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Very few words are needed to explain why London, a hundred years hence, will be very like it isnow, or rather, since I must slip into a prophetic past, why London, when my story opens, was verylike it was in those enviable days when I was still alive.The reason can be stated in one sentence. The people had absolutely lost faith in revolutions. Allrevolutions are doctrinal-such as the French one, or the one that introduced Christianity. For itstands to common sense that you cannot upset all existing things, customs, and compromises, unlessyou believe in something outside them, something positive and divine. Now, England, during thiscentury, lost all belief in this. It believed in a thing called Evolution. And it said, All theoreticchanges have ended in blood and ennui. If we change, we must change slowly and safely, as theanimals do. Nature's revolutions are the only successful ones. There has been no conservativereaction in favour of tails. And some things did change. Things that were not much thought of dropped out of sight. Thingsthat had not often happened did not happen at all. Thus, for instance, the actual physical forceruling the country, the soldiers and police, grew smaller and smaller, and at last vanished almost to apoint. The people combined could have swept the few policemen away in ten minutes: they did not, because they did not believe it would do them the least good. They had lost faith in revolutions.Democracy was dead; for no one minded the governing class governing. England was nowpractically a despotism, but not an hereditary one. Some one in the official class was made King. Noone cared how: no one cared who. He was merely an universal secretary.In this manner it happened that everything in London was very quiet. That vague and somewhatdepressed reliance upon things happening as they have always happened, which is with allLondoners a mood, had become an assumed condition. There was really no reason for any mandoing anything but the thing he had done the day before

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