THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY
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
“Cities and thrones and powers
Stand in Time’s eye
Almost as long as flowers
Which daily die.”
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.