THE SPECTACLE.
It was two days later than the events narrated above, that Leacraft
and Thomsen, with Miss Tobit between them, sat in a crowded window on
Hammersmith road watching for the enormous procession that had been
slowly winding through London, with offices and services, halts and
functions, as the King sadly led the departure of the English people
from the Mother of Nations.
And the vast pageant approached. Down Kensington road its first
glittering sallies were seen, the block of London police, a gorgeous
cavalcade behind them of the peers of the realm, and in the
immeasurable distance the shimmering parts, that looked stationary,
and yet were coming on with ample speed. The blaring trumpets in the
bands drew near, the street was cleared from curb to curb, the dense
assemblage, covering stoop and roof, and leaning from every window
became silent, the reiterated thud of the falling feet was heard,
and in an instant the marching host was passing beneath them. The
police and the peers of the realm passed in silence or with barely
noticeable tokens of recognition. The peers presented a dazzling array,
on superbly caparisoned horses, and in the regalia of their separate
stations, with a bearing of unmistakable dignity, and possessing in
a large measure the impress and gift of English manly beauty, they
uttered the note of _caste_. Behind them came the marshalled Church,
a wonderful picture; choirs of boys, surpliced and gowned, in open
carriages, priests and bishops, in their robes of office, with flying
standards of chapel, church or cathedral, golden lambs, crosses and
crowns, figures and mottes on white silk or ruby silk, in wavering
confusion, while hymns in wavering sopranos rose petulantly, or again
with sustained vitality and strength. It appealed to the people
strangely. They became very still, and faces contorted with sobs, or
heads bowed to hide the unbidden tears for a few moments drew a veil of
gloom over the splendid show. After the Church and the peers, a forest
of equipages brought in view the marvellous display of the robed and
crowned peeresses, and succeeding this shining cloud of matrons, that
gave the touch of tenderness, the atmosphere of feminine companionship,
and endurance, as if the mothers of England responded in this untoward
hour with an embracing sympathy; after them came the King’s Household
and the King, with outriders, equerries, and panoplied footmen, a
miracle of ostentatious and ceremonial color. His equipage was drawn
by ten jet black stallions, with diapers of the King’s colors on their
backs, and a line of ancient guardsmen, with pikes in their hands,
hedging them in, and a footman in sparkling white at the head of each
horse. The King was himself robed in the gowns of his high estate, and
was uncovered, the Crown resting on a cushion in front of him. A cheer
rent the air, unfurled flags and fluttering handkerchiefs, turned a
sea of faces into an ocean of white and red pennants. The King gravely
acknowledged the salute and bowed to right and left. He was alone;
the Queen had been enthroned among the peeresses. After the King came
the Mayor of London, with all the antiquated grandeur of his office,
coach, beef eaters, and all, and the people settled back again to their
luncheons, which had been interrupted by the King.
Then came the troops. The display was exhaustive. It was conceived upon
a scale of imperial magnificence, and it appealed in the succession of
its gorgeous units to the historic sense, to that divine purpose of
continuity which every Englishman instinctively appropriates to his
race and nation. It represented the chronological development of the
English army. As its sonorous length defiled before Leacraft, he saw
an objective symbol--nay, the corporeal fact--of England’s growing
power; regiment after regiment made a pictorial calendar from 1660 to
1900, and to the informed mind what a vista of martial glory, what
a presentation of advance and retreat over the tractless wastes of
the world, they made! It was a trampling chronicle of woe and fame,
shame and satisfaction; it embodied the progress of ideas, the clash
of political tendencies, the spreading domination of English rule; it
was a panorama of battles, the tide of victory, the ebbing terrors
of defeat; it reflected the pages of political designs, political
subterfuge, political confusion; the music that swelled from its ranks
now sent the long waves of its solemn processional melody through the
thrilled spectators, now in limpid folk-songs, quivered delightfully in
their ears, and now again summoned them to their feet with the stately
and pious invocation of the nation’s hymn.
The scarlet uniforms of the First Life Guards passed, and Maestricht,
Boyne, the Peninsular, and Waterloo, flashed in view--the regiment
which was raised in Holland by King Charles the Second, and was
composed of eighty gentlemen, whose sobriquet of the “cheeses,” along
with other Life Guards, had been acquired from the contemptuous
refusal of their veterans to serve in them when remodelled, because
they were no longer composed of gentlemen, but of cheesemongers.
Again, the Second Life Guards revived the stained memory of the
Stuarts, its own exile in the Netherlands, its return with the
restoration; and its sea green facings pleasantly restored for a
moment the face of the injured Queen Caroline. Here were the Royal
Horse Guards, that inherited, or at least might claim the virtues of
the Parliamentary army, which fought with dogmas at the ends of their
pike-staffs, and convictions in their hearts. Now passed the First
Dragoon Guards, that carried on its proud records the Battle of the
Boyne in 1690, Oudenarde in 1708, Malplaquet in 1709, Fontenoy in 1745,
Waterloo in 1815, and Pekin in 1860, though to Leacraft’s sensitive
mind the last was an inscription of disgrace. The beating hoofs of the
“Queen’s Bays,” the Second Dragoon Guards, hurried the reminiscent
admirer back to Lucknow and the Indian Mutiny. The nodding plumes of
the Prince of Wales, with the Rising Sun, and the Red Dragon which
came in view with the Third Dragoon Guards, unfailingly recalled to
the custodians of English military renown, that the regiment captured
the standard and kettle drums of the Bavarian Guards at the Battle of
Ramilies. Trampling on the heels of their horses, the lordly “Blue
Horse” defiled past, and the Fifth Dragoon Guards, which supported
the vital legend, “_Vestigia nulla retrorsum_,” and which captured
four standards at the Battle of Blenheim. Still the endless lines
advanced, wavered, stood still, and again with rattling and shivering
harness, passed. Now it was the Second Dragoons, the Scotch Greys,
raised in Scotland, and older than any other dragoons in the British
army, that started the furious applause, an ovation not unintelligently
bestowed--for it was they who captured the colors of the French at
Ramilies, and their standards at Dettingen. Now it was the “Black
Dragoons,” the Sixth, on its glistening horses--once part of the
Inniskilling forces, and still bearing as its crest the Castle of
Inniskilling; now the Eighth Hussars, whose Protestant fealty had made
their founders defenders of William of Orange at the Battle of the
Boyne, and who, with signal power, captured forty-four stands of colors
and seventy-two guns at the Battle of Leswarree. Now the Fifteenth
Hussars, who bore upon their helmets the dazzling inscription, “Five
Battalions of French defeated and taken by this Regiment, with their
Colors, and nine pieces of cannon, at Emsdorf, 16th of July, 1760.”
Swelling hearts greeted the Grenadier Guards, rich in the legacy of the
fame of the defeated French Imperial Guards.
Here were the Dublin Fusileers--the “Green Linnets,” the “Die
Hards”--the East Surries--the West Yorks--and Devons, who had been
part of that indiscriminate blunder and glory--the Boer War.
And now the infantry, in closing ranks, unrolled the endless phalanxes.
Where regiments, as entire units, were absent, companies took their
places, and English cheers saluted the swinging standards. The
Thirty-fifth, which took the Royal Roussillon French Grenadiers at the
Battle of Quebec--the Thirty-fourth, which impregnably covered the
retreat from Fontenoy--the Thirty-ninth, which defended Gibraltar in
1780, and captured the insurgents’ guns and standards at Maharajpore,
in 1843, along with the Fortieth--the Forty-second, with the red heckle
in its bonnets, to commemorate its capture of the French standards of
the “Invincible Legion,” in 1801, as well as for its distinguished
ardor in the Battle of Guildermalsen, in 1795, and the “Little Fighting
Toms” stirred the crowds, and even to those who regarded the pageant
with glances of bitterness, as the hollow mask of a cruel abdication,
even to their glassy stare, this epic review brought a momentary gleam
of gratitude and pride.
Here was the Forty-sixth, whose colonel, with the English nonchalence
which always wins so enduring a regard with Englishmen, in spite of
a kind of artifice of mere stubbornness in it, preached a sermon
to his men, under a heavy fire, about the Lacedemonians and their
discipline--and which, at least to an American, awoke only hateful
memories--and here the Fiftieth, “The Blind Half Hundred,” who fought
with damaged eyes in Egypt, and who shone resplendent with courage and
gallant sacrifice at Vimiera--Ah! and here was the Fifty-seventh--“the
Die Hards”--which had thirty bullets through the King’s colors, and
only one officer out of twenty-four, and one hundred and sixty-eight
men out of five hundred and eighty-four left standing at Albuera. The
people shouted and stormed, an avalanche of flags suddenly sprang up
over the walled street, and at points showers of flowers and bags of
fruit descended in a tornado of delight. Surely, if Englishmen had such
blood in them, the nation would yet live.
Here were the men from India, the regiments of the Seventy-third, the
Seventy-fourth, wearing the badge of the “elephant,” the Seventy-sixth,
too, that unfurled its victorious pennants at the Battle of Leswarree,
and the Seventy-seventh and Seventy-eighth, and on, on, straight in
the line, brave squadrons, whose illusive recognition in a numeral,
connoted glorious deeds, defiant strength, the prodigal powers of
the brave. The thundering salutations drowned the rollicking music
of “Clear the Way,” the cry at Barrosso, which with fife and drum
announced the approach of the Eighty-seventh--the Prince of Wales’ own
Irish--and the Eighty-eighth, the Connaught Rangers, whose more loving
sobriquet was “The Devil’s Own Connaught Boys,” from its gallantry
in action, and its irregularities in quarters. Uniform and vanity
with reciprocal enhancement made the Argyleshire Highlanders and the
Gordon Highlanders and the Sutherland Highlanders an envious spectacle
to manly youth, a vision of ingratiating heroes to feminine beauty.
Again India sprang back to memory, perhaps not without, to souls of
Leacraft’s fibre, inflicting some stinging stabs of remorse, when the
One Hundred Foot, the One Hundred and Second Foot, “the Lambs,” the
One Hundred and Third Foot, “the Old Toughs,” the One Hundred and
Fourth Foot, and Seventh, and Eighth, and Ninth marched past, with
ear shattering dim, in resplendent waves of color, and expressing the
English temperament of reserved force, and intelligent determination,
with, to the more analytical observer, a suggestion of brutal power in
their sturdy and inelastic tramp.
And then came the people of the Earth, from the ends of the world they
came; the wild, the exotic, the uncouth, the suave, and treacherous,
the mystic, the benign, the terrible, in all garbs, in vestures of wool
and silk and cotton, in no small numbers without much vesture. It was
a web of hues, a carpet of figures and dyes, a lithe and sinuous and
portentous living worm, each zone of its immense length, as it swayed
and twisted and halted, and then slipped on with ludicrous indecision
and disorder, made up of races, ethnic blotches or flowers from the
round prolific globe. The army had been history, the procession now
became psychological, a review of temperaments, endowments, climates,
proclivities and talents; nay it wore the aspect of a zoological
medley, a vast menagery of animal products, that with growl and
scream, trumpetings or fluttering wings gave to the congeries of
men and women who walked among them, or with them, the sentiment
and resemblance of the parade of the beasts before Adam. As if with
England’s dislodgement, the shaken countries of the earth emptied out
their populations in her wake, disturbed in all their resting places by
her calamity; spilled from their hidden corners into the shining light
of day, and bringing with them the animals of the fields and the birds
of the air. And the air itself was cruelly brilliant. The severity of
outlines, the sharp shadows, the nipping frostiness in the shades,
where the sun was not found, told the weary story that England had lost
her climate, and was swept back in a normal alignment with the cold and
feeble countries of the pole.
What is this odd group accentuated in the midst of all this confusion
of types by a more bizarre strangeness, the quizzical fatuity and
simpering idiocy of devotion--grinning _shikaris_ from the Tibet with
prayer wheels--from the lofty valleys of Baltistan and Ladakh, from
Kargil and Maulbek Chamba--incredible children from the East with their
rotating brass wheels, with a woman or so, proudly walking among them
carrying a burden of wealth in her turquoise and carnelian encrusted
pberak bound around her head and terminating in a black knotted fringe
behind her neck.
And straggling on their tracks come the Malays from Pinang and
Dindings, from Malaca and Singapore, the small brown men, enduring,
brighteyed, straight black-haired, in jackets, trousers and
sarongs--the tartan skirt fastened around the waist, and reaching to
the knee--and with a raja sprinkled among them with a yellow umbrella
over him, a dandy nonchalance printing his sleek cheek with dimples.
And India, the nursery of religions, of dreams, of talking and sleeping
and famishing men, followed, and for an instant Leacraft thought of
Kim’s journey “from Umballa through Kalka and the Pinjore gardens near
by up to Simla,” which Kipling told; he thought on “the flush of the
morning laid along the distant snows; the branched cacti; tier upon
tier the stony hillsides; the voices of a thousand water channels; the
chatter of the monkeys, the solemn deodars, climbing one after another,
with down-drooped branches; the vista of the plains rolled far out
beneath them; the incessant twanging of the tonga horns and the wild
rush of the led horses, the halt for prayers, the evening conference by
the halting places, when camels and bullocks chewed solemnly together.”
He closed his eyes in a revery, and the next opened them upon the very
thing. Here were the bullocks, the monkeys, the camels, and here too
came the hulking elephants. Dravidians from the southern peninsular, in
shawls; the Hill tribes, in coats; the high caste Hindus, in skirts and
turbans; Mussulmen from Cashmere, and a few Indian Princes, with their
suites, in a coruscation of gem stones, made up a train of spectacles
that drew the eager crowds together, almost to the obliteration of
the narrow string of exotics that, a little shabbily, shuffled along
between them, with however the Princes on horseback or swung in state
in palanquins.
But here came Egypt bearing her witness of the universality of that
power which, with her, at least, had seemed to play the part of a
benevolent trustee and guide. No longer the impetuous crowds crushed
the line of march; behind the blaring band that now approached rode
Lord Kitchener, Sirdar of the Egyptian army who had resumed his ancient
post and from an overwrought sentiment for exoneration, announced his
desire to remain there and thus efface the irreconcileable differences
which had caused Lord Curzon’s retirement from India. It was a
magnanimous action and had deeply ingratiated this popular hero in
the favor of the nation. Lord Kitchener, with his staff, preceded,
in military stateliness, and with smart precision, five regiments or
groups of Egyptian soldiers. These were combined or selected so as to
make a bouquet of colors, but essentially business like also in their
serious regularity, a demeanor fortified to the point of affectation by
the plaudits and unconcealed admiration of the hosts of people on the
streets, and protruding from every point above them. There were Arab
lancers--in light blue uniforms, almost too delicate in tone for daily
travel, the bodies of the camel corps, with the blackest type of men in
the Sudanese infantry regiments, assimilating to the soil of the desert
in the color of their khaki costume, and then other details of the
military organization, gleaming in immaculate white trousers and coats.
It was unmistakably effective, and it imparted moral strength to this
illimitable advertisement of physical power. It recalled the campaigns
of Khartum and Omdurman, and memorialized that time-worn boast of
the English rehabilitation of Egypt; a fact certainly, but not to be
distinguished as a very incredible achievement.
The spectacle closed with Zulus and Hottentots, the bushmen of
Australia, some dejected New Zealanders, and a picturesque assortment
of Jamaican negroes, who tramped along with amusement in their
staring eyes, and a raggedness of deportment, reflecting the wasteful
and careless way of the tropics. Nor were there wanting Greeks from
Cyprus. And at the last the loyalty of the Colonies was splendidly
emphasized, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Natal,
Bermuda, the Bahamas, contributed a final burst of patriotic zeal,
and seemed to open the wide earth, to their kindred in the English
island, for home-making and re-establishment. Nor was the show of
devotion fortuitous or hollow. It was sincere. It represented a sudden
_rapprochement_, an instantaneous and valid impulse of sympathy and
support. Nothing had ever happened in the history of the English
people, which had had so vital an influence in stimulating unity
among the English themselves, which so peremptorily flung them into
each other’s arms, and in a great peril summoned to the surface the
inextinguishable claims of blood, ancestry, tradition, instincts,
and pride, advancing them to a solidarity never before realised.
Its effects were very apparent. The pictures of Hope, lit up by the
imaginative flamings of Ambition, almost at times, at this dread
moment, gave to the future in the new habitations awaiting them, an
unexpected salubrity and beauty. The English leaders dreamed of new
achievements, a new literature, a greatness vastly exceeding all
historic records.
Three days after the parade, which Leacraft saw so magniloquently
evolved in the streets of London, at Tilbury, the King left English
soil, to transplant the symbols and the functions of the English
government to Australia, and to begin the new experiment. The hills,
the fields, the shores, were all too contracted to hold the army and
the people, gathered in one sublime throb of loyalty and affection
to witness the inexpressible event. The King wearing the uniform of
a Field Marshall issued from a royal tent and with uncovered head
moved towards the shore where his barge was moored. The moment was
statuesque; the immeasurable multitude with a wave of heart breaking
emotion uncovered; the national hymn played by a string and wind
orchestra of four hundred pieces pierced the air with its magnificent
undulation of melody, and a selected chorus led the engulfing tide
of song. Amid the surges of vocal outpouring the parks of artillery
belched their resounding salutes, the lines of war vessels with their
crews at attention returned the iron throated call, and the King
standing below the sweeping oars, turned for an instant towards the
shore, and then regained his first posture of immovable fixture upon
the pregnable sides of the Dreadnought, whither each stroke of those
fateful oarsmen was swiftly sending him.
The suspense was insupportable, the poignant crushing terror of it all,
the incredible predicament of a nation bodily leaving its birth place,
stunned the crowds, and in silence with a thousand varying episodes
throughout its interminable acres, the populace stood, dumb as the
unresponsive rock, apparently as apathetic as the herding cows.
Then at sunfall the Dreadnought, followed by an escort of cruisers
heavily churned the waters, and passed down the Thames, from its
mouth into the Channel, and so on to the open sea, and with it went
the concentrated expression of the Idea of the English empire--the
King. How strangely immobile is Nature! A race which had covered
its literary vestures with the garlands of poetry, wrought from the
imagery in nature’s picture-book, which had spent its brain and
industry in winning for nature new devotees, and new sacrifices of
praises and idolatry, which had enthroned among its chiefest charms
its surrender to the control of nature, in this hour of torturing
doubt, disenthronement and eviction won no sign of recognition. The
day closed brightly. The sun went down in a sky of unchecked splendor,
and the moon-illuminated night bathed the ancient bastions of Tilbury
with an argent sheen. The terrible event found no reflection in the
august calmness and serenity of Nature. “Its withers were unwrung.”
Enveloped in the processes of decay and change, the lapse of a kingdom
was but a paltry contribution to the chronicle of destroyed continents,
and shattered worlds. There was no contact between its mechanism
and the obliteration of a sentiment, or an idea, or moral regime.
Nothing short of a change in atmospheric pressure would bring tears to
its face, or agony in its deportment. And what in any case was this
desertion of a land, the removal of a people? It was subordinated to
fluctuations of an oceanic river, to the up and down shiverings of
the crust of the earth. It was a part of the huge drama part of the
inlaid order of things, as determined at creation, when the ways and
means of shaping the world, and all things in it, were inaugurated.
Why should the disappearance of a condition shock a system of
disappearances and appearances, which is another name for the unceasing
orbit of revolutions in the face of the earth, and which is nature? An
individual counts for nothing in the lapse of twenty-four hours gone
or come. Why in the aeons gone and the aeons yet to come should the
migration of a people, or the emptying of a vestige of the earth’s
surface merit notice? And so the elements did not hasten to weep, or
storm, or furiously proclaim their commiseration, and the whispering
calls of the half revived summer from pond and wood and meadow retained
their old time sweetness.
Thus it happened, but from the mouth of men and women, and prompted
deeply in their yearning soul, rose clouds of prayers that night, for
the safety of the King, and ever and anon as troops marched over the
roads in the cold summer night the hymn:
Lord of the Wave and Deep,
Save those at Sea,
Their path upon the Ocean keep,
And let them see
Thy hand each passing day,
Thy Ministry of Peace.
was played with bewitching plaintiveness. Men and women stopped and
sang it aloud as the regiments went by, and sometimes a company of
troopers added with resounding vigor their sonorous refrain.
The Prime Minister and Mr. Birrell, and Mr. Asquith, who had been
associated in 1906, in the famous dead lock between the Commons
and the House of Lords over the Educational Bill, prepared on the
departure of the King a statement which really was a programme of
evacuation. It contemplated a progressive transference of the people
from England, a slowly consummated shrinkage of the business facilities
and the moderated outflow of capital to the new centres of English
activity. In this way some check would ensue to the frightful fall in
the land values and rentals, apart from the practical consideration
of the physical impossibility of at once removing forty millions of
people. The government had usurped unusual powers in the creation
of a Committee of Direction, which by a house to house canvass, an
exhaustive survey of all titles, and a comparative estimate of the
hardship imposed by emigration to different families, with immense
labor, had prepared an itemized list of departure of the families
of London. This plan had been copied in the large cities of the
kingdom, and a co-operative scheme framed, which comprised a detailed
prescription of the time of sailing, and the places of settlement
for all persons listed. These lists were commonly referred to as the
“Doomsday Rolls.” The scope of the committee’s power was comprehensive.
It prohibited to individuals and to societies, federations and unions,
independent action, without explicit conference with the committee. It
proved to be a most helpful device, and lessened to the lowest possible
percentage of hardship the suffering of the people.
Leacraft and his new friends freed themselves from the jurisdiction
of the committee, by announcing their intention to go to America, and
upon ample evidence of their ability to do so, and their independent
financial standing.
It was fully understood that the evacuation was to be a sustained,
gradual movement, with, however, an irreversible determination to
make it finally complete. It was not believed that England had
become utterly uninhabitable, or that some vestiges of its former
occupation might not be still maintained. A part of the plan of
evacuation involved an affectionate care of its greater monuments of
architecture, if possible, though the fierceness of the winter winds
augured unhappily for the success of this design. A regency of love
at any rate was to be established, and as many links as possible of
connection, sentimental and real, were to be left unbroken.
And Edinburgh? Thomsen had woefully noted every day the scanty
paragraphs which entered the papers, and which gave brief intimations
of the devastating and continuous storms, which, through the winter,
swept over Scotland. As if, in order that the impending changes
might be most forcibly realized, and the loss of time averted from
too leniently interpreting the enormous seasonal metamorphosis going
on, nature had exhausted her power in developing disaster. Terrific
gales had lashed the rocky coasts, fierce insatiable blizzards had
devouringly raged in the interior, and the pitiless and untired skies
had emptied avalanches of snow upon the southern counties of Scotland.
Edinburgh became a storm centre. With whirling inconstancy the storms
beat upon the doomed city from the East and West; buildings were almost
buried in the banked up and superimposed drifts, crested ranges were
in the streets, and palisades of snow tortured into fantastic shapes,
towered over the outer eminences, fed from the blinding torrents of
flakes driven off from the Pentland hills and the Salisbury Crags.
These summits alone, in the whitened waste, lifted their scraped crowns
to the thickened skies. Edinburgh had become a city of the Frost King,
and his slumbering legions bivouacked on and around it, except when
aroused to riotous commotions by the sudden descent of the whistling
armies of the wind.
These details were rather incoherently reported, as the spring
advanced, and an occasional survivor from the north made his way
out of the beleaguered capital. When the spring had fairly ripened
into summer, an energetic effort was made to reach Edinburgh, and it
succeeded. Scotland at that time became inundated, and though the
enormous accumulations of snow refused at once to surrender their
blockade, they were so deeply broached and undermined that the North
British line pushed a train forward to the edge of the city, though
unable to reach its depot in the heart of the city, by reason of the
hammered wedge of snow which it encountered under the Castle’s cliffs.
After cutting their way out, to the Lothian Road, the explorers
began investigations and were horror stricken to find that immense
conflagration had broken out, destroying great sections of the city,
which owed its partial survival to the masses of invading snow. These
fires had started in the houses occupied by the domestic bandits, who
had seized the finest residences, provisioned them from the stores,
and surrendered themselves to an orgy of rapine and indulgence, by
which their own fears were stifled, through the excesses of their
drunken dissipation. Hundreds of these unfortunates had perished in
the flames, their recklessness had invoked. The picture of the noble
and beautiful city was shocking. The fires had made inroads upon the
attractive Princes street, and in the portions west of the Caledonian
station, towards the Donaldson hospital, gaping openings and swept
acres revealed the unchecked fury of the flames. While it was probable
that the city might, with a return of auspicious conditions resume
some of its old beauty it was also too plain that the veto of Nature
had been indelibly written across all such plans. Glaciers had already
begun their formation in the Highlands, and the incipient development
of an Ice Age was forcibly proclaimed on every hand. The logic of
events was unanswerable. The United Kingdom throughout all its parts
must participate again in the benighted life of Labrador and Siberia.
And Europe throughout its borders felt the poignant exasperation of
the Arctic goad. It trembled with a new apprehension. The touch of
those icy fingers, stretched out in myriad lines of approach, swarming
like wavering steel points in thick onslaught from the crowded skies,
made it suddenly anxious. It corrected its habits, it took council of
piety and played with beseeching care its pretty role of devotee. Its
ridiculous and wicked society, with futile haste filled the churches,
and tried to forget its inherited cruelty, and even turned with an
unexpected solicitude to the consideration of improving, in some sure
way, the state of the untitled majority. Its scientific men rushed into
congresses and explored their text books, and read and reread hopeless
papers on the _why_ and _how_ of it, but being unable to invent another
Gulf Stream, retired into dismal prognostications of a returning Ice
Age. In fact deluded, as scientific men often are, by language, they
embraced the thought of a “returning Ice Cap,” which would successfully
force its way from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. They nervously
began measurements of the Alpine glaciers, took temperatures, wandered
up in the higher regions of the atmosphere in balloons, sounded the
floor of the ocean, established meteorological stations everywhere,
and became so excited and convinced that they were happily on hand at
a critical geological juncture, that they succeeded in supplying a
technical ground for panic.
The statesmen and economists were more useful. They estimated the
results of any continued lowering of the temperatures, the effects
of climatic alterations on life and production, especially in grain,
and found that the southern countries of Europe were in some danger,
and the northern countries very really threatened with a commercial
overthrow, as England had been. They too turned to the colonies of
their respective countries for refuge. It looked as if the bursting
receptacles of European Culture were about to explode and scatter over
the ends of the world the germinal seeds of its civilization.