Now that my leg has been smashed up hopelessly, by that wretched German
shell, I shall never ride or shoot again. I have to content myself with
writing books to occupy my time, a very poor form of amusement compared
to tramping the fields after partridge. I suppose it is inevitable that
a man in my position should indulge in regretful memories. My mind
goes back now and then to certain days in my boyhood and I find myself
picturing scenes through which I shall not move again.
There are fields stretching back from the demesne which used to be mine.
In the autumn many of them were stubble fields and among them were gorse
covered hills. I used to go through them with my gun and dogs in early
October mornings. There were--no doubt there still are, though I
shall not see them--very fine threads of gossamer stretching across
astonishingly wide spaces. The dew hung on them in tiny drops and
glittered when the sun rose clear of the light mist and shone on them.
Sometimes the threads floated free in the air, attached to some object
at one end, the rest borne about by faint breaths of wind, waved to and
fro, seeking other attachment elsewhere. Some threads reached from tufts
of grass to little hummocks or to the twigs which form the boles of elm
trees. Others still, with less ambitious span, went only from one blade
of grass to another or united the thorns of whin bushes. The lower air,
near the earth, was full of these threads. They formed an indescribably
delicate net cast right over the fields and hills. I used to see them
glistening, rainbow coloured when the sun rays struck them. Oftener I
was aware of their presence only when my hands had touched and broken
them or when they clung to my clothes, dragged from their fastenings by
my passing through them.
I have no idea what place these gossamer threads occupy in the economy
of nature. I find it difficult to believe that the life of the fields
and gorsy hills and young plantations would be either better or worse if
there were no such thing as gossamer. But I am no longer contented with
my ignorance. I mean to find out all that is known about gossamer, and
satisfy myself of the truth of the tradition that the threads are spun
by tiny spiders, though surely with very little hope of snaring flies.
I spent six months making the tour which Ascher planned for me. I
returned to London in the spring of 1914, full of interest in what I had
seen and learned. I intend some day to write a book of travels, to give
an account of my experiences. I shall describe the long strip of the
world over which I wandered as a landscape on a quiet autumn morning,
netted over with gossamer. That is the way it strikes me now, looking
back on it all. Ascher and men like him have spun fine threads, covering
every civilised land with a web of credit, infinitely complex, so
delicate that a child’s hand could tear it.
A storm, even a strong breeze comes, and the threads are dragged from
their holdings and waved in wild confusion through the air. A man,
brutal as war, goes striding through the land, and, without knowing what
he does, bursts the filaments and destroys the shimmering beauty which
was before he came. That, I suppose, is what happens. But the passing of
a man, however violent he is, is the passing of a man and no more. Even
if a troop of men marches across the land their marching is over and
done with soon. They have their day, but afterwards there are other
days. Nature is infinitely persistent and gossamer is spun again.
I remember meeting, quite by chance, on a coasting steamer on which
I travelled, a bishop. He was not, judged by strict ecclesiastical
standards, quite entitled to that rank. He belonged to some American
religious organisation of which I had no knowledge, but he called
himself, on the passenger list, Bishop Zacchary Brown. He was apostolic
in his devotion to the Gospel as he understood it. His particular field
of work lay in the northern part of South America. He ranged, so I
understood, through Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela. He was full of hope
for the future of these lands, their spiritual future. I had long talks
with him and discovered that he regarded education, the American form
of it, and commerce, the fruit of American enterprise, as the enemies of
superstition and consequently the handmaids of the Gospel.
He wanted to see schools and colleges scattered over the republic in
which he was interested. He wanted to see these lands heavily fertilised
with capital.
“If you have any spare money,” he said, “put it into----”
I think he said fruit farming in Colombia. Whatever the business was--I
forgot at the time to make a note of the particulars--he promised that
it would develop enormously when the Panama Canal was opened. The advice
may have been perfectly sound; but I do not think it was disinterested.
Bishop Zacchary Brown was not anxious about my future or my fortune. He
did not care, cannot have cared, whether the Panama Canal made me rich
or not. Nor did it seem to him an important thing that the fruit trade
of South America should develop. What he cared for was his conception
of religion. He saw in the inflow of capital the way of triumph for his
Gospel, the means of breaking up old careless, lazy creeds, the infusion
of energy and love of freedom. Ascher, so I conceived the situation,
was to stretch his threads from Calvary to the grapefruit trees of
Cartagena.
At Bahia I was introduced to a Brazilian statesman. I met him first at
the house of one of Ascher’s banker friends. We talked to each other in
French, and, as we both spoke the language badly, understood each other
without much difficulty. It is one of the peculiarities of the French
language that the worse it is spoken the easier it is to understand. A
real Parisian baffles me completely. My Brazilian statesman was almost
always intelligible.
He was interested in international politics, the international politics
of the western hemisphere. I found that he was distrustful of the
growing power of the United States. He suspected a policy of Empire,
a far-reaching scheme of influence, if not actual dominion, centred in
Washington. He regarded the Monroe Doctrine as the root from which such
an extension of power might grow. It was no business of mine to argue
with him, though I am convinced that the citizens of the United States
are of all peoples the least obsessed by the imperial idea. I tried, by
looking sympathetic, to induce him to develop his theory. In the end I
gathered that he hoped for security from the imperial peril through the
increase of wealth and therefore power in the South American republics.
“Our natural resources,” he said, “are enormous, but undeveloped. We
cannot become strong in a military sense. We cannot possess fleets with
which to negotiate----”
I should have said “threaten” instead of “negotiate” for that was
plainly what he meant. But statesmen have to be careful in their use of
words.
“--Unless we can obtain capital with which to develop our wealth. The
great money-lending countries, England and France, ought in their own
interests to pour capital into our republics. The return, in the end,
would be enormous. But more important still, they would establish
a balance of power in the western world. Why do not your financiers
understand?”
Again Ascher. Battleships are to be towed across the ocean, from the
ship yards of the Clyde to these far-off seas, at the ends of the
gossamer threads which Ascher spins. The Gospel and international
politics are caught in the same web. I seemed to see Diocletian the
Emperor and Saint John, who said, “Love not the world,” doing homage
together to the power of capital, leading each other by the hand through
the mazes of the system of credit.
I saw beautiful scenes, wide harbours where stately ships lay anchored,
through whose shining gates fleets of steamers trudged. I never escaped
from the knowledge that the gossamer threads stretched from mast to
mast, a rigging more essential than the ropes of hemp and wire. I
saw the lines of steel on which trains go, stretched out across vast
prairies, and knew that they were not in reality lines of steel at all
but gossamer threads. I saw torrents made the slaves of man, the weight
of falling water transmuted into light and heat and force to drive cars
swiftly through city streets; but all the wheels and giant masses of
forged steel were tied together by these same slender threads which
Ascher spun in the shrine of that Greek temple of his, Ascher and his
fellow bankers.
Always the desire was for more capital. There was room for thousands of
ships instead of hundreds. There were whole territories over which no
trains ran. There was potentiality of wealth so great that, if it were
realised, men everywhere would be raised above the fear of want. A whole
continent was crying out to Ascher that he should fling his web across
it, join point to point with gossamer, in Amazonian jungles, Peruvian
mountain heights, Argentine plains and tropical fruit gardens.
I met and talked with many men whose outlook upon life was profoundly
interesting to me. Those whom I came to know best were Englishmen or
men of English origin. Some of them had built up flourishing businesses,
selling the products of English factories. Some acted as the agents
of steamboat companies, arranging for freights and settling the
destinations of ships which went voyaging. Some grew wheat or bred
cattle. Like all Englishmen whose lot is cast in far countries they
retained their feeling for England as a home and became conscious as
Englishmen in England seldom are, of love for their own land. Like all
Englishmen they grumbled ceaselessly at what they loved.
They spoke with contempt of everything English. They abused English
business methods and complained that Germans were ousting Englishmen
from the markets of the world. They derided English Government
and English statesmanship, ignoring party loyalties with a fine
impartiality. They decried English social customs, contrasting the
freedom of life in the land of their adoption with the convention-bound
ways of their home. Yet it always was their home. I felt that, even when
their contempt expressed itself in the bitterest words.
Whatever their opinions were or their affectations, however widely
their various activities were separated, these men were all consciously
dependent on the smooth working of the system of world-wide credit.
They were Ascher’s clients, or if not Ascher’s, the clients of others
like Ascher. They were in a sense Ascher’s dependents. They were united
to England, to Europe, to each other, by Ascher’s threads. Whether they
bred cattle and sold them, whether they grew corn, whether they shipped
cargoes or imported merchandise, the gossamer net was over them.
I returned to London with these impressions vivid in my mind, perhaps--I
tried to persuade myself of this--too vivid. I had travelled, so I
argued, under the shadow of a great banker. I had gone among bankers.
It was natural, inevitable, that I should see the world through
bankers’ eyes. Perhaps credit was not after all the life blood of our
civilisation. I failed to convince myself. The very fact that I could
go so far under the shadow of a bank proves how large a shadow a bank
throws. The fact that Ascher’s correspondents brought me into touch with
every kind of man, goes to show that banking has permeated, leavened
life, that human society is saturated with finance.
In a very few months, before the end of the summer which followed my
home-coming, I was to see the whole machine stop working suddenly. The
war god stalked across the world and brushed aside, broke, tore, tangled
up, the gossamer threads. Then, long before his march was done, while
awe-struck men and weeping women still listened to the strident clamour
of his arms, the spinners of the webs were at work again, patiently
joining broken threads, flinging fresh filaments across unbridged gulfs,
refastening to their points of attachment the gossamer which seemed so
frail, which yet the storm of violence failed to destroy utterly.