechnic, electrical phase: Coketown, on the other hand, believes that there is no limit to the usefulness of industrialism. Up to a certain point--but what point? The answer is, up to the point at which the cultivation of a humane life in a community of humane people becomes difficult or impossible.