SUCH—in briefest outline—is the England which confronts the challenge of a new century. It represents a civilisation containing many of the elements of human welfare, and enjoying a widespread happiness and personal comfort. Such comfort appears as somewhat unjustly divided between class and class. A main body of adequately rewarded and generally satisfied workers are set between the unnaturally wealthy on the one side, on the other the unnaturally poor. The superficial appearance is of a “plutocracy” with riches extravagantly accumulated and extravagantly expended; a middle class industrious and a little bewildered; a labouring population industrious, and in times of prosperity contented; below, a life which cries almost unheeded from a condition of perpetual privation. In all cases prosperity has brought some especial dangers: a weakening of the willingness to work, a rejection of earlier simplicities, a too eager absorption in pleasure. Representatives of the rich, from the security and ignorance of the country house and the country-house outlook upon society, bring charges against the working man: of loafing and neglecting his labour; of betting, drinking, and idling; of organising trades unions as a tyranny on the “ca’ canny” principle, designed to restrain the honest toiler from giving a fair day’s labour for a fair wage. Representatives of the working people, on the other hand, inflamed to bitterness by the wretchedness and degradation of those who endure an animal life in the abyss, bring a fierce indictment against the wealthy: of luxurious living, of callous indifference to the wrongs they see around them, of the contented plundering of the poor. The fact is that each class, in its several station, has pretty much the same characteristics, impulses, desires. If the poor were suddenly made rich, in a short space of time the majority would find themselves able to enjoy superfluous dinners, artificially created pleasures, and the satisfaction of an abundant life, without any sharp sense of judgment and condemnation in the knowledge of the huge misery that accompanies all this waste. If the rich were suddenly made poor they would soon be forcing their children to leave school prematurely in order to earn wages at mean occupations, would be organising themselves into “tyrannous” trades unions, would be mitigating the monotony of their lives by the excitement of a shilling on a horse or the encouragement of alcoholic stimulation. Dives and Lazarus may some day experience that kaleidoscopic change which has been dear to the heart of the discontented in all ages: a reversal of the accepted social order in a poor man’s Paradise. A very short time afterwards the child of Lazarus would be found faring sumptuously every day; indifferent to the descendant of Dives, lying at his gate, impotent, full of sores.

The observer will therefore not be greatly affected, in his choice of advocacy and action, by the particular arguments and appeals which may be advanced for the one side or the other. He sees a literature which vindicates an unequal distribution of wealth, in the necessity for leisure and a secured comfort for a certain proportion of the people, if there is to survive an amenity of manners, a cultivation of the arts, the traditions of a governing class. He sees a literature which stretches gaunt fingers over the costly clothes and furniture, and exhibits upon them the stains of blood. No reasoned or intellectual appeal will compel him to accept the one side or the other, to appear as the advocate of order or the advocate of change. Instinct, sentiment, temperament, upbringing in the case of the many; in the case of the few, a deliberate effort of the will, without much intellectual justification, and certainly as no nicely balanced adjustment of alternative, will direct statesmen or publicist to-day to choose the side of the rich or the side of the poor.

Among the many it is of little importance to any one but the individual which side is chosen. What is of importance is that, the choice being made, each man should see things clearly; should “clear himself of cant”; should realise that he is a soldier fighting for a cause, to be deflected from his purpose by no weakness and no vacillation. Whatever the future may bring, to him the matter of vital moment is that he should refuse to betray under any temptation those who have trusted him with their allegiance.

The reformers who have enrolled themselves with the advocates of change must not expect too speedily to realise even an appreciable percentage of their aims. Most men, setting out to move the mountain, will be content at the end if they have made some impression on the molehill. The divergence between the roseate vision of the ideal and the hard effort of practical affairs is a divergence which sometimes excites impatience and sometimes awakens suspicion of lethargy and compromise. Yet in a settled society, such as that of England to-day, where the overwhelming forces of the community are against any too sudden dislocation, we may be very content if some visible improvement can be estimated in a year or a decade. The forlorn and tattered flag “Work or Revolt,” flapping dejectedly over a procession of the ineffectual unemployed, is more scornful and cruel in dissociation of promise and performance than any attack from outside. It exhibits a challenge to the forces of this country by those who would be mown down like sheep or massacred like flies if they gave any real trouble or excited any real anxiety amongst the governing classes of England.

And this “security” is exceedingly strengthened by the inability of the majority of mankind to picture any life but the life that they have always known. The defiance of the future by the present—the insistence of hard, tangible things against a kingdom of dreams and speculations—is a defiance too often forgotten by those who are impatient of the slow processes of change. They see evil to be overcome, visions of clearer horizons and a fairer dawn. They cannot understand why mankind round them—equally intelligent, equally pitiful—do not find their feet marching to the same militant melody. They fail to apprehend rightly the crushing effect of the present, especially as embodied in solid, material realities, upon the minds of the majority. To these, history is but a misty panorama of uncertain meaning, geography a story of things wonderful and strange, but remote and negligible. Here is the real world: the houses of commerce, four-square, of stone, ample Government offices, law courts, police stations, secure private dwellings. “Let him change it who can,” their innermost souls declare, in a declaration which actually signifies, “It never will be changed at all.” By the many, of all classes, the affirmation of the Psalmist would be readily re-echoed,—“He has held the round world so fast, that it cannot be moved at any time.” Inhabitants of the earthquake zones are always convinced that each successive tremor will be the last tremor, that now, at length, the old earth, after a final shaking, has settled down to sleep. And the same is true of the shaking of the children of earth—the call, sounding to the nations in succeeding centuries, which has shattered custom, convention, security, and all the accepted ways. Each revolution is always the last revolution, the final effort of a violence which has expired in this ultimate convulsion. Now, at last, and after all the centuries, mankind is to be allowed to “settle down” in reasonable comfort to accept and to enjoy.

This tyranny of the present upon the imagination, is perhaps the greatest of all obstacles to reform. It is not only that the inhabitants of London cannot picture what London was when the Abbey of Westminster stood up white from green gardens, and over the river where now dwell two millions of persons the roads ran on causeways through sullen marshes lit by will-o’-the-wisps and fever fires. It is that they are unable even to imagine a time when Cadogan Square was a huddle of slum tenements, and Islington an expanse of meadow land, and the places they now occupy, quiet fields. Lacking such imagination, they find it impossible to stand up and face the domination of the present with the naked vision of the future. Mr. Wells, at the end of his voyage into Utopia, has described the traveller returning, standing, after so adventurous a journey, at the familiar spot where the Strand debouches into Trafalgar Square. Everything is the same—the railway stations, the tall buildings with winking sky signs, the column and the lions of the Square, the long, low, brooding ugliness of the National Gallery. Amongst them move the busy people, hurrying, to-day as yesterday, to and from their sedentary occupations and their comfortable suburban homes. It all appears “so fast” that “it cannot be moved at any time.” Utopia, before this intrusive reality—to be seen, touched, handled—rises from the earth and joins all other cloud cities “built in heaven.” An ironical touch may be given by the sight of a squalid, tiny crowd gathered round one of these pillars, with banners demanding the speedy coming of “the Social Revolution”; mocked at alike by the solid architecture, the indulgent policemen, the indifferent multitude that passes by. Mr. Lowes Dickinson, in a dialogue recently published, confronted a banker, of enlightened views, with the protest of an idealist and reformer against present social injustices. The reformer—from a University common room—has much the best of the argument. Looking out from those pleasant paths and gardens, not only over the injustices of the present, but also over all time and all existence, he can reveal to the man of business the impossibility of these injustices continuing, the urgent necessity for change. The banker has but one argument, but with that he can overwhelm his antagonist. That argument is the actual existence of the present, in solid, appreciable reality. He can counter the reformer’s acute and ready phrases with steamships and factories, Lombard Street, Pimlico, Manchester; against which the random Socialist, academic or anarchical, can make no more impression than a rat attempting to gnaw through the granite stones of the Bank of England. Here in part is the insistence of things against ideas, the dominance of the material; “the things” which, according to Emerson, are “in the saddle and ride mankind.” Samuel Butler once pictured the revolt of the machine against its master, a kind of universal Frankenstein monster come to life and striking blindly in the dark, like the furious rebellion of some slave race which in the past has occasionally wiped out a civilisation in hideous ruin. But apart from the possibility of such revolt, no first visitor to the newer industrial centres but is aware of a certain shrivelling up of man’s importance before the aggregate of material construction. The sense of proportion is dwarfed by the mere divergence in size and stability, as the weak, unprotected human body is contrasted with vast levers and furnaces which at any moment could crack him like an eggshell, or shrivel him up like sawdust. Human life and mechanical life come to be pictured in permanence like those gaunt and sullen streets of East London, where tiny cottages crouch beneath tall encompassing walls so high that between them men scarce can see the sun. And behind the weight laid upon the imagination by mass and matter is the perhaps more oppressive weight of custom and convention. “Every body”—so commences Newton’s famous law—“continues in its state of rest or motion in a straight line.” More than of any projectiles careering through space is this true of the mind of man—continuing always, unless forcibly and sometimes brutally wrested away by impacting forces, in its motion in a straight line. Bagehot tells a story of the “very conservative” people of Fiji. “A chief was one day going over a mountain path, followed by a long string of his people, when he happened to stumble and fall; all the rest of the people immediately did the same except one man, who was set upon by the rest to know whether he considered himself better than the chief.” Fiji is too remote a dwelling-place for such a leader. He resides to-day in Dulwich, in Poplar, in Eaton Square.

Not only is the present in its resistance to the future secure in its own armies and entrenchments. It is continually trafficking—and successfully—with the forces of the invader, purchasing them in single spies and in battalions. Every reform, successfully effected, transfers whole divisions and army corps from the attacking to the defending army. The giving of old age pensions, for example, at one stroke swings half a million aged persons passionately on the side of the status quo, passionately against any upheaval which would jeopardise, or might be thought to jeopardise, the regular reckonable dole of two half-crowns per week. And amongst individuals, nine out of ten at least of the men who would be competent to lead a movement towards change are to-day immediately caught up in the huge machine and provided outlet for their ambitions within a tangible and realisable present. How many potential Labour leaders and Socialists, through the operation of the huge sieve-net of the new scholarship system, are being swept into secondary schools from working-class homes? and thence, as clerks in great businesses, through university training, in subsequent Government or private employment, destined to be firmly cemented into the fabric of the present social order? Even the Labour leader, if successful, tends to become conservative, to despise the material he once organised, the masses of unskilled labour, as scattered dust or crumbling snow.

But the great majority of the children of ability in the industrial classes are being intercepted before the opportunity of becoming “Labour leaders” will arise. Their energies are being deflected from politics into commercial or industrial enterprise. Socialism seems destined to be left to the idealist and the economic failure, to the man with ready tongue and little stable capacity for work, like the “Masterman” so cruelly portrayed in Mr. Wells’s “Kipps,” to the reformer who revolts from the harsh operation of present law, but finds no allies except a proletariat from which the intelligence has been steadily drained in early boyhood. We seem destined to pass from the antithesis of the class war—the rich against the poor—to the antithesis which Nietzsche foresaw many years ago—the Many against the Few; the demands of incapacity to share in the benefits created by the competent. It is under such circumstances that the very sombre architecture of the present seem to smile down derisive indulgence at the vapourings and pleadings of those who still hope to change the world a little. The infant, says Mr. Whiteing in The Yellow Van, was blowing lustily upon a tin whistle as the van of the land reformers passed under the walls of Allonby Castle. “Nothing happened to the walls.”

Yet against this tyranny of the present the reformer, after all, has some sources of protection. “He laughs best who laughs the last”: and the longest laugh is always on the side of the forces of change. The hills are nothing, and flow from form to form; the mountains smoke at the touch of His hand: “He washeth away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth and destroyest the hope of man.” Researches in the great canyon of Arizona have revealed not only an eating through miles of solid rock by the flow of a quiet stream of water in a gulf created through almost limitless time, but behind this, in incalculable space of years, a succession of previous operations, formation and upheaval of continents and their overthrow, swinging the plummet of the mind into abysses beyond the powers of that mind ever to comprehend. The sun and rain and delicate air are wasting away, not only the backbone of the mountains, but also the granite stones of the Bank of England. The Future has great allies. Despite the momentary insistence of the material in factory and furnace, the mind can find tranquillity in realisation that this is merely the Idea, clothing itself for a season and in a temporary habitation; the Idea which can make the rocks dance to its music, and the solid ground tremble at its advent. Such has always been the vision of the poet; of all who can see not beyond the present, but through the present, to the future. To all such insight

And as of Nineveh there remains but a heap, and of Tyrus a spit of sandy shore, and of Sagesta but one solemn temple looking down the valley to the sea, so a triumphant imagination can fling off the yoke of the present, to see in solid England dynamic instead of static forces, and all the cities in motion and flow towards some unknown ends. This may not provide any peculiar satisfaction for present endeavour. There is no guarantee, because change is inevitable, that change will come along desirable ways. Nor does any consolation reside in the knowledge that one day, without a shadow of uncertainty, great London itself will become but a vast tomb for all its busy people, and of its splendour and pride not one stone be left upon another. But it does release from the tyranny of a present which sees no change possible. If change must come, then it may be deflected along desirable ways. The direction of forces is so much easier than the initiation of them. E pur si muove is the eternal affirmation, as much over societies which appear stationary as over societies which appear reckless in progress. For over each successive present, with its ample Government offices, its law courts, its police stations, its secure private dwellings, there will be written as epitaph the inexorable law of a universe, not of Being, but of Becoming: “A wind passeth over it. It is gone. The place thereof shall know it no more.”

And of all illusions of the opening twentieth century perhaps the most remarkable is that of security. Already gigantic and novel forces of mechanical invention, upheavals of people, social discontents, are exhibiting a society in the beginnings of change. It would seem likely that the very rapid disintegration, which has taken place in a period of external tranquillity, in beliefs and ideas, may be giving place to a reverse condition: of a time of internal quietude accompanied by large external transformations. With Europe facing an international discontent amongst its industrial peoples, the nations, as an armed camp, heaping up instruments of destruction, the East suddenly awake, the people in England and America writhing in the grasp of a money power more and more concentrated in the hands of enormous Corporations, he would be but a blind prophet who, looking to the future, would assert that all things will continue as until now.

A few years back men loved to anticipate an age of innocence and gold; with humanity at last tranquil and satisfied, in the socialistic millennium or the anarchic heaven of childhood. To-day the critic of a less sanguine outlook openly proclaims that modern civilisation carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Two great imaginative writers, M. Anatole France in Paris, Mr. H. G. Wells in London, have presented their visions of the coming end of an age. The picture of the former is more ironical, more completely the cry of Vanity in a world of disillusionment. The picture of the latter is more scientific. Here is one way at least in which the thing may happen, in which the end may come. And if not in this way, yet in any similar and entirely unexpected fashion, arising out of that present danger: the instability which of necessity must prevail when vast implements of destruction are placed in the hands of a civilisation imperfectly self-controlled, and subject to panic fears and hatreds. It is in the realisation of so remarkable a danger that the story of the outbreak of aerial warfare becomes not so much a nightmare vision of the future as a vigorous criticism of the present. Mr. Wells had formerly demanded supernatural machinery to effect his outpouring of calamity and terror. A comet, bearing a strange gas, will make every one sane. With a sudden gasp of amazement, they will realise the essential insanity of the life which they had hitherto regarded as natural to mankind. Martians, descending from the darkened sky, with irresistible powers of heat ray and poisonous dust, will wipe out humanity as a man will wipe out a wasp’s nest. But here[29] he has returned to the solid ground, and without any assumptions but those of but a slight advance in mechanical invention, exhibits the forces which make towards a cosmic overthrow. The apparatus required is not much more than will undoubtedly be furnished within the next half-century. “Flying” is now assured; has come to stay. It is merely a matter of years or perhaps months before every external apparatus that the author requires for his apocalypse will be at the disposal of mankind. And with that invention there comes a new epoch in the history of humanity. Given effective flying—to be utilised in war not for the transference of men, but for coercing a nation into submission—the march of events appears to follow a possible chain of sequence. Each nation, armed to the teeth in a world which has scarcely apprehended war—a city-bred people—is to-day restrained from fighting by fear of consequences. Each nation—in this grim forecast—thinking itself secure in the possession of a new invincible weapon, plunges into effort for the overlordship of the world. The German air fleet invades New York. The city, “drinking up the wealth of a continent as Rome once drank up the wealth of the Mediterranean, and Babylon the wealth of the East,” after a hopeless resistance, capitulates. The poor, neglected in their quarters of squalor, like the poor in Paris in 1870, raise the cry that they are betrayed. Sporadic violence against the invader breaks the truce. The Germans, enraged, determine to make an example which will crush out the need for further effort in a cruelty which is ultimately to prove a kindness. Fire and brimstone rain down from the airships, like the fire and brimstone which rained down upon the cities of the plain. At the end New York is a smoking mass of ruins: a cemetery of a million dead. The assumption of terrorism would have been justified had war been operating under the old conditions. Rage and a fury of revenge on such occasion will always overcome cowardice; man, in a kind of madness, will be content to be destroyed, if only he can destroy. It is only when the resistance becomes obviously senseless—when he has no means of hurting his enemy—that he finally accepts the inevitable. But in the new conditions of air-fighting such an equilibrium would never be attained. There are no frontiers that can be guarded. Desperate men, equipping these new craft, can always exact terrible reprisals. In return for New York’s destruction, Berlin is smashed to powder by American airships; in return for Berlin, other American cities. Madness and delirium seize the people: the whole world is at war; modern civilisation blows up and vanishes from the world.

With the destructive fury of the war comes the collapse in the whole edifice of credit which maintains the economic efficiency of the industrial system. Men demand gold as in America in the last crisis, hoarding it in their stockings or burying it in their gardens. The stock of gold becomes exhausted, bonds and shares waste paper. Factories close. The city populations find neither work nor bread. In peril of imminent destruction from the enemy above, men claw and mow at one another in blind struggle in the starving cities, reeling back visibly into the beast; as they will do in extremity even when an earthquake has shattered their city and death sits waiting at the door of their houses. After the fighting comes the famine, after the famine the great pestilence. The organisation of society is broken and fissured. The vast multitude perish. The few that remain, like the few that remained of the Roman civilisation after the impact of the barbarian, are found at the end, in village communities or isolated huts, or encamped in the ruins of once populous towns. Amid the nettle and the ivy the survivors of London wander forlorn through the empty labyrinths: as the survivors encamped in the ruins of Rome in the long twilight which preceded the Middle Age. After the three hundred years of diastole there came “the swift and unexpected systole, like the closing of a fist.” “They could not understand it was a systole,” writes Mr. Wells. “They could not think of it as anything but a jolt, a hitch, a mere oscillatory indication of the swiftness of their progress. Collapse, though it happened all about them, remained incredible. Presently some falling mass smote them down, or the ground opened beneath their feet. They died incredulous.” So incredulous indeed died Babylon, Tyre, Rome; each refusing to believe that it was witnessing the end of a world.

How far is this sombre vision a nightmare merely? How far a warning of the things which may come to pass? Mr. Wells requires for his Götterdämmerung no fresh influx of barbarian hordes to smash civilisation brutally to pieces, such as is feared by some: not even the upheaval from below, in the consolidated masses of the poor, which has seemed to M. Anatole France and others a force destined to consume civilisation in fire and blood. He had accepted the undeniable note of the age, that material advance has far transcended moral progress, and that this inequality is full of the elements of danger. Man has wrested secrets from sun and star, equipped himself with apparatus which should make him rival the older gods, stolen, like Prometheus, the fire of heaven to be his servant, and made the earth and the air to obey him. Yet this unparalleled control of dead things has failed to eliminate his silly national jealousies, his little prejudices and selfishnesses, his clumsy determination to make his life a brutal, irrational thing. Mr. Wells outpours his vials of wrath upon the Crowd: the vacant street-bred people, the “common abundant life,” “flowing, in its cheerful, aimless way,” towards the Abyss. His hero, one of this Crowd, Mr. Bert Smallways, is one of “the sort of men who had made England and America what they are.” “He had lived all his life in narrow streets, and between mean houses he could not look over, and in a narrow circle of ideas from which there was no escape. He thought the whole duty of man was to be smarter than his fellows, get his hands, as he put it, ‘on the dibs,’ and have a good time.” But the author need not have gone to the Crowd for his illustration. No lunacy that flourishes amongst the little but is intensified amongst the great. The German Professors, the conversation of an Oxford College Common Room will exhibit as dangerous a combination of truculence and terror as any gathering of patriots at a public-house bar. The war scare of a halfpenny paper, with its frantic appeals to race prejudice and passion, is revealed in deepening imbecilities in sixpenny magazines which circulate amongst the country clergy, or half-crown reviews which lie upon the table of country houses. Countless millions in Europe and Asia and America, “instead of being born rooted in the soil, were born struggling in a torrent they never clearly understood. All the faiths of their fathers had been taken by surprise, and startled into the strangest forms and reactions.” Everywhere in the early twentieth century this observer finds “a sort of heated, irascible stupidity”; everywhere “congested nations in inconvenient areas, stopping the exchange of population and produce with each other, annoying each other with tariffs and every possible commercial vexation, and threatening each other with navies and armies that grow every year more portentious.”

“The houses were never high enough to satisfy the people,” says M. Anatole France of his “Penguins.” “They kept on making them still higher. They built them of thirty or forty storeys, with offices, shops, banks, societies, one above another. They dug cellars and tunnels ever deeper downwards. Fifteen millions of men laboured in a giant town.” Everything here was constructed efficiently for the production of wealth. The organisation was perfect. The ancient aristocracies and democracies had alike departed. The Trusts, with their Directors, were omnipotent. “Like all true aristocrats, like the patricians of Republican Rome or the squires of old England, these powerful men affected a great severity in their habits and customs. They were the ascetics of wealth. At the meetings of the Trusts an observer would have noticed their smooth and puffy faces, their lantern cheeks, their sunken eyes and wrinkled brows.... Denying themselves all happiness, all pleasure, and all rest, they spent their miserable lives in rooms without light or air, furnished only with electrical apparatus, living on eggs and milk, and sleeping on camp beds. By doing nothing except pressing nickel buttons with their fingers, these mystics heaped up riches of which they never saw the signs, and acquired the vain possibility of gratifying desires that they never experienced.” Society, as a whole, became organised on a plutocratic, as once on a military, basis; and all classes endeavoured to approximate themselves to the ideal standard set from above. Like insects, the huge hive laboured night and day, driven forward by the blind, furious instinct for accumulation. “All passions which injured the increase or the preservation of wealth were regarded as dishonourable. Neither indolence, nor idleness, nor the taste for disinterested study, nor love of the arts, nor, above all, extravagance, was ever forgiven. Pity was condemned as a dangerous weakness.” “The State was firmly based on two great public virtues: respect for the rich, contempt for the poor.” As they devoted their whole intelligence to business, they sought no intellectual pleasures. The theatre was reduced to pantomime and comic dances. The very rich formed only a minority, but their collaborators were the entire people. The agents of commerce or banking, the engineers and managers of factories, received immense salaries, and were recruited from the talent to whom this supreme career was always open. The system sucked the efficient and enterprising from the populace below. What remained, a spongy morass of low-grade life, shepherded, controlled, fed, and housed by their masters, presented every sign of physical and moral degeneration. “Of low stature, with small heads and narrow chests, they were further distinguished from the comfortable classes by a multitude of physiological anomalies, and, in particular, by a common want of symmetry between the head and the limbs.” The more robust of them became soldiers. From the remainder the employers continually and methodically selected out the enterprising and talented, leaving alone “labourers who were incapable of defending their rights, but were yet intelligent enough to perform their toil, which highly perfected machines rendered extremely simple.” “In a word, these miserable employees were plunged in a gloomy apathy that nothing enlightened and nothing exasperated. They were necessary instruments for the social order, and well adapted to their purpose.”

Civilisation seemed to have at length attained its ideal, and to have finally established a coherent, organic society. A system founded on “what is strongest in human nature, pride and cupidity,” would seem to have been guaranteed an earthly immortality. Yet there were grounds for uneasiness, especially on the score of physical health. “The health of the poor is what it must be,” said the experts in hygiene, “but that of the rich leaves much to be desired.” The multi-millionaires were bald at the age of eighteen. Some showed from time to time a dangerous weakness of mind. Overstrung and enfeebled, they gave enormous sums to ignorant charlatans, and there suddenly sprang up in the town the medical or theological fortune of some trumpery bath-attendant who had become a teacher or a prophet. The number of lunatics increased continually. Suicides multiplied in the world of wealth.

M. Anatole France requires no visitants from another world to ensure the destruction of his nightmare. He does not even need the national jealousies and insanities of Mr. Wells equipped with new weapons of destruction. His vision of a Penguin Chicago at Paris finally falls to pieces from its own internal rottenness. Anarchists, wielding tremendous explosives, accepted as deliverers by the enslaved and degenerate proletariat, smash Society into pieces. One of them, a clerk in the Electricity Trust, an afternoon in June, from the heights of Fort Saint-Michel, witnesses the beginning of the end. To a little child, playing there all unconscious of the coming cataclysm, he tells the story of human progress. “A fisherman once threw his net into the sea, and drew out a little sealed copper pot, which he opened with his knife. Smoke came out of it, and as it mounted up to the clouds the smoke grew thicker and thicker, and became a giant, who gave such a terrible yawn that the whole world was blown to dust.” The “yawn” is the weariness of a vast disillusionment: the awakening of a slave population to the futility of its further continuance. At first the Anarchists waged war on the Trusts, while the people stood aloof, resentful, indifferent. Later, in the panic that accompanied the immense ruin of property, the mob ceased work and indulged in a pandemonium of destruction. Men fought for food and for plunder in the darkened ways of the city. Society lost its structure and deliquesced into a kind of sloppy morass. Epidemics followed the fighting, bred from unburied corpses. Famine carried off those whom pestilence had spared. “Reforms were introduced into institutions, and great changes took place in habits and customs; but the country never recovered the loss of its capital, and never regained its former prosperity. Commerce and industry dwindled away. Civilisation abandoned those countries which for so long it had preferred to all others. They became insalubrious and sterile. The territories that had supported so many millions of men became nothing more than a desert. On the hill of Fort Saint-Michel wild horses cropped the coarse grass.”

The diastole had been followed by a systole. Mankind after the European, as after the Roman, civilisation fell back into darkness. A catastrophe of centuries was occupied by the evening, the midnight, and the dawn. As once the barbarians walked with wonder along the deserted Roman roads or suddenly emerged from forest and plain to gaze astonished on the vast ruins of aqueducts and coliseums and once populous cities, so the new child peoples which survived the cosmic catastrophe contemplated the embankments, the crumbling bridges, the tattered, torn fragments of deserted towns which marked the memories of our dead race. The wheel of history slowly revolved through the centuries, and after a time once again the unending cyclic process was renewed and another “civilisation” erected which thought itself the last word of human progress.

“Days flowed like water from the fountains, and the centuries passed like drops falling from the ends of stalactites. Hunters came to chase the bears upon the hills that covered the forgotten city. Shepherds fed their flocks upon them. Labourers turned up the soil with their ploughs. Gardeners cultivated their lettuces and grafted their pear trees. They were not rich, and they had no arts. The walls of their cabins were covered with old vines and roses. A goat-skin clothed their tanned limbs, while their wives dressed themselves with the wool that they themselves had spun. The goat-herds moulded little figures of men and animals out of clay, or sang songs about the young girl who follows her lover through woods or among the browsing goats; while the pine trees whisper together, and the water utters its murmuring sound. The master of the house grew angry with the beetles who devoured his figs. He planned snares to protect his fowls from the velvet-tailed fox, and he poured out wine for his neighbours, saying, ‘Drink! the flies have not spoilt my vintage; the vines were dry before they came.’

“In the course of ages the wealth of the villages and the corn that filled the fields were pillaged by barbarian invaders. The country changed its masters many times. The conquerors built castles on the hills. Cultivation increased: mills, forges, tanneries, and looms were established. Roads were opened through the woods and over the marshes. The river was covered with boats. The hamlets became large villages, and, joining together, formed a town which protected itself by deep trenches and lofty walls. Later, becoming the capital of a great State, it found itself straitened within its now useless ramparts, and it converted them into grass-grown villas. It grew very rich and large beyond measure.

“The houses were never high enough to satisfy the people. They kept on making them still higher. They built them of thirty or forty storeys, with offices, shops, banks, societies, one above another. They dug cellars and tunnels ever deeper downwards. Fifteen millions of men laboured in a giant town.”[30]

After a time, says a great writer, the earth grows sick of her children, like exhausted ground that will bear fruit no more. It is impossible that society could “blow up” with such rapidity as is here pictured; the process is, in any case, foreshortened. But any student who has followed the history of Rome’s destruction—the gradual disintegration of a society exceedingly complex and rational—will never conceal from himself the possibility of similar vast changes in the world of to-morrow. The process is always incredible to those who think that mankind henceforth has but to settle down and be comfortable in a world where tranquillity is secure. Dr. Dill has described such a life under the Roman peace, with the municipalities competing in magnificence of building, the arts of life secure, the farmhouse (in one picture) with the peacocks in the garden under the sunlight, and every accompanying element of enjoyment and repose. The only sorrow which disturbed such an age was the sometimes transient regret that all the great things had been accomplished; that humanity, in a completely rational society, had nothing to contemplate in the future but a continuous repetition of the present—an endless end of the world. A few generations later that farmhouse lies deserted, the cities are crumbling into ruin, society itself has fallen to pieces, terror, and with terror childlike superstition and ferocity, have achieved dominance. Night has resumed her ancient Empire. What guarantee does the present offer against the repetition of a similar catastrophe? Civilisation possesses weapons adequate to protection against forces without. It has no protection against forces within. One of the passing figures in Mr. Wells’s vision of desolation mourns over the vanishing of all the bright hopes of a transfigured world. “The sense of fine beginnings! It was all a sham. There were no beginnings. We’re just ants in ant-hill circles, in a world that doesn’t matter: that goes on and rambles into nothingness. New York—New York doesn’t even strike me as horrible. New York was nothing but an ant-hill kicked to pieces by a fool.”

These observers are justified at least in one contention: that the future, whether in orderly progress or with sudden or gradual retrogression, will be astonished at the “illusion of security” in which to-day society reposes; forgetting that but a thin crust separates it from the central elemental fires, that the heart of the earth is a flame. There are forces of resistance to disintegration and decay, even amongst this shabby crowd which appears to the indignant observer but an aggregation of aimless, impossible lives. Mr. Wells himself in earlier work has shown us the humanity and romantic ardour of Mr. Hoopdriver and the resolute hope of Mr. Lewisham, even if in later effort he can see little but the fatuous ineptitude of Mr. “Art” Kipps or the ineffective blunderings of Mr. Bert Smallways. Mr. Anatole France has revealed in his studies of contemporary life kindly intelligent citizens, doing bravely the work of the day. In no panic fear, certainly with no acquiescence and despair, the reformer to-day will contemplate the possible future of a society beyond measure complex, baffling and uncertain in its energies and aims. But the warning, always useful, but now more than ever necessary, cannot be too strongly emphasised: that with the vertical division between nation and nation armed to the teeth, and the horizontal division between rich and poor which has become a cosmopolitan fissure, the future of progress is still doubtful and precarious. Humanity—at best—appears but as a shipwrecked crew which has taken refuge on a narrow ledge of rock, beaten by wind and wave; which cannot tell how many, if any at all, will survive when the long night gives place to morning. The wise man will still go softly all his days; working always for greater economic equality on the one hand, for understanding between estranged peoples on the other; apprehending always how slight an effort of stupidity or violence could strike a death-blow to twentieth-century civilisation, and elevate the forces of destruction triumphant over the ruins of a world.