Which daily die.”
And as of Nineveh there remains but a heap, and of Tyrus a spit of sandy shore, and of Sagesta but one solemn temple looking down the valley to the sea, so a triumphant imagination can fling off the yoke of the present, to see in solid England dynamic instead of static forces, and all the cities in motion and flow towards some unknown ends. This may not provide any peculiar satisfaction for present endeavour. There is no guarantee, because change is inevitable, that change will come along desirable ways. Nor does any consolation reside in the knowledge that one day, without a shadow of uncertainty, great London itself will become but a vast tomb for all its busy people, and of its splendour and pride not one stone be left upon another. But it does release from the tyranny of a present which sees no change possible. If change must come, then it may be deflected along desirable ways. The direction of forces is so much easier than the initiation of them. E pur si muove is the eternal affirmation, as much over societies which appear stationary as over societies which appear reckless in progress. For over each successive present, with its ample Government offices, its law courts, its police stations, its secure private dwellings, there will be written as epitaph the inexorable law of a universe, not of Being, but of Becoming: “A wind passeth over it. It is gone. The place thereof shall know it no more.”
And of all illusions of the opening twentieth century perhaps the most remarkable is that of security. Already gigantic and novel forces of mechanical invention, upheavals of people, social discontents, are exhibiting a society in the beginnings of change. It would seem likely that the very rapid disintegration, which has taken place in a period of external tranquillity, in beliefs and ideas, may be giving place to a reverse condition: of a time of internal quietude accompanied by large external transformations. With Europe facing an international discontent amongst its industrial peoples, the nations, as an armed camp, heaping up instruments of destruction, the East suddenly awake, the people in England and America writhing in the grasp of a money power more and more concentrated in the hands of enormous Corporations, he would be but a blind prophet who, looking to the future, would assert that all things will continue as until now.
A few years back men loved to anticipate an age of innocence and gold; with humanity at last tranquil and satisfied, in the socialistic millennium or the anarchic heaven of childhood. To-day the critic of a less sanguine outlook openly proclaims that modern civilisation carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Two great imaginative writers, M. Anatole France in Paris, Mr. H. G. Wells in London, have presented their visions of the coming end of an age. The picture of the former is more ironical, more completely the cry of Vanity in a world of disillusionment. The picture of the latter is more scientific. Here is one way at least in which the thing may happen, in which the end may come. And if not in this way, yet in any similar and entirely unexpected fashion, arising out of that present danger: the instability which of necessity must prevail when vast implements of destruction are placed in the hands of a civilisation imperfectly self-controlled, and subject to panic fears and hatreds. It is in the realisation of so remarkable a danger that the story of the outbreak of aerial warfare becomes not so much a nightmare vision of the future as a vigorous criticism of the present. Mr. Wells had formerly demanded supernatural machinery to effect his outpouring of calamity and terror. A comet, bearing a strange gas, will make every one sane. With a sudden gasp of amazement, they will realise the essential insanity of the life which they had hitherto regarded as natural to mankind. Martians, descending from the darkened sky, with irresistible powers of heat ray and poisonous dust, will wipe out humanity as a man will wipe out a wasp’s nest. But here[29] he has returned to the solid ground, and without any assumptions but those of but a slight advance in mechanical invention, exhibits the forces which make towards a cosmic overthrow. The apparatus required is not much more than will undoubtedly be furnished within the next half-century. “Flying” is now assured; has come to stay. It is merely a matter of years or perhaps months before every external apparatus that the author requires for his apocalypse will be at the disposal of mankind. And with that invention there comes a new epoch in the history of humanity. Given effective flying—to be utilised in war not for the transference of men, but for coercing a nation into submission—the march of events appears to follow a possible chain of sequence. Each nation, armed to the teeth in a world which has scarcely apprehended war—a city-bred people—is to-day restrained from fighting by fear of consequences. Each nation—in this grim forecast—thinking itself secure in the possession of a new invincible weapon, plunges into effort for the overlordship of the world. The German air fleet invades New York. The city, “drinking up the wealth of a continent as Rome once drank up the wealth of the Mediterranean, and Babylon the wealth of the East,” after a hopeless resistance, capitulates. The poor, neglected in their quarters of squalor, like the poor in Paris in 1870, raise the cry that they are betrayed. Sporadic violence against the invader breaks the truce. The Germans, enraged, determine to make an example which will crush out the need for further effort in a cruelty which is ultimately to prove a kindness. Fire and brimstone rain down from the airships, like the fire and brimstone which rained down upon the cities of the plain. At the end New York is a smoking mass of ruins: a cemetery of a million dead. The assumption of terrorism would have been justified had war been operating under the old conditions. Rage and a fury of revenge on such occasion will always overcome cowardice; man, in a kind of madness, will be content to be destroyed, if only he can destroy. It is only when the resistance becomes obviously senseless—when he has no means of hurting his enemy—that he finally accepts the inevitable. But in the new conditions of air-fighting such an equilibrium would never be attained. There are no frontiers that can be guarded. Desperate men, equipping these new craft, can always exact terrible reprisals. In return for New York’s destruction, Berlin is smashed to powder by American airships; in return for Berlin, other American cities. Madness and delirium seize the people: the whole world is at war; modern civilisation blows up and vanishes from the world.
With the destructive fury of the war comes the collapse in the whole edifice of credit which maintains the economic efficiency of the industrial system. Men demand gold as in America in the last crisis, hoarding it in their stockings or burying it in their gardens. The stock of gold becomes exhausted, bonds and shares waste paper. Factories close. The city populations find neither work nor bread. In peril of imminent destruction from the enemy above, men claw and mow at one another in blind struggle in the starving cities, reeling back visibly into the beast; as they will do in extremity even when an earthquake has shattered their city and death sits waiting at the door of their houses. After the fighting comes the famine, after the famine the great pestilence. The organisation of society is broken and fissured. The vast multitude perish. The few that remain, like the few that remained of the Roman civilisation after the impact of the barbarian, are found at the end, in village communities or isolated huts, or encamped in the ruins of once populous towns. Amid the nettle and the ivy the survivors of London wander forlorn through the empty labyrinths: as the survivors encamped in the ruins of Rome in the long twilight which preceded the Middle Age. After the three hundred years of diastole there came “the swift and unexpected systole, like the closing of a fist.” “They could not understand it was a systole,” writes Mr. Wells. “They could not think of it as anything but a jolt, a hitch, a mere oscillatory indication of the swiftness of their progress. Collapse, though it happened all about them, remained incredible. Presently some falling mass smote them down, or the ground opened beneath their feet. They died incredulous.” So incredulous indeed died Babylon, Tyre, Rome; each refusing to believe that it was witnessing the end of a world.
How far is this sombre vision a nightmare merely? How far a warning of the things which may come to pass? Mr. Wells requires for his Götterdämmerung no fresh influx of barbarian hordes to smash civilisation brutally to pieces, such as is feared by some: not even the upheaval from below, in the consolidated masses of the poor, which has seemed to M. Anatole France and others a force destined to consume civilisation in fire and blood. He had accepted the undeniable note of the age, that material advance has far transcended moral progress, and that this inequality is full of the elements of danger. Man has wrested secrets from sun and star, equipped himself with apparatus which should make him rival the older gods, stolen, like Prometheus, the fire of heaven to be his servant, and made the earth and the air to obey him. Yet this unparalleled control of dead things has failed to eliminate his silly national jealousies, his little prejudices and selfishnesses, his clumsy determination to make his life a brutal, irrational thing. Mr. Wells outpours his vials of wrath upon the Crowd: the vacant street-bred people, the “common abundant life,” “flowing, in its cheerful, aimless way,” towards the Abyss. His hero, one of this Crowd, Mr. Bert Smallways, is one of “the sort of men who had made England and America what they are.” “He had lived all his life in narrow streets, and between mean houses he could not look over, and in a narrow circle of ideas from which there was no escape. He thought the whole duty of man was to be smarter than his fellows, get his hands, as he put it, ‘on the dibs,’ and have a good time.” But the author need not have gone to the Crowd for his illustration. No lunacy that flourishes amongst the little but is intensified amongst the great. The German Professors, the conversation of an Oxford College Common Room will exhibit as dangerous a combination of truculence and terror as any gathering of patriots at a public-house bar. The war scare of a halfpenny paper, with its frantic appeals to race prejudice and passion, is revealed in deepening imbecilities in sixpenny magazines which circulate amongst the country clergy, or half-crown reviews which lie upon the table of country houses. Countless millions in Europe and Asia and America, “instead of being born rooted in the soil, were born struggling in a torrent they never clearly understood. All the faiths of their fathers had been taken by surprise, and startled into the strangest forms and reactions.” Everywhere in the early twentieth century this observer finds “a sort of heated, irascible stupidity”; everywhere “congested nations in inconvenient areas, stopping the exchange of population and produce with each other, annoying each other with tariffs and every possible commercial vexation, and threatening each other with navies and armies that grow every year more portentious.”
“The houses were never high enough to satisfy the people,” says M. Anatole France of his “Penguins.” “They kept on making them still higher. They built them of thirty or forty storeys, with offices, shops, banks, societies, one above another. They dug cellars and tunnels ever deeper downwards. Fifteen millions of men laboured in a giant town.” Everything here was constructed efficiently for the production of wealth. The organisation was perfect. The ancient aristocracies and democracies had alike departed. The Trusts, with their Directors, were omnipotent. “Like all true aristocrats, like the patricians of Republican Rome or the squires of old England, these powerful men affected a great severity in their habits and customs. They were the ascetics of wealth. At the meetings of the Trusts an observer would have noticed their smooth and puffy faces, their lantern cheeks, their sunken eyes and wrinkled brows.... Denying themselves all happiness, all pleasure, and all rest, they spent their miserable lives in rooms without light or air, furnished only with electrical apparatus, living on eggs and milk, and sleeping on camp beds. By doing nothing except pressing nickel buttons with their fingers, these mystics heaped up riches of which they never saw the signs, and acquired the vain possibility of gratifying desires that they never experienced.” Society, as a whole, became organised on a plutocratic, as once on a military, basis; and all classes endeavoured to approximate themselves to the ideal standard set from above. Like insects, the huge hive laboured night and day, driven forward by the blind, furious instinct for accumulation. “All passions which injured the increase or the preservation of wealth were regarded as dishonourable. Neither indolence, nor idleness, nor the taste for disinterested study, nor love of the arts, nor, above all, extravagance, was ever forgiven. Pity was condemned as a dangerous weakness.” “The State was firmly based on two great public virtues: respect for the rich, contempt for the poor.” As they devoted their whole intelligence to business, they sought no intellectual pleasures. The theatre was reduced to pantomime and comic dances. The very rich formed only a minority, but their collaborators were the entire people. The agents of commerce or banking, the engineers and managers of factories, received immense salaries, and were recruited from the talent to whom this supreme career was always open. The system sucked the efficient and enterprising from the populace below. What remained, a spongy morass of low-grade life, shepherded, controlled, fed, and housed by their masters, presented every sign of physical and moral degeneration. “Of low stature, with small heads and narrow chests, they were further distinguished from the comfortable classes by a multitude of physiological anomalies, and, in particular, by a common want of symmetry between the head and the limbs.” The more robust of them became soldiers. From the remainder the employers continually and methodically selected out the enterprising and talented, leaving alone “labourers who were incapable of defending their rights, but were yet intelligent enough to perform their toil, which highly perfected machines rendered extremely simple.” “In a word, these miserable employees were plunged in a gloomy apathy that nothing enlightened and nothing exasperated. They were necessary instruments for the social order, and well adapted to their purpose.”
Civilisation seemed to have at length attained its ideal, and to have finally established a coherent, organic society. A system founded on “what is strongest in human nature, pride and cupidity,” would seem to have been guaranteed an earthly immortality. Yet there were grounds for uneasiness, especially on the score of physical health. “The health of the poor is what it must be,” said the experts in hygiene, “but that of the rich leaves much to be desired.” The multi-millionaires were bald at the age of eighteen. Some showed from time to time a dangerous weakness of mind. Overstrung and enfeebled, they gave enormous sums to ignorant charlatans, and there suddenly sprang up in the town the medical or theological fortune of some trumpery bath-attendant who had become a teacher or a prophet. The number of lunatics increased continually. Suicides multiplied in the world of wealth.