Manufacturing and business of different kinds were diffused in proportion to the population. There were no great factories or business houses, but innumerable small ones. No manufacturer employed more than ten persons, usually but five, and two or three employes were sufficient for the business houses.
The remarkable discoveries and inventions of the land revolutionized all our ideas of manual labor and mechanics. Heavy and bulky machinery is entirely unknown.
There were no smoking furnaces, no clangor of machinery. The factory was as neat and practically as noiseless as the private home. Useful and necessary devices and machinery were turned out as quietly as a housewife disposes of her routine labors. Science had apparently solved the rough and knotty problem of labor and production.
Nowhere did I see a furnace; in fact, fire was visible nowhere; and yet I could see its offices performed everywhere. I asked Karmas to explain the phenomena.
"That," he replied, "will be explained to you by Remo, Custodian of Useful Mechanical Devices. That is his official sphere."
Another incredible phenomenon presented itself during the journey. We passed through one province early in that journey, and my attention was called to the fact that the farmers were sowing their cereals, which, by the way, greatly resemble our own, but in a much higher state of cultivation and infinitely more nutritious.
Ten days later we repassed the same spot, and they were harvesting the ripened grain.
"In my country," I said to Karmas, "from eight to ten months, dependent upon the season, elapses between the sowing and the harvesting of wheat. Here the period is reduced to from eight to ten days. I can not understand the discrepancy."
"But it is an absolute mystery to you?"
"It is."