Comprehensive Study Notes on News from Nowhere (Chapters I–XV)

The League Debate and the Journey to Hammersmith

A brisk conversational discussion takes place one winter night at the League regarding the "Morrow of the Revolution" and the future structure of a fully developed socialist society.
Six individuals attend the meeting, representing six distinct sections of the party, four of which advocate strong but widely divergent Anarchist viewpoints.
One section—a member very well known to the narrator—remains largely silent at first, is eventually drawn into the argument, loses his temper, and ends by shouting loudly and condemning all the other participants as fools.
Following an outbreak of noise and a subsequent lull, this member departs amicably and travels home alone toward a western suburb using the underground railway, characterized as a "vapour-bath of hurried and discontented humanity."
During the transit, he stews in self-reproach for losing his temper and frets over the many conclusive arguments he had forgotten to deploy during the debate.
Filled with discontent, he mutters repeatedly to himself: "If I could but see a day of it… if I could but see it!"
He exits the station five minutes from his house, which is situated on the banks of the Thames slightly above an ugly suspension bridge.
The winter night is crisp and clear; the wind has shifted a point or two north of west, sweeping the clouds from the sky except for a few light flecks.
A young moon hangs halfway up the firmament, tangled in the branches of a tall old elm; the refreshing air dissipates his unhappiness, evoking the feel of a pleasant countryside.
Lingering at the riverside wall, he watches the moonlit water near high tide swirling up toward Chiswick Eyot, noting only that the customary downstream row of bridge lights seems absent.
Upon entering his house, all memory of the logical debate vanishes, replaced by a vague longing for an epoch of peace, rest, cleanliness, and smiling goodwill.
He falls asleep within two minutes, but awakens between one and three in the morning in a state of hyper-acute mental clarity, reviewing past mistakes and life entanglements until they begin to weave into an entertaining narrative, after which he sleeps again.

Awakening into an Transformed Thames Valley

The narrator awakens finding his bedclothes cast off, surrounded by bright sunlight and intense summer heat, despite having gone to bed in early winter.
Emerging from the house in a bewildered, drowsy state, he discovers that the riverside foliage and temperature indicate a bright morning in early June.
The familiar Thames remains, sparkling near high water, and the narrator resolves to take a morning swim in mid-stream, expecting to hire a boat at Biffin's.
Instead of walking to Biffin's, he notices a well-constructed landing-stage directly in front of his house, occupying the site where his next-door neighbor had once built a rough platform.
A boatman resting on his sculls in a sturdy boat designed for bathers greets him warmly as if expecting him.
Observing the unusual purity of the river, the narrator exclaims at its clarity; the boatman remarks that the flood tide always causes slight thickening, while the narrator recalls it being muddy even at half-ebb.
Diving into the water, the narrator turns toward the tide to view the bridge and is so startled by what he sees that he sinks spluttering beneath the surface before scrambling back to the boat.
The waterman notes that the time is barely $5:00\text{ AM}$ and that the river is as pleasant here as it is off Barn Elms.
The waterman is described as a handsome, berry-brown, dark-haired young man with clean-cut, muscular limbs and an exceptionally friendly, open countenance.
His attire resembles that of a fourteenth-century painting: a simple tunic of fine, unstained dark blue cloth, secured by a brown leather belt with a beautifully wrought clasp of damascened steel.
On the Surrey shore, light timber stages equipped with landward windlasses line the foreshore; when the narrator queries their purpose, the waterman explains they are used for drawing salmon nets, confirming that salmon have returned in abundance to the Thames.
Industrial manufacturing sites have vanished entirely: the soap-works with their smoke-belching chimneys, the lead-works, the engineer's works, and the clatter of riveting from Thorneycroft's are absent.
In place of the old suspension bridge stands an exquisite stone bridge of solid, graceful arches, built high enough to accommodate river traffic, adorned with quaint booths or shops topped with painted and gilded vanes and spirelets, totally devoid of urban grime.
The waterman states that the stone bridge was opened in the year $2003$ , having replaced an earlier, plain timber structure.
Both banks are lined with comfortable, low, red-brick, tile-roofed dwellings set back behind blooming continuous gardens that perfume the water; behind them rise massive plane trees, giving the reaches toward Putney the appearance of a lake surrounded by forest.

The Abolition of Money and the Culture of Gift

Upon returning to the landing-stage, the narrator reaches into his waistcoat pocket and asks the boatman, "How much?"
The boatman fails to comprehend the inquiry, initially mistaking the question for an inquiry about the tide, which is near the turn.
The narrator produces a handful of oxidized nineteenth-century silver coins (darkened like a blackleaded stove), asking what is owed for the ferrying service.
The waterman explains that providing casts and ferrying across the water is his regular business, which he performs gladly for anyone; receiving formal payment or special gifts for normal neighborly acts strikes him as a bizarre, roundabout nuisance.
He notes that if passengers gave him tokens or gifts, he would have no place to stow away so many useless mementos of friendship.
Examining the Victorian coins with detached curiosity, the waterman observes that while his local museum possesses ample nineteenth-century coins, they are aesthetically hideous compared to medieval coinage, such as an Edward III piece depicting the king in a ship with leopards and fleurs-de-lys along the gunwale.
The waterman reveals that he himself is a metal craftsman fond of working in gold and steel, having wrought his own damascened belt buckle.
Sensing the narrator's disorientation, the waterman offers to act as his guide through the countryside.
To free his time, he arranges for a friend—Robert, a Yorkshire weaver who has strained himself through excessive indoor mathematics and weaving—to take over his rowing duties.
The waterman blows a small silver bugle-horn at his belt, summoning Robert from the adjacent Guest House.
Robert arrives wearing a light-green surcoat embroidered on the breast with a golden spray and a filagree silver belt; he enthusiastically assumes the sculling duties.
The waterman is identified as Richard (Dick) Hammond, who is preparing to travel upstream to Oxfordshire within a week to assist friends with the hay-harvest.

The Hammersmith Guest House and Morning Meal

The Guest House occupies the exact site of the narrator's former private dwelling.
The exterior is a long, lead-roofed building of red brick, featuring low traceried windows and an external baked-clay frieze of exquisitely rendered figures representing historical and allegorical themes.
The interior hall features a marble mosaic floor, an open timber roof, and an arcade opening onto garden chambers, with upper walls decorated in vibrant narrative frescoes.
Three vigorous, comely women in elegant drapery—combining ancient classical elegance with fourteenth-century simplicity, free from modern millinery and tight lacing—welcome the company without affected shyness.
Breakfast consists of rustic, dark, sweet-tasting farmhouse loaves, delicate wheaten pipe-stems resembling the bread of Turin, fresh butter, newly harvested garden strawberries served on cabbage leaves, and fresh-cut roses in delicate glassware.
Inscribed in carved and gilded lettering on the wall paneling behind the High Table is the dedication: "Guests and neighbours, on the site of this Guest-hall once stood the lecture-room of the Hammersmith Socialists. Drink a glass to the memory! May 1962."
The narrator adopts the pseudonym "William Guest," claiming to have been raised on the fringes of Epping Forest at Walthamstow and Woodford.
Dick notes that Epping Forest expanded significantly following the "great clearing of houses in 1955."
William Guest recounts the nineteenth-century condition of Epping Forest: hornbeam pollards, holly thickets, and the cessation of traditional commoner "lopping and topping" when the Corporation of London acquired the land about $25$ years prior to his former era.
Robert asks the narrator's age; upon William's answer that he is hard on $56$ , the company is astonished at his worn and weathered appearance, noting that living among unhappy people in "unsocial countries" causes premature physical aging.
One of the hostesses, who appears to be roughly $20$ years old, reveals that she is actually $42$ , possessing unlined, ivory-smooth skin, round cheeks, red lips, and firm, muscular arms.
Robert describes his personal occupations: mechanical weaving, composing, machine printing (which is waning alongside the decline in the competitive overproduction of books), mathematics, and writing an antiquarian history of the late nineteenth century prior to the revolutionary civil wars.
A resplendent figure enters: Henry Johnson, nicknamed "Boffin" or the "Golden Dustman," an exceedingly handsome man clad in a surcoat heavily embroidered with gold thread.
Johnson is a municipal dustman who spends his leisure writing reactionary romantic novels and obsessing over historical local color.
Dick borrows an open carriage from James Allen (Jim), drawn by a sturdy grey horse named Greylocks, to drive William Guest to Bloomsbury to consult his antiquarian great-grandfather.

The Journey Through Hammersmith and Kensington

King Street has been replaced by wide, sunny meadows and garden-like tillage; the ancient culverted creek has been uncovered and crossed by a stone bridge, filled with pleasure boats.
Domestic buildings are yeoman-like structures of red brick or timber-and-plaster, reminiscent of fourteenth-century domestic design, each enveloped in productive gardens.
Passing Hammersmith Broadway, the travelers encounter an exuberant public architectural complex combining elements of Northern Gothic, Byzantine, and Saracenic traditions.
The northern structure is the Winter Mote-House, featuring large damascened bronze doors wrought by Dick himself; in summer, public motes meet outdoors in the meadows opposite Barn Elms.
Across the highway stands an octagonal, high-roofed communal theatre surrounded by an arcaded cloister, reminiscent of the Florence Baptistery.
The surrounding road is filled with decorated market carts loaded with country produce, managed by joyous, healthy people dressed in vibrant seasonal colors.
A beautiful dark-haired woman in a light-green gown passes with a basket of early peas; when Guest remarks that he has seen no "poor people," Dick confuses the term with "poorly" (ill) people, knowing nothing of economic destitution.
Continuing eastward past Kensington Market and an arcaded town-hall, the roadway enters a continuous tract of woodland known as Kensington Gardens.
Dick delineates the geographic extent of this urban forest: it stretches north and west over Paddington and Notting Hill, sweeps northeast to Primrose Hill, passes through Kingsland to Stoke-Newington and Clapton, borders the Lea marshes, and connects directly with Epping Forest.
The woods are populated by parties of children between ages $6$ or $8$ and $16$ or $17$ , camping out in tents for weeks during the summer, tending fires, cooking, managing forest ponies, and acquiring woodcraft.
Dick mentions that adults also spend summer periods in larger wilderness tracts such as Windsor Forest, the Forest of Dean, or the northern wastes to engage in rough physical forestry work.

Educational Principles and Public Monumental Architecture

Dick completely rejects nineteenth-century coercive institutional schooling, which he terms "boy-farms," finding the conventional concept of an educational system alien.
Children learn naturally through imitation, environmental engagement, and curiosity without artificial pressure.
Every child acquires physical competencies: swimming, managing horses, outdoor cooking, mowing, thatching, basic carpentry, and retail assistance.
Literacy is acquired casually: seeing books scattered about, children typically teach themselves to read by age $4$ .
Early handwriting is discouraged to prevent the acquisition of careless, ugly scrawls; refined calligraphy is practiced as a fine art for producing limited-edition poetry and literature, while everyday texts utilize simple printing.
Children acquire modern spoken languages effortlessly through contact with continental visitors: French (spoken across the Channel) and German (spoken by communes and colleges on the mainland), alongside English, Welsh, and Irish (regarded as another form of Welsh); ancient Greek and Latin are acquired voluntarily alongside general reading.
Systematic reading of history is rare among the youth, as historical interest tends to predominate during epochs of political turmoil and suffering rather than eras of stable contentment.
Bookishness before the age of $15$ is viewed with skepticism, as premature study often fades naturally as adolescents engage in outdoor communal tasks like stone-paving, gardening, and building.
Emerging from the forest at the top of a rise, Guest views Westminster Abbey; Dick notes that the exterior was ruined centuries ago, but the interior was restored over a century prior by sweeping away the vulgar monuments erected to historical fools and knaves.
The Houses of Parliament are preserved and utilized as a subsidiary market and a central storage repository for agricultural manure (the "Dung Market").
Dick explains that their preservation resulted from an agitation by an ancient antiquarian society, which argued that maintaining the building serves as an aesthetic foil to show the superiority of modern architecture.

Commerce Replaced: The Piccadilly Market

Entering Piccadilly, Guest observes an elegant, arcaded street reminiscent of northern Italian cities, with upper stories serving as public guest-houses for travelers visiting the center.
The lower levels consist of exhibition booths displaying beautifully crafted wares without commercial salesmanship, price tags, or financial transactions.
Dick asks Guest if he wishes to procure anything; Guest confesses he left his coins at Hammersmith and desires tobacco and a pipe.
Dick asks an elegantly clad woman in figured silk to hold their horse; he muses somberly that romantic passions still cause occasional tragedies, citing a recent mishap that claimed the lives of two men and a woman.
Entering a tobacco booth, they find it tended by two children: a twelve-year-old boy and his thirteen-year-old sister, both absorbed in reading books.
Guest asks for Latakia tobacco; the girl fills an embroidered pouch of red morocco leather and presents him with an ornate pipe carved from dense hardwood, embellished with gold and precious stones resembling Japanese masterwork.
When Guest asks how much he is to pay, Dick cautions him with a glance against exhibiting obsolete commercial morality; the girl cannot fathom the concept of payment, explaining that if the pipe is lost, someone else will find and enjoy it.
The children offer their guests refreshments: a straw-colored fine Rhine wine (Steinberg) served in delicate glassware, while the girl drinks lemonade and the boy drinks ginger-beer.
Returning outside, they find a sturdy ninety-year-old man holding the horse, who joins them on the carriage ride toward Bloomsbury.
The travelers discuss the extinct societal malady of "Idleness" (historically termed the "Blue-devils" or "Mulleygrubs"), which afflicted the hereditary descendants of nineteenth-century capitalists and slave-holders.
In early post-revolutionary generations, those afflicted with compulsive idleness were assigned to attend retail booths; their physical forms were characterized by dry, skewer-like hands, stick-like arms, tightly laced hourglass waists, pinched noses, and sour countenances.
The old man notes that nineteenth-century domestic lackeys wore plush breeches of worsted velvet to designate their servile status to the diseased idle rich.

Trafalgar Square, Civil Law, and the Abolition of Penal Systems

Proceeding through streets bordered by fruit orchards, apricot-tree groves, and pear-lined avenues, the carriage enters Trafalgar Square.
Guest recalls a vision of the square on "Bloody Sunday" in November $1887$ : four-fold cordons of police, mounted soldiers, bludgeoned crowds, and dingy stone facades.
Dick notes that the square preserves its name as a harmless relic of past folly, though it was the site of the pivotal, decisive revolutionary battle fought in the year $1952$ .
The old passenger references James' Social Democratic History, which recorded the peaceful, bludgeoned meeting of $1887$ that resulted only in the imprisonment of the victims.
Guest asks about modern penal institutions; both Dick and the old man react with intense horror and revulsion at the concept of imprisonment.
Dick asserts that a society cannot call itself free or happy if neighbors are caged by professional jailers; judicial incarceration is condemned as cold-blooded, institutional cruelty.
The National Gallery is seen through plane trees; the name "National Gallery" has become a generic designation applied to any regional building housing curated collections of historical artwork.
Passing a rambling group of buildings, Guest identifies a "Banded-workshop," where craftsmen assemble freely for cooperative hand-production in pottery, kiln operations, and glass-blowing.
Banded-workshops emit no atmospheric smoke; power is decentralized and available on demand in every domestic unit and small workshop across the land, eliminating industrial factory centralization.
A road-mending team of a dozen athletic young men working with picks is encountered; their richly embroidered garments lie nearby under the watch of a six-year-old boy and a mastiff dog.
Road-mending is treated as invigorating physical sport, accompanied by good humor, communal meals of cold meat pies and wine, and mutual assistance in guiding carriages past excavations.

The British Museum and Antiquarian Hammond

Entering Long Acre—flanked by plane trees and closely built houses—the old passenger dismounts to visit friends in the adjacent gardens.
Dick comments that the man is around $90$ years old, noting that humans have far exceeded the biblical lifespan of threescore years and ten due to clean living, temperance, and freedom from commercial anxiety.
The carriage passes down Endell Street through extensive rose-gardens, crossing Holborn and Oxford Road.
Dick recalls historical references to the area, citing the Bishop of Ely's palace noted in William Shakespeare's King Richard III.
Arriving at the British Museum, Guest notes the familiar classical portico standing without its former enclosing perimeter railings, surrounded by sycamore-shaded courtyards, arcaded cloister markets, and pigeons.
They stable Greylocks in a spacious communal stable and enter the official residence of Dick's great-grandfather, old Hammond.
Hammond is over $105$ years of age, a former custodian of books at the Museum, who resides in a plainly furnished, whitewashed chamber containing solid, simply carved oak furniture made by his father.
Hammond is dressed in a threadbare blue serge Norfolk jacket, serge breeches, and grey worsted stockings.
Clara, Dick's former wife, enters the room; she and Dick experience an emotional reconciliation and are sent upstairs by Hammond to converse in Nelson's room, which is lined with medieval manuscripts.
Hammond explains the relationship between Dick and Clara: they had married young, lived together two years, and had two children (currently being fostered by Hammond's daughter).
Clara had temporarily fallen in love with another man and departed; after a year, remorseful and disillusioned, she sought Hammond's counsel, who engineered their reunion.
Hammond repudiates the concept of divorce courts, explaining that nineteenth-century marital litigation existed entirely to adjudicate quarrels over private property, monetary settlements, and patriarchal child ownership.

Gender Relations, Family, and Social Customs

With the elimination of private property, legal contracts enforcing emotional sentiment or sexual passion have become obsolete and absurd.
Unhappiness and disappointment arising from sexual passions, calf love, unreciprocated devotion, or natural estrangements are recognized as unavoidable human experiences, but they are no longer compounded by legal coercion, artificial maintenance, or social hypocrisy.
The society recognizes no Procrustean code of conventional morality or social excommunication; men and women are free to unite or separate according to genuine emotional affinity.
Prostitution ("venal lust") has disappeared completely, being both legally impossible and socially unthinkable in the absence of commercial inequality.
In response to Guest's query regarding the status of women, Hammond emphasizes that nineteenth-century feminist controversies are defunct because institutional male tyranny and competitive sex antagonisms have ceased.
Housekeeping and culinary management are regarded as honored, creative crafts; Hammond mocks the nineteenth-century view that devalued household arts, citing the Norwegian folk tale How the Man minded the House (in which the domestic ineptitude of the man leaves him suspended in a chimney while the family cow dangles from a turf roof).
Motherhood is venerated as a vital social contribution; the artificial anxieties of child-rearing—fears of poverty, starvation, and economic degradation—are eradicated.
The physical appearance of the population has dramatically improved; comparing modern citizens with nineteenth-century photographic archives demonstrates a profound increase in general health, symmetry, and beauty, which Hammond attributes to unions founded on mutual attraction rather than commercial calculation.

The Transformation of Towns and Countryside

Coercive public education was historically an artifact of economic destitution, functioning as an intellectual tread-mill designed to produce compliant wage-slaves and arrogant masters.
Modern life preserves individual domestic households; early utopian socialist concepts of communal barracks or Fourierist phalangsteries were merely defensive reactions against pervasive poverty.
The vast industrial slum tracts of nineteenth-century London have been completely demolished.
Annually on May-day, the eastern communes hold a public festival known as "The Clearing of Misery," gathering in meadows where the worst slums once stood to feast, dance, and listen to young women sing historical songs of suffering, such as Thomas Hood's The Song of the Shirt, whose lyrics are now completely incomprehensible to the joyous listeners.
The central financial city—the former commercial quarter known as the "Swindling Kens"—was temporarily inhabited by displaced slum-dwellers because its stone offices were structurally solid; it remains the most densely populated quarter, bounded by Aldgate.
East of Aldgate, the land opens into pleasant meadows flanking the River Lea (the ancient haunt of Isaak Walton), extending through restored rural settlements at Stratford and Old Ford.
The Thames Docks are maintained for essential maritime transport, though global shipping centralization has been abolished; the low marshlands toward Canning Town and Silvertown have been transformed into rich pastures, hayricks, and cattle-ranges overlooked by Shooters' Hill.
Murky northern manufacturing districts have ceased to exist; mineral extraction and coal mining are conducted with minimal surface disturbance and no environmental degradation.
Smaller provincial towns have dismantled their suburban peripheries while rebuilding their historic urban cores around open market squares and mote-houses.
Oxford and Cambridge have abandoned commercial education and bourgeois cynicism; Oxford preserves its ancient pre-commercial architecture and cultivates knowledge purely as an aesthetic art.
Agricultural villages have been revitalized since the early revolutionary era, when urban populations flooded back to the land, restoring village populations to levels unseen since the fourteenth century.
Suburban distinction between city and country has dissolved; England is organized as a continuous garden interspersed with forests, wild moors, collegiate rural dwellings, and workshops.
Wilderness tracts and natural rockeries are deliberately preserved, including the sandy wastes of Hindhead in Surrey, the forests of Middlesex and Essex, the fells of Cumberland and Westmoreland, and the sheep-walks between Ingleborough and Pen-y-gwent.

The Dissolution of Government, Law, and Politics

The society maintains no central government, executive, parliament, standing army, navy, or judicial police system; the entire population functions as its own parliament.
Hammond defines nineteenth-century government as the executive machinery of the Law-Courts, backed by organized violence, designed entirely to protect the property monopolies of the rich and suppress the working classes.
International wars were commercial rivalries fought to open foreign markets and enrich competing oligarchs; the modern world recognizes no competing nation-states, borders, or chauvinistic patriotism.
Formal politics has ceased entirely; Hammond references Chapter $72$ of Horrebow's Natural History of Iceland ("Concerning Snakes in Iceland") to describe their political system: there are no politics.
Administrative units are organized into local communes, wards, and parishes, which govern themselves through direct democracy at communal assemblies called Motels.
Communal decision-making follows a structured, deliberative procedure:
- Any proposed communal change (such as constructing a new town-hall or replacing an iron bridge with stone) is moved and seconded at a regular Mote.
- If general agreement exists, the proposal is adopted without further delay.
- If any neighbor objects, the matter is postponed to the next assembly to prevent hasty action; during the interval, pro and con arguments are freely published and debated.
- At the second Mote, a vote by show of hands is conducted; if the division is close, the debate is adjourned a second time.
- If a large majority forms at the third meeting, the minority almost invariably yields in a friendly manner to the general will.
- If the community remains evenly and obstinately divided, the proposal lapses, and the status quo is maintained.
Coercive majority rule does not exist; individuals are never compelled to labor on public projects they oppose, though modern citizens voluntarily cooperate because all collective work directly enhances their shared environment.

The Nature of Crime and Restitution

Civil law has abolished itself; since private property no longer exists, legal litigation over contracts, debts, and ownership is impossible.
Criminal law has likewise disappeared; historic crimes of violence were almost entirely the indirect results of property laws, poverty, commercial jealousy, and domestic subjugation.
Sporadic crimes of violence resulting from sudden emotional fury or sexual jealousy still occur, but they are treated as temporary personal tragedies rather than criminal offenses against a state.
Society maintains no prisons, executioners, or professional judges; state-sanctioned retaliatory violence is condemned as cowardly and barbaric.
In the absence of artificial legal penalties to evade, an individual who commits an act of violence experiences profound spontaneous remorse and voluntarily makes whatever restitution or public atonement is possible.
If an offender is mentally unstable or sick, he is gently secluded and cared for until restored to health, with citizens acting as nurses and doctors rather than jailers.
Market exchanges are regulated by mutual consent, functional requirements, and local custom, completely devoid of coercive trade statutes.

The Organization of Labor and the Craft Ideal

Communal labor is sustained without monetary wages or artificial compulsion because work has been transformed into a source of sensory and creative pleasure.
The nineteenth-century dogma that human beings naturally abhor work was a fallacy born of exploitative, soul-destroying wage-labor.
Labor in the modern epoch is classified into three pleasurable categories:
- Work performed with the conscious hope of social honor and communal well-being.
- Work that has become an easy, satisfying physical habit.
- Work that provides direct sensuous, artistic pleasure in its execution (craftsmanship).
The nineteenth-century "World-Market" generated a destructive cycle: machines produced vast surpluses of cheap, shoddy goods, creating artificial wants that bound humanity to ceaseless, useless toil.
Imperialist expansion was driven by this market: Western nations used pretexts (suppressing native customs, spreading unwanted religions, or rescuing reckless adventurers) to send armed forces to smash traditional societies, force worthless products on indigenous peoples, and reduce them to industrial slavery.
Hammond notes the brutal history of imperial conquests, from British authorities distributing smallpox-infected blankets to native American tribes, to the destructive expeditions of Henry Morton Stanley across Africa.
Modern production creates only goods of absolute utility and beauty; goods are made by craftsmen for their neighbors' direct use with the same care as if making them for themselves.
Labor-saving machinery is deployed rationally: complex, irksome, and purely mechanical operations are executed by advanced machines, while tasks that afford human physical or creative pleasure are performed entirely by hand.
If a specific manufacturing process proves hopelessly disagreeable or degrading, the community abandons the process entirely and foregoes the product.
A widespread concern in modern society is the speculative fear of a "work-famine"—the possibility that improvements in technique and the durability of goods will leave communities with an insufficient supply of engaging tasks.
Hammond dismisses this anxiety, observing that art, scientific research, architectural adornment, and the physical restoration of formerly devastated regions (such as the northern United States, which had been turned into a polluted industrial wasteland) provide inexhaustible fields for creative human endeavor.