By its traffic in Coketown’s multifarious goods and by its command over certain kinds of paper known as mortgages or securities, Megalopolis ensures a supply of real foods and real staples from the countryside. Through incessant production of books, magazines, newspapers, boilerplate features, and syndicated matter, Megalopolis ensures that the idolum of the National Utopia shall be kept alive in the minds of the underlying inhabitants of the country. Finally, by the devices of “national education” and “national advertising” all the inhabitants of the National Utopia are persuaded that the good life is that which is lived, on paper, in the capital city; and that an approximation to this life can be achieved only by eating the food, dressing in the clothes, holding the opinions, and purchasing the goods which are offered for sale by Megalopolis. So the chief aim of every other city in the National Utopia is to become like Megalopolis; its chief hope is to grow as big as Megalopolis; its boast is that it is another Megalopolis. When the denizens of Megalopolis dream of a better world, it is only a paper perfection of that National Utopia which Edward Bellamy looked forward to in Looking Backward. Working in connection with the Machine Process of Coketown, the Megalopolis erects a standard of life which can be expressed in commercial terms, on paper, even if it does not offer any tangible satisfaction in goods and services and perfections. The chief boast of this standard is its uniformity; that is, its equal applicability to every person in the community without respect to his history, his circumstances, his needs, his actual rewards. Hence such goods as Megalopolis creates in profusion are for the most part in the line of plumbing and sanitary devices which, if they do not exactly heighten the joy of living, at any rate make the routine of Megalopolitan life a little less formidable. The total result of these standards and uniformities is that what was originally a fiction in time becomes a fact. Whereas the inhabitants of the national utopia may originally have been as diverse as the trees in a forest, they tend to become, under the influence of education and propaganda, as similar as telegraph poles along a road. It is not a little to the credit of Megalopolis that the National Utopia has pragmatically justified itself. It has created the sort of mental environment on paper which is necessary to a smooth adjustment of Coketown and the Country House. What is Megalopolis, in fact, but a paper purgatory which serves as a medium through which the fallen sons of Coketown, the producer’s hell, may finally attain the high bliss of the Country House, the consumer’s Heaven? 13