Hard Times

Answers

• Q22HABIT

  Does organizing daily life by fixed schedules strengthen or weaken self-government?

  Weakens. Coketown's people all go in and out at the same hours to do the same work, and every day is the same as the one before.

  It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.

  Book I, Chapter V: The Key-note · Downloaded Gutenberg #786; confirmed passage in Book I, Chapter V.