Section 1
The task that lay before the Assembly of Brissago, viewed as we
may view it now from the clarifying standpoint of things
accomplished, was in its broad issues a simple one. Essentially
it was to place social organisation upon the new footing that the
swift, accelerated advance of human knowledge had rendered
necessary. The council was gathered together with the haste of a
salvage expedition, and it was confronted with wreckage; but the
wreckage was irreparable wreckage, and the only possibilities of
the case were either the relapse of mankind to the agricultural
barbarism from which it had emerged so painfully or the
acceptance of achieved science as the basis of a new social
order. The old tendencies of human nature, suspicion, jealousy,
particularism, and belligerency, were incompatible with the
monstrous destructive power of the new appliances the inhuman
logic of science had produced. The equilibrium could be restored
only by civilisation destroying itself down to a level at which
modern apparatus could no longer be produced, or by human nature
adapting itself in its institutions to the new conditions. It was
for the latter alternative that the assembly existed.
Sooner or later this choice would have confronted mankind. The
sudden development of atomic science did but precipitate and
render rapid and dramatic a clash between the new and the
customary that had been gathering since ever the first flint was
chipped or the first fire built together. From the day when man
contrived himself a tool and suffered another male to draw near
him, he ceased to be altogether a thing of instinct and
untroubled convictions. From that day forth a widening breach can
be traced between his egotistical passions and the social need.
Slowly he adapted himself to the life of the homestead, and his
passionate impulses widened out to the demands of the clan and
the tribe. But widen though his impulses might, the latent hunter
and wanderer and wonderer in his imagination outstripped their
development. He was never quite subdued to the soil nor quite
tamed to the home. Everywhere it needed teaching and the priest
to keep him within the bounds of the plough-life and the
beast-tending. Slowly a vast system of traditional imperatives
superposed itself upon his instincts, imperatives that were
admirably fitted to make him that cultivator, that cattle-mincer,
who was for twice ten thousand years the normal man.
And, unpremeditated, undesired, out of the accumulations of his
tilling came civilisation. Civilisation was the agricultural
surplus. It appeared as trade and tracks and roads, it pushed
boats out upon the rivers and presently invaded the seas, and
within its primitive courts, within temples grown rich and
leisurely and amidst the gathering medley of the seaport towns
rose speculation and philosophy and science, and the beginning of
the new order that has at last established itself as human life.
Slowly at first, as we traced it, and then with an accumulating
velocity, the new powers were fabricated. Man as a whole did not
seek them nor desire them; they were thrust into his hand. For a
time men took up and used these new things and the new powers
inadvertently as they came to him, recking nothing of the
consequences. For endless generations change led him very
gently. But when he had been led far enough, change quickened the
pace. It was with a series of shocks that he realised at last
that he was living the old life less and less and a new life more
and more.
Already before the release of atomic energy the tensions between
the old way of living and the new were intense. They were far
intenser than they had been even at the collapse of the Roman
imperial system. On the one hand was the ancient life of the
family and the small community and the petty industry, on the
other was a new life on a larger scale, with remoter horizons and
a strange sense of purpose. Already it was growing clear that men
must live on one side or the other. One could not have little
tradespeople and syndicated businesses in the same market,
sleeping carters and motor trolleys on the same road, bows and
arrows and aeroplane sharpshooters in the same army, or
illiterate peasant industries and power-driven factories in the
same world. And still less it was possible that one could have
the ideas and ambitions and greed and jealousy of peasants
equipped with the vast appliances of the new age. If there had
been no atomic bombs to bring together most of the directing
intelligence of the world to that hasty conference at Brissago,
there would still have been, extended over great areas and a
considerable space of time perhaps, a less formal conference of
responsible and understanding people upon the perplexities of
this world-wide opposition. If the work of Holsten had been
spread over centuries and imparted to the world by imperceptible
degrees, it would nevertheless have made it necessary for men to
take counsel upon and set a plan for the future. Indeed already
there had been accumulating for a hundred years before the crisis
a literature of foresight; there was a whole mass of 'Modern
State' scheming available for the conference to go upon. These
bombs did but accentuate and dramatise an already developing
problem.
Section 2
This assembly was no leap of exceptional minds and
super-intelligences into the control of affairs. It was
teachable, its members trailed ideas with them to the gathering,
but these were the consequences of the 'moral shock' the bombs
had given humanity, and there is no reason for supposing its
individual personalities were greatly above the average. It
would be possible to cite a thousand instances of error and
inefficiency in its proceedings due to the forgetfulness,
irritability, or fatigue of its members. It experimented
considerably and blundered often. Excepting Holsten, whose gift
was highly specialised, it is questionable whether there was a
single man of the first order of human quality in the gathering.
But it had a modest fear of itself, and a consequent directness
that gave it a general distinction. There was, of course, a
noble simplicity about Leblanc, but even of him it may be asked
whether he was not rather good and honest-minded than in the
fuller sense great.
The ex-king had wisdom and a certain romantic dash, he was a man
among thousands, even if he was not a man among millions, but his
memoirs, and indeed his decision to write memoirs, give the
quality of himself and his associates. The book makes admirable
but astonishing reading. Therein he takes the great work the
council was doing for granted as a little child takes God. It is
as if he had no sense of it at all. He tells amusing trivialities
about his cousin Wilhelm and his secretary Firmin, he pokes fun
at the American president, who was, indeed, rather a little
accident of the political machine than a representative American,
and he gives a long description of how he was lost for three days
in the mountains in the company of the only Japanese member, a
loss that seems to have caused no serious interruption of the
work of the council…
The Brissago conference has been written about time after time,
as though it were a gathering of the very flower of humanity.
Perched up there by the freak or wisdom of Leblanc, it had a
certain Olympian quality, and the natural tendency of the human
mind to elaborate such a resemblance would have us give its
members the likenesses of gods. It would be equally reasonable
to compare it to one of those enforced meetings upon the
mountain-tops that must have occurred in the opening phases of
the Deluge. The strength of the council lay not in itself but in
the circumstances that had quickened its intelligence, dispelled
its vanities, and emancipated it from traditional ambitions and
antagonisms. It was stripped of the accumulation of centuries, a
naked government with all that freedom of action that nakedness
affords. And its problems were set before it with a plainness
that was out of all comparison with the complicated and
perplexing intimations of the former time.
Section 3
The world on which the council looked did indeed present a task
quite sufficiently immense and altogether too urgent for any
wanton indulgence in internal dissension. It may be interesting
to sketch in a few phrases the condition of mankind at the close
of the period of warring states, in the year of crisis that
followed the release of atomic power. It was a world
extraordinarily limited when one measures it by later standards,
and it was now in a state of the direst confusion and distress.
It must be remembered that at this time men had still to spread
into enormous areas of the land surface of the globe. There were
vast mountain wildernesses, forest wildernesses, sandy deserts,
and frozen lands. Men still clung closely to water and arable
soil in temperate or sub-tropical climates, they lived abundantly
only in river valleys, and all their great cities had grown upon
large navigable rivers or close to ports upon the sea. Over great
areas even of this suitable land flies and mosquitoes, armed with
infection, had so far defeated human invasion, and under their
protection the virgin forests remained untouched. Indeed, the
whole world even in its most crowded districts was filthy with
flies and swarming with needless insect life to an extent which
is now almost incredible. A population map of the world in 1950
would have followed seashore and river course so closely in its
darker shading as to give an impression that homo sapiens was an
amphibious animal. His roads and railways lay also along the
lower contours, only here and there to pierce some mountain
barrier or reach some holiday resort did they clamber above 3000
feet. And across the ocean his traffic passed in definite lines;
there were hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean no ship
ever traversed except by mischance.
Into the mysteries of the solid globe under his feet he had not
yet pierced for five miles, and it was still not forty years
since, with a tragic pertinacity, he had clambered to the poles
of the earth. The limitless mineral wealth of the Arctic and
Antarctic circles was still buried beneath vast accumulations of
immemorial ice, and the secret riches of the inner zones of the
crust were untapped and indeed unsuspected. The higher mountain
regions were known only to a sprinkling of guide-led climbers and
the frequenters of a few gaunt hotels, and the vast rainless
belts of land that lay across the continental masses, from Gobi
to Sahara and along the backbone of America, with their perfect
air, their daily baths of blazing sunshine, their nights of cool
serenity and glowing stars, and their reservoirs of deep-lying
water, were as yet only desolations of fear and death to the
common imagination.
And now under the shock of the atomic bombs, the great masses of
population which had gathered into the enormous dingy town
centres of that period were dispossessed and scattered
disastrously over the surrounding rural areas. It was as if some
brutal force, grown impatient at last at man's blindness, had
with the deliberate intention of a rearrangement of population
upon more wholesome lines, shaken the world. The great
industrial regions and the large cities that had escaped the
bombs were, because of their complete economic collapse, in
almost as tragic plight as those that blazed, and the
country-side was disordered by a multitude of wandering and
lawless strangers. In some parts of the world famine raged, and
in many regions there was plague… The plains of north India,
which had become more and more dependent for the general welfare
on the railways and that great system of irrigation canals which
the malignant section of the patriots had destroyed, were in a
state of peculiar distress, whole villages lay dead together, no
man heeding, and the very tigers and panthers that preyed upon
the emaciated survivors crawled back infected into the jungle to
perish. Large areas of China were a prey to brigand bands…
It is a remarkable thing that no complete contemporary account of
the explosion of the atomic bombs survives. There are, of
course, innumerable allusions and partial records, and it is from
these that subsequent ages must piece together the image of these
devastations.
The phenomena, it must be remembered, changed greatly from day to
day, and even from hour to hour, as the exploding bomb shifted
its position, threw off fragments or came into contact with water
or a fresh texture of soil. Barnet, who came within forty miles
of Paris early in October, is concerned chiefly with his account
of the social confusion of the country-side and the problems of
his command, but he speaks of heaped cloud masses of steam. 'All
along the sky to the south-west' and of a red glare beneath these
at night. Parts of Paris were still burning, and numbers of
people were camped in the fields even at this distance watching
over treasured heaps of salvaged loot. He speaks too of the
distant rumbling of the explosion-'like trains going over iron
bridges.'
Other descriptions agree with this; they all speak of the
'continuous reverberations,' or of the 'thudding and hammering,'
or some such phrase; and they all testify to a huge pall of
steam, from which rain would fall suddenly in torrents and amidst
which lightning played. Drawing nearer to Paris an observer
would have found the salvage camps increasing in number and
blocking up the villages, and large numbers of people, often
starving and ailing, camping under improvised tents because there
was no place for them to go. The sky became more and more
densely overcast until at last it blotted out the light of day
and left nothing but a dull red glare 'extraordinarily depressing
to the spirit.' In this dull glare, great numbers of people were
still living, clinging to their houses and in many cases
subsisting in a state of partial famine upon the produce in their
gardens and the stores in the shops of the provision dealers.
Coming in still closer, the investigator would have reached the
police cordon, which was trying to check the desperate enterprise
of those who would return to their homes or rescue their more
valuable possessions within the 'zone of imminent danger.'
That zone was rather arbitrarily defined. If our spectator could
have got permission to enter it, he would have entered also a
zone of uproar, a zone of perpetual thunderings, lit by a strange
purplish-red light, and quivering and swaying with the incessant
explosion of the radio-active substance. Whole blocks of
buildings were alight and burning fiercely, the trembling, ragged
flames looking pale and ghastly and attenuated in comparison with
the full-bodied crimson glare beyond. The shells of other
edifices already burnt rose, pierced by rows of window sockets
against the red-lit mist.
Every step farther would have been as dangerous as a descent
within the crater of an active volcano. These spinning, boiling
bomb centres would shift or break unexpectedly into new regions,
great fragments of earth or drain or masonry suddenly caught by a
jet of disruptive force might come flying by the explorer's head,
or the ground yawn a fiery grave beneath his feet. Few who
adventured into these areas of destruction and survived attempted
any repetition of their experiences. There are stories of puffs
of luminous, radio-active vapour drifting sometimes scores of
miles from the bomb centre and killing and scorching all they
overtook. And the first conflagrations from the Paris centre
spread westward half-way to the sea.
Moreover, the air in this infernal inner circle of red-lit ruins
had a peculiar dryness and a blistering quality, so that it set
up a soreness of the skin and lungs that was very difficult to
heal…
Such was the last state of Paris, and such on a larger scale was
the condition of affairs in Chicago, and the same fate had
overtaken Berlin, Moscow, Tokio, the eastern half of London,
Toulon, Kiel, and two hundred and eighteen other centres of
population or armament. Each was a flaming centre of radiant
destruction that only time could quench, that indeed in many
instances time has still to quench. To this day, though indeed
with a constantly diminishing uproar and vigour, these explosions
continue. In the map of nearly every country of the world three
or four or more red circles, a score of miles in diameter, mark
the position of the dying atomic bombs and the death areas that
men have been forced to abandon around them. Within these areas
perished museums, cathedrals, palaces, libraries, galleries of
masterpieces, and a vast accumulation of human achievement, whose
charred remains lie buried, a legacy of curious material that
only future generations may hope to examine…
Section 4
The state of mind of the dispossessed urban population which
swarmed and perished so abundantly over the country-side during
the dark days of the autumnal months that followed the Last War,
was one of blank despair. Barnet gives sketch after sketch of
groups of these people, camped among the vineyards of Champagne,
as he saw them during his period of service with the army of
pacification.
There was, for example, that 'man-milliner' who came out from a
field beside the road that rises up eastward out of Epernay, and
asked how things were going in Paris. He was, says Barnet, a
round-faced man, dressed very neatly in black-so neatly that it
was amazing to discover he was living close at hand in a tent
made of carpets-and he had 'an urbane but insistent manner,' a
carefully trimmed moustache and beard, expressive eyebrows, and
hair very neatly brushed.
'No one goes into Paris,' said Barnet.
'But, Monsieur, that is very unenterprising,' the man by the
wayside submitted.
'The danger is too great. The radiations eat into people's
skins.'
The eyebrows protested. 'But is nothing to be done?'
'Nothing can be done.'
'But, Monsieur, it is extraordinarily inconvenient, this living
in exile and waiting. My wife and my little boy suffer
extremely. There is a lack of amenity. And the season advances.
I say nothing of the expense and difficulty in obtaining
provisions… When does Monsieur think that something will be
done to render Paris-possible?'
Barnet considered his interlocutor.
'I'm told,' said Barnet, 'that Paris is not likely to be possible
again for several generations.'
'Oh! but this is preposterous! Consider, Monsieur! What are
people like ourselves to do in the meanwhile? Iam a costumier.
All my connections and interests, above all my style, demand
Paris…'
Barnet considered the sky, from which a light rain was beginning
to fall, the wide fields about them from which the harvest had
been taken, the trimmed poplars by the wayside.
'Naturally,' he agreed, 'you want to go to Paris. But Paris is
over.'
'Over!'
'Finished.'
'But then, Monsieur-what is to become-of ME?'
Barnet turned his face westward, whither the white road led.
'Where else, for example, may I hope to find-opportunity?'
Barnet made no reply.
'Perhaps on the Riviera. Or at some such place as Homburg. Or
some plague perhaps.'
'All that,' said Barnet, accepting for the first time facts that
had lain evident in his mind for weeks; 'all that must be over,
too.'
There was a pause. Then the voice beside him broke out. 'But,
Monsieur, it is impossible! It leaves-nothing.'
'No. Not very much.'
'One cannot suddenly begin to grow potatoes!'
'It would be good if Monsieur could bring himself--'
'To the life of a peasant! And my wife--You do not know the
distinguished delicacy of my wife, a refined helplessness, a
peculiar dependent charm. Like some slender tropical
creeper-with great white flowers… But all this is foolish
talk. It is impossible that Paris, which has survived so many
misfortunes, should not presently revive.'
'I do not think it will ever revive. Paris is finished. London,
too, Iam told-Berlin. All the great capitals were
stricken…'
'But--! Monsieur must permit me to differ.'
'It is so.'
'It is impossible. Civilisations do not end in this manner.
Mankind will insist.'
'On Paris?'
'On Paris.'
'Monsieur, you might as well hope to go down the Maelstrom and
resume business there.'
'I am content, Monsieur, with my own faith.'
'The winter comes on. Would not Monsieur be wiser to seek a
house?'
'Farther from Paris? No, Monsieur. But it is not possible,
Monsieur, what you say, and you are under a tremendous
mistake… Indeed you are in error… I asked merely for
information…'
'When last I saw him,' said Barnet, 'he was standing under the
signpost at the crest of the hill, gazing wistfully, yet it
seemed to me a little doubtfully, now towards Paris, and
altogether heedless of a drizzling rain that was wetting him
through and through…'
Section 5
This effect of chill dismay, of a doom as yet imperfectly
apprehended deepens as Barnet's record passes on to tell of the
approach of winter. It was too much for the great mass of those
unwilling and incompetent nomads to realise that an age had
ended, that the old help and guidance existed no longer, that
times would not mend again, however patiently they held out. They
were still in many cases looking to Paris when the first
snowflakes of that pitiless January came swirling about them. The
story grows grimmer…
If it is less monstrously tragic after Barnet's return to
England, it is, if anything, harder. England was a spectacle of
fear-embittered householders, hiding food, crushing out robbery,
driving the starving wanderers from every faltering place upon
the roads lest they should die inconveniently and reproachfully
on the doorsteps of those who had failed to urge them onward…
The remnants of the British troops left France finally in March,
after urgent representations from the provisional government at
Orleans that they could be supported no longer. They seem to have
been a fairly well-behaved, but highly parasitic force
throughout, though Barnet is clearly of opinion that they did
much to suppress sporadic brigandage and maintain social order.
He came home to a famine-stricken country, and his picture of the
England of that spring is one of miserable patience and desperate
expedients. The country was suffering much more than France,
because of the cessation of the overseas supplies on which it had
hitherto relied. His troops were given bread, dried fish, and
boiled nettles at Dover, and marched inland to Ashford and paid
off. On the way thither they saw four men hanging from the
telegraph posts by the roadside, who had been hung for stealing
swedes. The labour refuges of Kent, he discovered, were feeding
their crowds of casual wanderers on bread into which clay and
sawdust had been mixed. In Surrey there was a shortage of even
such fare as that. He himself struck across country to
Winchester, fearing to approach the bomb-poisoned district round
London, and at Winchester he had the luck to be taken on as one
of the wireless assistants at the central station and given
regular rations. The station stood in a commanding position on
the chalk hill that overlooks the town from the east…
Thence he must have assisted in the transmission of the endless
cipher messages that preceded the gathering at Brissago, and
there it was that the Brissago proclamation of the end of the war
and the establishment of a world government came under his hands.
He was feeling ill and apathetic that day, and he did not realise
what it was he was transcribing. He did it mechanically, as a
part of his tedious duty.
Afterwards there came a rush of messages arising out of the
declaration that strained him very much, and in the evening when
he was relieved, he ate his scanty supper and then went out upon
the little balcony before the station, to smoke and rest his
brains after this sudden and as yet inexplicable press of duty.
It was a very beautiful, still evening. He fell talking to a
fellow operator, and for the first time, he declares, 'I began to
understand what it was all about. I began to see just what
enormous issues had been under my hands for the past four hours.
But I became incredulous after my first stimulation. "This is
some sort of Bunkum," I said very sagely.
'My colleague was more hopeful. "It means an end to
bomb-throwing and destruction," he said. "It means that
presently corn will come from America."
' "Who is going to send corn when there is no more value in
money?" I asked.
'Suddenly we were startled by a clashing from the town below. The
cathedral bells, which had been silent ever since I had come into
the district, were beginning, with a sort of rheumatic
difficulty, to ring. Presently they warmed a little to the work,
and we realised what was going on. They were ringing a peal. We
listened with an unbelieving astonishment and looking into each
other's yellow faces.
' "They mean it," said my colleague.
' "But what can they do now?" I asked. "Everything is broken
down…" '
And on that sentence, with an unexpected artistry, Barnet
abruptly ends his story.
Section 6
From the first the new government handled affairs with a certain
greatness of spirit. Indeed, it was inevitable that they should
act greatly. From the first they had to see the round globe as
one problem; it was impossible any longer to deal with it piece
by piece. They had to secure it universally from any fresh
outbreak of atomic destruction, and they had to ensure a
permanent and universal pacification. On this capacity to grasp
and wield the whole round globe their existence depended. There
was no scope for any further performance.
So soon as the seizure of the existing supplies of atomic
ammunition and the apparatus for synthesising Carolinum was
assured, the disbanding or social utilisation of the various
masses of troops still under arms had to be arranged, the
salvation of the year's harvests, and the feeding, housing, and
employment of the drifting millions of homeless people. In
Canada, in South America, and Asiatic Russia there were vast
accumulations of provision that was immovable only because of the
breakdown of the monetary and credit systems. These had to be
brought into the famine districts very speedily if entire
depopulation was to be avoided, and their transportation and the
revival of communications generally absorbed a certain proportion
of the soldiery and more able unemployed. The task of housing
assumed gigantic dimensions, and from building camps the housing
committee of the council speedily passed to constructions of a
more permanent type. They found far less friction than might have
been expected in turning the loose population on their hands to
these things. People were extraordinarily tamed by that year of
suffering and death; they were disillusioned of their traditions,
bereft of once obstinate prejudices; they felt foreign in a
strange world, and ready to follow any confident leadership. The
orders of the new government came with the best of all
credentials, rations. The people everywhere were as easy to
control, one of the old labour experts who had survived until the
new time witnesses, 'as gangs of emigrant workers in a new land.'
And now it was that the social possibilities of the atomic energy
began to appear. The new machinery that had come into existence
before the last wars increased and multiplied, and the council
found itself not only with millions of hands at its disposal but
with power and apparatus that made its first conceptions of the
work it had to do seem pitifully timid. The camps that were
planned in iron and deal were built in stone and brass; the roads
that were to have been mere iron tracks became spacious ways that
insisted upon architecture; the cultivations of foodstuffs that
were to have supplied emergency rations, were presently, with
synthesisers, fertilisers, actinic light, and scientific
direction, in excess of every human need.
The government had begun with the idea of temporarily
reconstituting the social and economic system that had prevailed
before the first coming of the atomic engine, because it was to
this system that the ideas and habits of the great mass of the
world's dispossessed population was adapted. Subsequent
rearrangement it had hoped to leave to its successors-whoever
they might be. But this, it became more and more manifest, was
absolutely impossible. As well might the council have proposed a
revival of slavery. The capitalist system had already been
smashed beyond repair by the onset of limitless gold and energy;
it fell to pieces at the first endeavour to stand it up again.
Already before the war half of the industrial class had been out
of work, the attempt to put them back into wages employment on
the old lines was futile from the outset-the absolute shattering
of the currency system alone would have been sufficient to
prevent that, and it was necessary therefore to take over the
housing, feeding, and clothing of this worldwide multitude
without exacting any return in labour whatever. In a little while
the mere absence of occupation for so great a multitude of people
everywhere became an evident social danger, and the government
was obliged to resort to such devices as simple decorative work
in wood and stone, the manufacture of hand-woven textiles,
fruit-growing, flower-growing, and landscape gardening on a grand
scale to keep the less adaptable out of mischief, and of paying
wages to the younger adults for attendance at schools that would
equip them to use the new atomic machinery… So quite
insensibly the council drifted into a complete reorganisation of
urban and industrial life, and indeed of the entire social
system.
Ideas that are unhampered by political intrigue or financial
considerations have a sweeping way with them, and before a year
was out the records of the council show clearly that it was
rising to its enormous opportunity, and partly through its own
direct control and partly through a series of specific
committees, it was planning a new common social order for the
entire population of the earth. 'There can be no real social
stability or any general human happiness while large areas of the
world and large classes of people are in a phase of civilisation
different from the prevailing mass. It is impossible now to have
great blocks of population misunderstanding the generally
accepted social purpose or at an economic disadvantage to the
rest.' So the council expressed its conception of the problem it
had to solve. The peasant, the field-worker, and all barbaric
cultivators were at an 'economic disadvantage' to the more mobile
and educated classes, and the logic of the situation compelled
the council to take up systematically the supersession of this
stratum by a more efficient organisation of production. It
developed a scheme for the progressive establishment throughout
the world of the 'modern system' in agriculture, a system that
should give the full advantages of a civilised life to every
agricultural worker, and this replacement has been going on right
up to the present day. The central idea of the modern system is
the substitution of cultivating guilds for the individual
cultivator, and for cottage and village life altogether. These
guilds are associations of men and women who take over areas of
arable or pasture land, and make themselvesresponsible for a
certain average produce. They are bodies small enough as a rule
to be run on a strictly democratic basis, and large enough to
supply all the labour, except for a certain assistance from
townspeople during the harvest, needed upon the land farmed. They
have watchers' bungalows or chalets on the ground cultivated, but
the ease and the costlessness of modern locomotion enables them
to maintain a group of residences in the nearest town with a
common dining-room and club house, and usually also a guild house
in the national or provincial capital. Already this system has
abolished a distinctively 'rustic' population throughout vast
areas of the old world, where it has prevailed immemorially. That
shy, unstimulated life of the lonely hovel, the narrow scandals
and petty spites and persecutions of the small village, that
hoarding, half inanimate existence away from books, thought, or
social participation and in constant contact with cattle, pigs,
poultry, and their excrement, is passing away out of human
experience. In a little while it will be gone altogether. In the
nineteenth century it had already ceased to be a necessary human
state, and only the absence of any collective intelligence and an
imagined need for tough and unintelligent soldiers and for a
prolific class at a low level, prevented its systematic
replacement at that time…
And while this settlement of the country was in progress, the
urban camps of the first phase of the council's activities were
rapidly developing, partly through the inherent forces of the
situation and partly through the council's direction, into a
modern type of town…
Section 7
It is characteristic of the manner in which large enterprises
forced themselves upon the Brissago council, that it was not
until the end of the first year of their administration and then
only with extreme reluctance that they would take up the manifest
need for a lingua franca for the world. They seem to have given
little attention to the various theoretical universal languages
which were proposed to them. They wished to give as little
trouble to hasty and simple people as possible, and the
world-wide alstribution of English gave them a bias for it from
the beginning. The extreme simplicity of its grammar was also in
its favour.
It was not without some sacrifices that the English-speaking
peoples were permitted the satisfaction of hearing their speech
used universally. The language was shorn of a number of
grammatical peculiarities, the distinctive forms for the
subjunctive mood for example and most of its irregular plurals
were abolished; its spelling was systematised and adapted to the
vowel sounds in use upon the continent of Europe, and a process
of incorporating foreign nouns and verbs commenced that speedily
reached enormous proportions. Within ten years from the
establishment of the World Republic the New English Dictionary
had swelled to include a vocabulary of 250,000 words, and a man
of 1900 would have found considerable difficulty in reading an
ordinary newspaper. On the other hand, the men of the new time
could still appreciate the older English literature… Certain
minor acts of uniformity accompanied this larger one. The idea of
a common understanding and a general simplification of
intercourse once it was accepted led very naturally to the
universal establishment of the metric system of weights and
measures, and to the disappearance of the various makeshift
calendars that had hitherto confused chronology. The year was
divided into thirteen months of four weeks each, and New Year's
Day and Leap Year's Day were made holidays, and did not count at
all in the ordinary week. So the weeks and the months were
brought into correspondence. And moreover, as the king put it to
Firmin, it was decided to 'nail down Easter.'… In these
matters, as in so many matters, the new civilisation came as a
simplification of ancient complications; the history of the
calendar throughout the world is a history of inadequate
adjustments, of attempts to fix seed-time and midwinter that go
back into the very beginning of human society; and this final
rectification had a symbolic value quite beyond its practical
convenience. But the council would have no rash nor harsh
innovations, no strange names for the months, and no alteration
in the numbering of the years.
The world had already been put upon one universal monetary basis.
For some months after the accession of the council, the world's
affairs had been carried on without any sound currency at all.
Over great regions money was still in use, but with the most
extravagant variations in price and the most disconcerting
fluctuations of public confidence. The ancient rarity of gold
upon which the entire system rested was gone. Gold was now a
waste product in the release of atomic energy, and it was plain
that no metal could be the basis of the monetary system again.
Henceforth all coins must be token coins. Yet the whole world
was accustomed to metallic money, and a vast proportion of
existing human relationships had grown up upon a cash basis, and
were almost inconceivable without that convenient liquidating
factor. It seemed absolutely necessary to the life of the social
organisation to have some sort of currency, and the council had
therefore to discover some real value upon which to rest it.
Various such apparently stable values as land and hours of work
were considered. Ultimately the government, which was now in
possession of most of the supplies of energy-releasing material,
fixed a certain number of units of energy as the value of a gold
sovereign, declared a sovereign to be worth exactly twenty marks,
twenty-five francs, five dollars, and so forth, with the other
current units of the world, and undertook, under various
qualifications and conditions, to deliver energy upon demand as
payment for every sovereign presented. On the whole, this worked
satisfactorily. They saved the face of the pound sterling. Coin
was rehabilitated, and after a phase of price fluctuations, began
to settle down to definite equivalents and uses again, with names
and everyday values familiar to the common run of people…
Section 8
As the Brissago council came to realise that what it had supposed
to be temporary camps of refugees were rapidly developing into
great towns of a new type, and that it was remoulding the world
in spite of itself, it decided to place this work of
redistributing the non-agricultural population in the hands of a
compactor and better qualified special committee. That committee
is now, far more than the council of any other of its delegated
committees, the active government of the world. Developed from
an almost invisible germ of 'town-planning' that came obscurely
into existence in Europe or America (the question is still in
dispute) somewhere in the closing decades of the nineteenth
century, its work, the continual active planning and replanning
of the world as a place of human habitation, is now so to speak
the collective material activity of the race. The spontaneous,
disorderly spreadings and recessions of populations, as aimless
and mechanical as the trickling of spilt water, which was the
substance of history for endless years, giving rise here to
congestions, here to chronic devastating wars, and everywhere to
a discomfort and disorderliness that was at its best only
picturesque, is at an end. Men spread now, with the whole power
of the race to aid them, into every available region of the
earth. Their cities are no longer tethered to running water and
the proximity of cultivation, their plans are no longer affected
by strategic considerations or thoughts of social insecurity. The
aeroplane and the nearly costless mobile car have abolished trade
routes; a common language and a universal law have abolished a
thousand restraining inconveniences, and so an astonishing
dispersal of habitations has begun. One may live anywhere. And
so it is that our cities now are true social gatherings, each
with a character of its own and distinctive interests of its own,
and most of them with a common occupation. They lie out in the
former deserts, these long wasted sun-baths of the race, they
tower amidst eternal snows, they hide in remote islands, and bask
on broad lagoons. For a time the whole tendency of mankind was to
desert the river valleys in which the race had been cradled for
half a million years, but now that the War against Flies has been
waged so successfully that this pestilential branch of life is
nearly extinct, they are returning thither with a renewed
appetite for gardens laced by watercourses, for pleasant living
amidst islands and houseboats and bridges, and for nocturnal
lanterns reflected by the sea.
Man who is ceasing to be an agricultural animal becomes more and
more a builder, a traveller, and a maker. How much he ceases to
be a cultivator of the soil the returns of the Redistribution
Committee showed. Every year the work of our scientific
laboratories increases the productivity and simplifies the labour
of those who work upon the soil, and the food now of the whole
world is produced by less than one per cent. of its population, a
percentage which still tends to decrease. Far fewer people are
needed upon the land than training and proclivity dispose towards
it, and as a consequence of this excess of human attention, the
garden side of life, the creation of groves and lawns and vast
regions of beautiful flowers, has expanded enormously and
continues to expand. For, as agricultural method intensifies and
the quota is raised, one farm association after another, availing
itself of the 1975 regulations, elects to produce a public garden
and pleasaunce in the place of its former fields, and the area of
freedom and beauty is increased. And the chemists' triumphs of
synthesis, which could now give us an entirely artificial food,
remain largely in abeyance because it is so much more pleasant
and interesting to eat natural produce and to grow such things
upon the soil. Each year adds to the variety of our fruits and
the delightfulness of our flowers.
Section 9
The early years of the World Republic witnessed a certain
recrudescence of political adventure. There was, it is rather
curious to note, no revival of separatism after the face of King
Ferdinand Charles had vanished from the sight of men, but in a
number of countries, as the first urgent physical needs were met,
there appeared a variety of personalities having this in common,
that they sought to revive political trouble and clamber by its
aid to positions of importance and satisfaction. In no case did
they speak in the name of kings, and it is clear that monarchy
must have been far gone in obsolescence before the twentieth
century began, but they made appeals to the large survivals of
nationalist and racial feeling that were everywhere to be found,
they alleged with considerable justice that the council was
overriding racial and national customs and disregarding religious
rules. The great plain of India was particularly prolific in such
agitators. The revival of newspapers, which had largely ceased
during the terrible year because of the dislocation of the
coinage, gave a vehicle and a method of organisation to these
complaints. At first the council disregarded this developing
opposition, and then it recognised it with an entirely
devastating frankness.
Never, of course, had there been so provisional a government. It
was of an extravagant illegality. It was, indeed, hardly more
than a club, a club of about a hundred persons. At the outset
there were ninety-three, and these were increased afterwards by
the issue of invitations which more than balanced its deaths, to
as many at one time as one hundred and nineteen. Always its
constitution has been miscellaneous. At no time were these
invitations issued with an admission that they recognised a
right. The old institution or monarchy had come out unexpectedly
well in the light of the new regime. Nine of the original members
of the first government were crowned heads who had resigned their
separate sovereignty, and at no time afterwards did the number of
its royal members sink below six. In their case there was perhaps
a kind of attenuated claim to rule, but except for them and the
still more infinitesimal pretensions of one or two ax-presidents
of republics, no member of the council had even the shade of a
right to his participation in its power. It was natural,
therefore, that its opponents should find a common ground in a
clamour for representative government, and build high hopes upon
a return, to parliamentary institutions.
The council decided to give them everything they wanted, but in a
form that suited ill with their aspirations. It became at one
stroke a representative body. It became, indeed, magnificently
representative. It became so representative that the politicians
were drowned in a deluge of votes. Every adult of either sex
from pole to pole was given a vote, and the world was divided
into ten constituencies, which voted on the same day by means of
a simple modification of the world post. Membership of the
government, it was decided, must be for life, save in the
exceptional case of a recall; but the elections, which were held
quinquenially, were arranged to add fifty members on each
occasion. The method of proportional representation with one
transferable vote was adopted, and the voter might also write
upon his voting paper in a specially marked space, the name of
any of his representatives that he wished to recall. A ruler was
recallable by as many votes as the quota by which he had been
elected, and the original members by as many votes in any
constituency as the returning quotas in the first election.
Upon these conditions the council submitted itself very
cheerfully to the suffrages of the world. None of its members
were recalled, and its fifty new associates, which included
twenty-seven which it had seen fit to recommend, were of an
altogether too miscellaneous quality to disturb the broad trend
of its policy. Its freedom from rules or formalities prevented
any obstructive proceedings, and when one of the two newly
arrived Home Rule members for India sought for information how to
bring in a bill, they learnt simply that bills were not brought
in. They asked for the speaker, and were privileged to hear much
ripe wisdom from the ex-king Egbert, who was now consciously
among the seniors of the gathering. Thereafter they were baffled
men…
But already by that time the work of the council was drawing to
an end. It was concerned not so much for the continuation of its
construction as for the preservation of its accomplished work
from the dramatic instincts of the politician.
The life of the race becomes indeed more and more independent of
the formal government. The council, in its opening phase, was
heroic in spirit; a dragon-slaying body, it slashed out of
existence a vast, knotted tangle of obsolete ideas and clumsy and
jealous proprietorships; it secured by a noble system of
institutional precautions, freedom of inquiry, freedom of
criticism, free communications, a common basis of education and
understanding, and freedom from economic oppression. With that
its creative task was accomplished. It became more and more an
established security and less and less an active intervention.
There is nothing in our time to correspond with the continual
petty making and entangling of laws in an atmosphere of
contention that is perhaps the most perplexing aspect of
constitutional history in the nineteenth century. In that age
they seem to have been perpetually making laws when we should
alter regulations. The work of change which we delegate to these
scientific committees of specific general direction which have
the special knowledge needed, and which are themselves dominated
by the broad intellectual process of the community, was in those
days inextricably mixed up with legislation. They fought over the
details; we should as soon think of fighting over the arrangement
of the parts of a machine. We know nowadays that such things go
on best within laws, as life goes on between earth and sky. And
so it is that government gathers now for a day or so in each year
under the sunshine of Brissago when Saint Bruno's lilies are in
flower, and does little more than bless the work of its
committees. And even these committees are less originative and
more expressive of the general thought than they were at first.
It becomes difficult to mark out the particular directive
personalities of the world. Continually we are less personal.
Every goodthought contributes now, and every able brain falls
within that informal and dispersed kingship which gathers
together into one purpose the energies of the race.
Section 10
It is doubtful if we shall ever see again a phase of human
existence in which 'politics,' that is to say a partisan
interference with the ruling sanities of the world, will be the
dominant interest among serious men. We seem to have entered
upon an entirely new phase in history in which contention as
distinguished from rivalry, has almost abruptly ceased to be the
usual occupation, and has become at most a subdued and hidden and
discredited thing. Contentious professions cease to be an
honourable employment for men. The peace between nations is also
a peace between individuals. We live in a world that comes of
age. Man the warrior, man the lawyer, and all the bickering
aspects of life, pass into obscurity; the grave dreamers, man the
curious learner, and man the creative artist, come forward to
replace these barbaric aspects of existence by a less ignoble
adventure.
There is no natural life of man. He is, and always has been, a
sheath of varied and even incompatible possibilities, a
palimpsest of inherited dispositions. It was the habit of many
writers in the early twentieth century to speak of competition
and the narrow, private life of trade and saving and suspicious
isolation as though such things were in some exceptional way
proper to the human constitution, and as though openness of mind
and a preference for achievement over possession were abnormal
and rather unsubstantial qualities. How wrong that was the
history of the decades immediately following the establishment of
the world republic witnesses. Once the world was released from
the hardening insecurities of a needless struggle for life that
was collectively planless and individually absorbing, it became
apparent that there was in the vast mass of people a long,
smothered passion to make things. The world broke out into
making, and at first mainly into aesthetic making. This phase of
history, which has been not inaptly termed the 'Efflorescence,'
is still, to a large extent, with us. The majority of our
population consists of artists, and the bulk of activity in the
world lies no longer with necessities but with their elaboration,
decoration, and refinement. There has been an evident change in
the quality of this making during recent years. It becomes more
purposeful than it was, losing something of its first elegance
and prettiness and gaining in intensity; but that is a change
rather of hue than of nature. That comes with a deepening
philosophy and a sounder education. For the first joyous
exercises of fancy we perceive now the deliberation of a more
constructive imagination. There is a natural order in these
things, and art comes before science as the satisfaction of more
elemental needs must come before art, and as play and pleasure
come in a human life before the development of a settled
purpose…
For thousands of years this gathering impulse to creative work
must have struggled in man against the limitations imposed upon
him by his social ineptitude. It was a long smouldering fire
that flamed out at last in all these things. The evidence of a
pathetic, perpetually thwarted urgency to make something, is one
of the most touching aspects of the relics and records of our
immediate ancestors. There exists still in the death area about
the London bombs, a region of deserted small homes that furnish
the most illuminating comment on the old state of affairs. These
homes are entirely horrible, uniform, square, squat, hideously
proportioned, uncomfortable, dingy, and in some respects quite
filthy, only people in complete despair of anything better could
have lived in them, but to each is attached a ridiculous little
rectangle of land called 'the garden,' containing usually a prop
for drying clothes and a loathsome box of offal, the dustbin,
full of egg-shells, cinders, and such-like refuse. Now that one
may go about this region in comparitive security-for the London
radiations have dwindled to inconsiderable proportions-it is
possible to trace in nearly every one of these gardens some
effort to make. Here it is a poor little plank summer-house,
here it is a 'fountain' of bricks and oyster-shells, here a
'rockery,' here a 'workshop.' And in the houses everywhere there
are pitiful little decorations, clumsy models, feeble drawings.
These efforts are almost incredibly inept, like the drawings of
blindfolded men, they are only one shade less harrowing to a
sympathetic observer than the scratchings one finds upon the
walls of the old prisons, but there they are, witnessing to the
poor buried instincts that struggled up towards the light. That
god of joyous expression our poor fathers ignorantly sought, our
freedom has declared to us…
In the old days the common ambition of every simple soul was to
possess a little property, a patch of land, a house uncontrolled
by others, an 'independence' as the English used to put it. And
what made this desire for freedom and prosperity so strong, was
very evidently the dream of self-expression, of doing something
with it, of playing with it, of making a personal delightfulness,
a distinctiveness. Property was never more than a means to an
end, nor avarice more than a perversion. Men owned in order to
do freely. Now that every one has his own apartments and his own
privacy secure, this disposition to own has found its release in
a new direction. Men study and save and strive that they may
leave behind them a series of panels in some public arcade, a row
of carven figures along a terrace, a grove, a pavilion. Or they
give themselves to the penetration of some still opaque riddle in
phenomena as once men gave themselves to the accumulation of
riches. The work that was once the whole substance of social
existence-for most men spent all their lives in earning a
living-is now no more than was the burden upon one of those old
climbers who carried knapsacks of provisions on their backs in
order that they might ascend mountains. It matters little to the
easy charities of our emancipated time that most people who have
made their labour contribution produce neither new beauty nor new
wisdom, but are simply busy about those pleasant activities and
enjoyments that reassure them that they are alive. They help, it
may be, by reception and reverberation, and they hinder nothing.
…
Section 11
Now all this phase of gigantic change in the contours and
appearances of human life which is going on about us, a change as
rapid and as wonderful as the swift ripening of adolescence to
manhood after the barbaric boyish years, is correlated with moral
and mental changes at least as unprecedented. It is not as if old
things were going out of life and new things coming in, it is
rather that the altered circumstances of men are making an appeal
to elements in his nature that have hitherto been suppressed, and
checking tendencies that have hitherto been over-stimulated and
over-developed. He has not so much grown and altered his
essential being as turned new aspects to the light. Such turnings
round into a new attitude the world has seen on a less extensive
scale before. The Highlanders of the seventeenth century, for
example, were cruel and bloodthirsty robbers, in the nineteenth
their descendants were conspicuously trusty and honourable men.
There was not a people in Western Europe in the early twentieth
century that seemed capable of hideous massacres, and none that
had not been guilty of them within the previous two centuries.
The free, frank, kindly, gentle life of the prosperous classes in
any European country before the years of the last wars was in a
different world of thought and feeling from that of the dingy,
suspicious, secretive, and uncharitable existence of the
respectable poor, or the constant personal violence, the squalor
and naive passions of the lowest stratum. Yet there were no real
differences of blood and inherent quality between these worlds;
their differences were all in circumstances, suggestion, and
habits of mind. And turning to more individual instances the
constantly observed difference between one portion of a life and
another consequent upon a religious conversion, were a standing
example of the versatile possibilities of human nature.
The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities
and businesses and economic relations shook them also out of
their old established habits of thought, and out of the lightly
held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.
To borrow a word from the old-fashioned chemists, men were made
nascent; they were released from old ties; for good or evil they
were ready for new associations. The council carried them
forward for good; perhaps if his bombs had reached their
destination King Ferdinand Charles might have carried them back
to an endless chain of evils. But his task would have been a
harder one than the council's. The moral shock of the atomic
bombs had been a profound one, and for a while the cunning side
of the human animal was overpowered by its sincere realisation of
the vital necessity for reconstruction. The litigious and trading
spirits cowered together, scared at their own consequences; men
thought twice before they sought mean advantages in the face of
the unusual eagerness to realise new aspirations, and when at
last the weeds revived again and 'claims' began to sprout, they
sprouted upon the stony soil of law-courts reformed, of laws that
pointed to the future instead of the past, and under the blazing
sunshine of a transforming world. A new literature, a new
interpretation of history were springing into existence, a new
teaching was already in the schools, a new faith in the young.
The worthy man who forestalled the building of a research city
for the English upon the Sussex downs by buying up a series of
estates, was dispossessed and laughed out of court when he made
his demand for some preposterous compensation; the owner of the
discredited Dass patents makes his last appearance upon the
scroll of history as the insolvent proprietor of a paper called
The Cry for Justice, in which he duns the world for a hundred
million pounds. That was the ingenuous Dass's idea of justice,
that he ought to be paid about five million pounds annually
because he had annexed the selvage of one of Holsten's
discoveries. Dass came at last to believe quite firmly in his
right, and he died a victim of conspiracy mania in a private
hospital at Nice. Both of these men would probably have ended
their days enormously wealthy, and of course ennobled in the
England of the opening twentieth century, and it is just this
novelty of their fates that marks the quality of the new age.
The new government early discovered the need of a universal
education to fit men to the great conceptions of its universal
rule. It made no wrangling attacks on the local, racial, and
sectarian forms of religious profession that at that time divided
the earth into a patchwork of hatreds and distrusts; it left
these organisations to make their peace with God in their own
time; but it proclaimed as if it were a mere secular truth that
sacrifice was expected from all, that respect had to be shown to
all; it revived schools or set them up afresh all around the
world, and everywhere these schools taught the history of war and
the consequences and moral of the Last War; everywhere it was
taught not as a sentiment but as a matter of fact that the
salvation of the world from waste and contention was the common
duty and occupation of all men and women. These things which are
now the elementary commonplaces of human intercourse seemed to
the councillors of Brissago, when first they dared to proclaim
them, marvellously daring discoveries, not untouched by doubt,
that flushed the cheek and fired the eye.
The council placed all this educational reconstruction in the
hands of a committee of men and women, which did its work during
the next few decades with remarkable breadth and effectiveness.
This educational committee was, and is, the correlative upon the
mental and spiritual side of the redistribution committee. And
prominent upon it, and indeed for a time quite dominating it, was
a Russian named Karenin, who was singular in being a congenital
cripple. His body was bent so that he walked with difficulty,
suffered much pain as he grew older, and had at last to undergo
two operations. The second killed him. Already malformation,
which was to be seen in every crowd during the middle ages so
that the crippled beggar was, as it were, an essential feature of
the human spectacle, was becoming a strange thing in the world.
It had a curious effect upon Karenin's colleagues; their feeling
towards him was mingled with pity and a sense of inhumanity that
it needed usage rather than reason to overcome. He had a strong
face, with little bright brown eyes rather deeply sunken and a
large resolute thin-lipped mouth. His skin was very yellow and
wrinkled, and his hair iron gray. He was at all times an
impatient and sometimes an angry man, but this was forgiven him
because of the hot wire of suffering that was manifestly thrust
through his being. At the end of his life his personal prestige
was very great. To him far more than to any contemporary is it
due that self-abnegation, self-identification with the world
spirit, was made the basis of universal education. That general
memorandum to the teachers which is the key-note of the modern
educational system, was probably entirely his work.
'Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it,' he wrote. 'That is
the device upon the seal of this document, and the starting point
of all we have to do. It is a mistake to regard it as anything
but a plain statement of fact. It is the basis for your work.
You have to teach self-forgetfulness, and everything else that
you have to teach is contributory and subordinate to that end.
Education is the release of man from self. You have to widen the
horizons of your children, encourage and intensify their
curiosity and their creative impulses, and cultivate and enlarge
their sympathies. That is what you are for. Under your guidance
and the suggestions you will bring to bear on them, they have to
shed the old Adam of instinctive suspicions, hostilities, and
passions, and to find themselves again in the great being of the
universe. The little circles of their egotisms have to be opened
out until they become arcs in the sweep of the racial purpose.
And this that you teach to others you must learn also sedulously
yourselves. Philosophy, discovery, art, every sort of skill,
every sort of service, love: these are the means of salvation
from that narrow loneliness of desire, that brooding
preoccupation with self and egotistical relationships, which is
hell for the individual, treason to the race, and exile from
God…'
Section 12
As things round themselves off and accomplish themselves, one
begins for the first time to see them clearly. From the
perspectives of a new age one can look back upon the great and
widening stream of literature with a complete understanding.
Things link up that seemed disconnected, and things that were
once condemned as harsh and aimless are seen to be but factors in
the statement of a gigantic problem. An enormous bulk of the
sincerer writing of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth
centuries falls together now into an unanticipated unanimity; one
sees it as a huge tissue of variations upon one theme, the
conflict of human egotism and personal passion and narrow
imaginations on the one hand, against the growing sense of wider
necessities and a possible, more spacious life.
That conflict is in evidence in so early a work as Voltaire's
Candide, for example, in which the desire for justice as well as
happiness beats against human contrariety and takes refuge at
last in a forced and inconclusive contentment with little things.
Candide was but one of the pioneers of a literature of uneasy
complaint that was presently an innumerable multitude of books.
The novels more particularly of the nineteenth century, if one
excludes the mere story-tellers from our consideration, witness
to this uneasy realisation of changes that call for effort and of
the lack of that effort. In a thousand aspects, now tragically,
now comically, now with a funny affectation of divine detachment,
a countless host of witnesses tell their story of lives fretting
between dreams and limitations. Now one laughs, now one weeps,
now one reads with a blank astonishment at this huge and almost
unpremeditated record of how the growing human spirit, now
warily, now eagerly, now furiously, and always, as it seems,
unsuccessfully, tried to adapt itself to the maddening misfit of
its patched and ancient garments. And always in these books as
one draws nearer to the heart of the matter there comes a
disconcerting evasion. It was the fantastic convention of the
time that a writer should not touch upon religion. To do so was
to rouse the jealous fury of the great multitude of professional
religious teachers. It was permitted to state the discord, but
it was forbidden to glance at any possible reconciliation.
Religion was the privilege of the pulpit…
It was not only from the novels that religion was omitted. It was
ignored by the newspapers; it was pedantically disregarded in the
discussion of business questions, it played a trivial and
apologetic part in public affairs. And this was done not out of
contempt but respect. The hold of the old religious organisations
upon men's respect was still enormous, so enormous that there
seemed to be a quality of irreverence in applying religion to the
developments of every day. This strange suspension of religion
lasted over into the beginnings of the new age. It was the clear
vision of Marcus Karenin much more than any other contemporary
influence which brought it back into the texture of human life.
He saw religion without hallucinations, without superstitious
reverence, as a common thing as necessary as food and air, as
land and energy to the life of man and the well-being of the
Republic. He saw that indeed it had already percolated away from
the temples and hierarchies and symbols in which men had sought
to imprison it, that it was already at work anonymously and
obscurely in the universal acceptance of the greater state. He
gave it clearer expression, rephrased it to the lights and
perspectives of the new dawn…
But if we return to our novels for our evidence of the spirit of
the times it becomes evident as one reads them in their
chronological order, so far as that is now ascertainable, that as
one comes to the latter nineteenth and the earlier twentieth
century the writers are much more acutely aware of secular change
than their predecessors were. The earlier novelists tried to show
'life as it is,' the latter showed life as it changes. More and
more of their characters are engaged in adaptation to change or
suffering from the effects of world changes. And as we come up
to the time of the Last Wars, this newer conception of the
everyday life as a reaction to an accelerated development is
continually more manifest. Barnet's book, which has served us so
well, is frankly a picture of the world coming about like a ship
that sails into the wind. Our later novelists give a vast gallery
of individual conflicts in which old habits and customs, limited
ideas, ungenerous temperaments, and innate obsessions are pitted
against this great opening out of life that has happened to us.
They tell us of the feelings of old people who have been wrenched
away from familiar surroundings, and how they have had to make
peace with uncomfortable comforts and conveniences that are still
strange to them. They give us the discord between the opening
egotisms of youths and the ill-defined limitations of a changing
social life. They tell of the universal struggle of jealousy to
capture and cripple our souls, of romantic failures and tragical
misconceptions of the trend of the world, of the spirit of
adventure, and the urgency of curiosity, and how these serve the
universal drift. And all their stories lead in the end either to
happiness missed or happiness won, to disaster or salvation. The
clearer their vision and the subtler their art, the more
certainly do these novels tell of the possibility of salvation
for all the world. For any road in life leads to religion for
those upon it who will follow it far enough…
It would have seemed a strange thing to the men of the former
time that it should be an open question as it is to-day whether
the world is wholly Christian or not Christian at all. But
assuredly we have the spirit, and as surely have we left many
temporary forms behind. Christianity was the first expression of
world religion, the first complete repudiation of tribalism and
war and disputation. That it fell presently into the ways of more
ancient rituals cannot alter that. The common sense of mankind
has toiled through two thousand years of chastening experience to
find at last how sound a meaning attaches to the familiar phrases
of the Christian faith. The scientific thinker as he widens out
to the moral problems of the collective life, comes inevitably
upon the words of Christ, and as inevitably does the Christian,
as his thoughtgrows clearer, arrive at the world republic. As
for the claims of the sects, as for the use of a name and
successions, we live in a time that has shaken itself free from
such claims and consistencies.