In this new world of falling water, burning coal, and whirring machinery, utopia was born again. It is easy to see why this should have happened, and why about two-thirds of our utopias should have been written in the nineteenth century. The world was being visibly made over; and it was possible to conceive of a different order of things without escaping to the other side of the earth. There were political changes, and the monarchic state was tempered by republicanism; there were industrial changes, and two hungry mouths were born where one could feed before; and there were social changes--the strata of society shifted and “faulted,” and men who in an earlier period would have been doomed to a dull and ignominious round, perhaps, took a place alongside those whom inheritance had given all the privileges of riches and breeding. In contrast to all these fresh possibilities were the dismal realities which were easily enough perceived by people who stood outside this new order, or who by temperament revolted against the indignities and repressions and vilenesses that accompanied it. It is not my particular business here to deal with the facts of history; but unless one understands the facts of history, the utopias which I am about to present lose a good part of their meaning. Those machines whose output was so great that all men might be clothed; those new methods of agriculture and new agricultural implements, which promised crops so big that all men might be fed--the very instruments that were to give the whole community the physical basis of a good life turned out, for the vast majority of people who possessed neither capital nor land, to be nothing short of instruments of torture. I do not speak too harshly of the early industrial age; it is impossible to speak too harshly. Take the trouble to read Robert Owen’s “Essay on the Formation of Character” (Manchester: 1837) and learn what conditions were like in a model factory run by an enlightened employer: it is a picture of unmitigated brutality. One must go back to the blackest periods of ancient slavery for a parallel, if indeed one would find it, for the Pyramids that were built under the lash have a certain grandeur and permanence which justify their existence, whilst the goods which were produced in Yorkshire through the maimed bodies of pauper children proved to be as impermanent as the lives that were sacrificed in making them.