The Time Machine — EN

VI
The Sunset of Mankind

“A queer thing I soon dis­cov­ered about my lit­tle hosts, and that was their lack of inter­est. They would come to me with eager cries of aston­ish­ment, like chil­dren, but like chil­dren they would soon stop exam­in­ing me and wan­der away after some oth­er toy. The din­ner and my con­ver­sa­tion­al begin­nings end­ed, I not­ed for the first time that almost all those who had sur­round­ed me at first were gone. It is odd, too, how speed­i­ly I came to dis­re­gard these lit­tle peo­ple. I went out through the por­tal into the sun­lit world again as soon as my hunger was sat­is­fied. I was con­tin­u­al­ly meet­ing more of these men of the future, who would fol­low me a lit­tle dis­tance, chat­ter and laugh about me, and, hav­ing smiled and ges­tic­u­lat­ed in a friend­ly way, leave me again to my own devices.

“The calm of evening was upon the world as I emerged from the great hall, and the scene was lit by the warm glow of the set­ting sun. At first things were very con­fus­ing. Every­thing was so entire­ly dif­fer­ent from the world I had known – even the flow­ers. The big build­ing I had left was sit­u­at­ed on the slope of a broad riv­er val­ley, but the Thames had shift­ed per­haps a mile from its present posi­tion. I resolved to mount to the sum­mit of a crest per­haps a mile and a half away, from which I could get a wider view of this our plan­et in the year Eight Hun­dred and Two Thou­sand Sev­en Hun­dred and One A.D. For that, I should explain, was the date the lit­tle dials of my machine recorded.

“As I walked I was watch­ing for every impres­sion that could pos­si­bly help to explain the con­di­tion of ruinous splen­dour in which I found the world – for ruinous it was. A lit­tle way up the hill, for instance, was a great heap of gran­ite, bound togeth­er by mass­es of alu­mini­um, a vast labyrinth of pre­cip­i­tous walls and crum­pled heaps, amidst which were thick heaps of very beau­ti­ful pago­da-like plants – net­tles pos­si­bly – but won­der­ful­ly tint­ed with brown about the leaves, and inca­pable of sting­ing. It was evi­dent­ly the derelict remains of some vast struc­ture, to what end built I could not deter­mine. It was here that I was des­tined, at a lat­er date, to have a very strange expe­ri­ence – the first inti­ma­tion of a still stranger dis­cov­ery – but of that I will speak in its prop­er place.

“Look­ing round with a sud­den thought, from a ter­race on which I rest­ed for a while, I real­ized that there were no small hous­es to be seen. Appar­ent­ly the sin­gle house, and pos­si­bly even the house­hold, had van­ished. Here and there among the green­ery were palace-like build­ings, but the house and the cot­tage, which form such char­ac­ter­is­tic fea­tures of our own Eng­lish land­scape, had disappeared.

“”Com­mu­nism,” said I to myself.

“And on the heels of that came anoth­er thought. I looked at the half-dozen lit­tle fig­ures that were fol­low­ing me. Then, in a flash, I per­ceived that all had the same form of cos­tume, the same soft hair­less vis­age, and the same girl­ish rotun­di­ty of limb. It may seem strange, per­haps, that I had not noticed this before. But every­thing was so strange. Now, I saw the fact plain­ly enough. In cos­tume, and in all the dif­fer­ences of tex­ture and bear­ing that now mark off the sex­es from each oth­er, these peo­ple of the future were alike. And the chil­dren seemed to my eyes to be but the minia­tures of their par­ents. I judged, then, that the chil­dren of that time were extreme­ly pre­co­cious, phys­i­cal­ly at least, and I found after­wards abun­dant ver­i­fi­ca­tion of my opinion.

“See­ing the ease and secu­ri­ty in which these peo­ple were liv­ing, I felt that this close resem­blance of the sex­es was after all what one would expect; for the strength of a man and the soft­ness of a woman, the insti­tu­tion of the fam­i­ly, and the dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion of occu­pa­tions are mere mil­i­tant neces­si­ties of an age of phys­i­cal force; where pop­u­la­tion is bal­anced and abun­dant, much child­bear­ing becomes an evil rather than a bless­ing to the State; where vio­lence comes but rarely and off-spring are secure, there is less neces­si­ty – indeed there is no neces­si­ty – for an effi­cient fam­i­ly, and the spe­cial­iza­tion of the sex­es with ref­er­ence to their children’s needs dis­ap­pears. We see some begin­nings of this even in our own time, and in this future age it was com­plete. This, I must remind you, was my spec­u­la­tion at the time. Lat­er, I was to appre­ci­ate how far it fell short of the reality.

“While I was mus­ing upon these things, my atten­tion was attract­ed by a pret­ty lit­tle struc­ture, like a well under a cupo­la. I thought in a tran­si­to­ry way of the odd­ness of wells still exist­ing, and then resumed the thread of my spec­u­la­tions. There were no large build­ings towards the top of the hill, and as my walk­ing pow­ers were evi­dent­ly mirac­u­lous, I was present­ly left alone for the first time. With a strange sense of free­dom and adven­ture I pushed on up to the crest.

“There I found a seat of some yel­low met­al that I did not rec­og­nize, cor­rod­ed in places with a kind of pink­ish rust and half smoth­ered in soft moss, the arm-rests cast and filed into the resem­blance of griffins’ heads. I sat down on it, and I sur­veyed the broad view of our old world under the sun­set of that long day. It was as sweet and fair a view as I have ever seen. The sun had already gone below the hori­zon and the west was flam­ing gold, touched with some hor­i­zon­tal bars of pur­ple and crim­son. Below was the val­ley of the Thames, in which the riv­er lay like a band of bur­nished steel. I have already spo­ken of the great palaces dot­ted about among the var­ie­gat­ed green­ery, some in ruins and some still occu­pied. Here and there rose a white or sil­very fig­ure in the waste gar­den of the earth, here and there came the sharp ver­ti­cal line of some cupo­la or obelisk. There were no hedges, no signs of pro­pri­etary rights, no evi­dences of agri­cul­ture; the whole earth had become a garden.

“So watch­ing, I began to put my inter­pre­ta­tion upon the things I had seen, and as it shaped itself to me that evening, my inter­pre­ta­tion was some­thing in this way. (After­wards I found I had got only a half-truth – or only a glimpse of one facet of the truth.)

“It seemed to me that I had hap­pened upon human­i­ty upon the wane. The rud­dy sun­set set me think­ing of the sun­set of mankind. For the first time I began to real­ize an odd con­se­quence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a log­i­cal con­se­quence enough. Strength is the out­come of need; secu­ri­ty sets a pre­mi­um on fee­ble­ness. The work of ame­lio­rat­ing the con­di­tions of life – the true civ­i­liz­ing process that makes life more and more secure – had gone steadi­ly on to a cli­max. One tri­umph of a unit­ed human­i­ty over Nature had fol­lowed anoth­er. Things that are now mere dreams had become projects delib­er­ate­ly put in hand and car­ried for­ward. And the har­vest was what I saw!

“After all, the san­i­ta­tion and the agri­cul­ture of today are still in the rudi­men­ta­ry stage. The sci­ence of our time has attacked but a lit­tle depart­ment of the field of human dis­ease, but even so, it spreads its oper­a­tions very steadi­ly and per­sis­tent­ly. Our agri­cul­ture and hor­ti­cul­ture destroy a weed just here and there and cul­ti­vate per­haps a score or so of whole­some plants, leav­ing the greater num­ber to fight out a bal­ance as they can. We improve our favourite plants and ani­mals – and how few they are – grad­u­al­ly by selec­tive breed­ing; now a new and bet­ter peach, now a seed­less grape, now a sweet­er and larg­er flower, now a more con­ve­nient breed of cat­tle. We improve them grad­u­al­ly, because our ideals are vague and ten­ta­tive, and our knowl­edge is very lim­it­ed; because Nature, too, is shy and slow in our clum­sy hands. Some day all this will be bet­ter orga­nized, and still bet­ter. That is the drift of the cur­rent in spite of the eddies. The whole world will be intel­li­gent, edu­cat­ed, and co-oper­at­ing; things will move faster and faster towards the sub­ju­ga­tion of Nature. In the end, wise­ly and care­ful­ly we shall read­just the bal­ance of ani­mal and veg­etable to suit our human needs.

“This adjust­ment, I say, must have been done, and done well; done indeed for all Time, in the space of Time across which my machine had leaped. The air was free from gnats, the earth from weeds or fun­gi; every­where were fruits and sweet and delight­ful flow­ers; bril­liant but­ter­flies flew hith­er and thith­er. The ide­al of pre­ven­tive med­i­cine was attained. Dis­eases had been stamped out. I saw no evi­dence of any con­ta­gious dis­eases dur­ing all my stay. And I shall have to tell you lat­er that even the process­es of putre­fac­tion and decay had been pro­found­ly affect­ed by these changes.

“Social tri­umphs, too, had been effect­ed. I saw mankind housed in splen­did shel­ters, glo­ri­ous­ly clothed, and as yet I had found them engaged in no toil. There were no signs of strug­gle, nei­ther social nor eco­nom­i­cal strug­gle. The shop, the adver­tise­ment, traf­fic, all that com­merce which con­sti­tutes the body of our world, was gone. It was nat­ur­al on that gold­en evening that I should jump at the idea of a social par­adise. The dif­fi­cul­ty of increas­ing pop­u­la­tion had been met, I guessed, and pop­u­la­tion had ceased to increase.

“But with this change in con­di­tion comes inevitably adap­ta­tions to the change. What, unless bio­log­i­cal sci­ence is a mass of errors, is the cause of human intel­li­gence and vigour? Hard­ship and free­dom: con­di­tions under which the active, strong, and sub­tle sur­vive and the weak­er go to the wall; con­di­tions that put a pre­mi­um upon the loy­al alliance of capa­ble men, upon self-restraint, patience, and deci­sion. And the insti­tu­tion of the fam­i­ly, and the emo­tions that arise there­in, the fierce jeal­ousy, the ten­der­ness for off­spring, parental self-devo­tion, all found their jus­ti­fi­ca­tion and sup­port in the immi­nent dan­gers of the young. Now, where are these immi­nent dan­gers? There is a sen­ti­ment aris­ing, and it will grow, against con­nu­bial jeal­ousy, against fierce mater­ni­ty, against pas­sion of all sorts; unnec­es­sary things now, and things that make us uncom­fort­able, sav­age sur­vivals, dis­cords in a refined and pleas­ant life.

“I thought of the phys­i­cal slight­ness of the peo­ple, their lack of intel­li­gence, and those big abun­dant ruins, and it strength­ened my belief in a per­fect con­quest of Nature. For after the bat­tle comes Qui­et. Human­i­ty had been strong, ener­getic, and intel­li­gent, and had used all its abun­dant vital­i­ty to alter the con­di­tions under which it lived. And now came the reac­tion of the altered conditions.

“Under the new con­di­tions of per­fect com­fort and secu­ri­ty, that rest­less ener­gy, that with us is strength, would become weak­ness. Even in our own time cer­tain ten­den­cies and desires, once nec­es­sary to sur­vival, are a con­stant source of fail­ure. Phys­i­cal courage and the love of bat­tle, for instance, are no great help – may even be hin­drances – to a civ­i­lized man. And in a state of phys­i­cal bal­ance and secu­ri­ty, pow­er, intel­lec­tu­al as well as phys­i­cal, would be out of place. For count­less years I judged there had been no dan­ger of war or soli­tary vio­lence, no dan­ger from wild beasts, no wast­ing dis­ease to require strength of con­sti­tu­tion, no need of toil. For such a life, what we should call the weak are as well equipped as the strong, are indeed no longer weak. Bet­ter equipped indeed they are, for the strong would be fret­ted by an ener­gy for which there was no out­let. No doubt the exquis­ite beau­ty of the build­ings I saw was the out­come of the last surg­ings of the now pur­pose­less ener­gy of mankind before it set­tled down into per­fect har­mo­ny with the con­di­tions under which it lived – the flour­ish of that tri­umph which began the last great peace. This has ever been the fate of ener­gy in secu­ri­ty; it takes to art and to eroti­cism, and then come lan­guor and decay.

“Even this artis­tic impe­tus would at last die away – had almost died in the Time I saw. To adorn them­selves with flow­ers, to dance, to sing in the sun­light: so much was left of the artis­tic spir­it, and no more. Even that would fade in the end into a con­tent­ed inac­tiv­i­ty. We are kept keen on the grind­stone of pain and neces­si­ty, and, it seemed to me, that here was that hate­ful grind­stone bro­ken at last!

“As I stood there in the gath­er­ing dark I thought that in this sim­ple expla­na­tion I had mas­tered the prob­lem of the world – mas­tered the whole secret of these deli­cious peo­ple. Pos­si­bly the checks they had devised for the increase of pop­u­la­tion had suc­ceed­ed too well, and their num­bers had rather dimin­ished than kept sta­tion­ary. That would account for the aban­doned ruins. Very sim­ple was my expla­na­tion, and plau­si­ble enough – as most wrong the­o­ries are!