white fish of the Kentucky caves, for instance. Then, those large eyes,
with that capacity for reflecting light, are common features of
nocturnal things witness the owl and the cat. And last of all, that
evident confusion in the sunshine, that hasty yet fumbling awkward
flight towards dark shadow, and that peculiar carriage of the head
while in the light all reinforced the theory of an extreme
sensitiveness of the retina.
Beneath my feet, then, the earth must be tunnelled enormously, and
these tunnellings were the habitat of the New Race. The presence of
ventilating shafts and wells along the hill slopes everywhere, in fact,
except along the river valley showed how universal were its
ramifications. What so natural, then, as to assume that it was in this
artificial Underworld that such work as was necessary to the comfort of
the daylight race was done? The notion was so plausible that I at once
accepted it, and went on to assume the _how_ of this splitting of the
human species. I dare say you will anticipate the shape of my theory;
though, for myself, I very soon felt that it fell far short of the
truth.
At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear
as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely
temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer
was the key to the whole position. No doubt it will seem grotesque
enough to you and wildly incredible! and yet even now there are
existing circumstances to point that way. There is a tendency to
utilise underground space for the less ornamental purposes of
civilisation; there is the Metropolitan Railway in London, for
instance, there are new electric railways, there are subways, there are
underground workrooms and restaurants, and they increase and multiply.
Evidently, I thought, this tendency had increased till Industry had
gradually lost its birthright in the sky. I mean that it had gone
deeper and deeper into larger and ever larger underground factories,
spending a still-increasing amount of its time therein, till, in the
end ! Even now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial
conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the
earth?
Again, the exclusive tendency of richer people due, no doubt, to the
increasing refinement of their education, and the widening gulf between
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