The Park of Kings by Aleksandr Kuprin — Read

It was the beginning of the twenty-sixth century of the Christian era. The life of men on earth had changed beyond recognition. The colored races of mankind had already blended completely with the white races, adding to their blood that health, firmness, and longevity which are so characteristic of all hybrids and mongrels among animals. Wars ceased forever in the middle of the twentieth century, after dreadful slaughters in which the whole civilized world took part and which cost mankind tens of millions of human lives and hundreds of billions in money. Man's genius had rendered mild the severest climates, had drained swamps, had dug tunnels through mountains, transformed the earth into a luxuriant garden and a gigantic machine-shop, the productivity of which had increased tenfold. Improvements in machinery reduced the working day to four hours, while work became compulsory for everybody. Vices disappeared entirely and virtue blossomed out. To tell the truth, however, all this was tiresome enough. And it was no wonder that in the middle of the thirty-second century, after the great South African insurrection, which took the form of a protest against the existing wearisome order of things, the whole of humanity, in a frenzy of intoxication, entered again upon the road of war, blood, plots, corruption, and cruel despotism, and, for Lord knows which time in the long history of our planet, destroyed and turned into dust and ashes all the great achievements of the world's civilization.

But the contented prosperity which preceded this elemental destruction came as by itself, without blood or violence.