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labour notes, which they had to redeem upon recovery. They signed these
labour notes with thumb-marks, which were photographed and indexed in
such a way that this world-wide Labour Company could identify any one of
its two or three hundred million clients at the cost of an hour's
inquiry. The day's labour was defined as two spells in a treadmill used
in generating electrical force, or its equivalent, and its due
performance could be enforced by law. In practice the Labour Company
found it advisable to add to its statutory obligations of food and
shelter a few pence a day as an inducement to effort; and its enterprise
had not only abolished pauperisation altogether, but supplied
practically all but the very highest and most responsible labour
throughout the world. Nearly a third of the population of the world were
its serfs and debtors from the cradle to the grave.
In this practical, unsentimental way the problem of the unemployed had
been most satisfactorily met and overcome. No one starved in the public
ways, and no rags, no costume less sanitary and sufficient than the
Labour Company's hygienic but inelegant blue canvas, pained the eye
throughout the whole world. It was the constant theme of the
phonographic newspapers how much the world had progressed since
nineteenth-century days, when the bodies of those killed by the
vehicular traffic or dead of starvation, were, they alleged, a common
feature in all the busier streets.
Denton and Elizabeth sat apart in the waiting-room until their turn
came. Most of the others collected there seemed limp and taciturn, but
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