This externalism, this impersonality, seems to characterize the whole scene. We follow Julius West and his new love, Edith, into a modern shop, where everything is displayed by sample, and an order for goods is sent to a central warehouse, and along with undoubted economies of space and time, we note that there is an almost complete absence of personal contacts or relationships: more than ever the worker has become a cog in the machine, more than ever he deals with a thin, barren, abstract world of paper notations, more than ever his desire for social contacts is dammed up; and so, more than ever, there must be occasion in this new age for stimulants and socialities beside which the roller coasters of Coney Island and the promiscuities of a modern dance hall would be insipid things. Bellamy does not show us what these compensatory institutions would be: but he has invented a high-powered engine of repression, and he does not fool us when he conceals the safety-valve. Unless there is a safety-valve his universal army, under a rigorous discipline for twenty-four years, is bound to blow up the works. We can guess when we read the cheap illustrated papers, when we go to the movies, when we watch the behavior of the crowds on Broadway, what this twenty-first century Utopia would be like--it would be all that a modern city is, exaggerated. In The New Society, Dr. Walter Rathenau drew a picture of a socialized modern society, moving along its present path without any change in its aims and ideals; and that nightmare of his must be added to Bellamy’s dream in order to define it.