More than a hundred people had gone to death in the crash of two thundering passenger trains in Colorado, a crash that had been due to the failure of an engineer to heed the plainest of signals. Two train wrecks in northern England had taken a toll of life almost as great, and there were reports of many other crashes from various parts of earth. In every one the accident had been due to the inexplicable failure of the human element, the failure of dispatcher or switchman or engineer to perform the duty that habit should have made automatic. In one case, that of the Austrian disaster, the crash had been directly caused by the sudden craziness of a switchman, who, for some slight grievance, had sent a long passenger-train crashing through an open switch and down an embankment.
There was news as terrible from the seas. Wireless reports flashed thick with word of ships that had blundered fatally on rocks or shoals by fault of helmsman or navigating officer. The greater part of these, fortunately, were freight-ships of medium and small size, but one case sent a thrill of horror through earth, already steeped in horror. That was when the great transatlantic liner Garonia, bound to Southampton, crashed by night into the southern Irish coast with the resulting loss of three-fourths of the thousand humans it carried. And that wreck, like the others, was due to an utterly inexplicable failure of the ship's personnel.
Smaller in magnitude, but taking a total of far more lives, were the unnumbered accidents that took place in the thickly populated and highly mechanized countries of North America and Europe. The number of automobile deaths, always staggering America, reached a stunning total in those last fateful days of September. Crashes took place at every corner, and the running down of pedestrians became a common occurrence everywhere. Many cars mowed a path of death through street and sidewalk before they were halted, their drivers losing apparently all faculty of control of them.
And in mill and shop and factory death's grim hand was reaping as thickly. Men, upon whom the lives of many depended, suddenly lost control of their machines and sent those many to death. Countless others were mangled or crushed to death by the great mechanisms they had operated for years without mishaps. Airplane crashes became so numerous that many sections of the world peremptorily forbade all further flying until the cause of it all could be ascertained. It was as though more and more of the masses of men were becoming incapable of handling the mechanisms, of conducting the operations, that they had been executing for years. Was mankind going collectively insane?
It seemed insanity, indeed, that was sweeping earth now. Riots had taken place on a small scale here and there in those days, but it was not until after the first of October that the first of the great outbreaks took place in London. Crowds of wandering men and women began the looting of shops, the breaking of windows, and the rioting swiftly spread. So swiftly did it spread, in fact, that by the time the troops called to suppress it appeared on the scene, unestimated thousands were engaged in the wild search for plunder. At the order to fire, an irregular volley from the troops killed scores, but in the pitched mob battle that followed scores of the soldiers took the side of the looters. The combat between mob and soldiers was forgotten, and the battle became a wild scene of brutality and violence in which hundreds were slain and trampled. In the end it required machine-guns to disperse them.
A similar great outbreak in New York was curbed quickly a day later by the use of planes and tear-bombs, but two days after there came a huge riot of unexampled bloodiness in Chicago, which cost several thousand lives and which resulted in the burning of a third of the city. Beginning as a race riot and developing into a savage general battle for loot, it was notable for the fact that the troops, called to suppress it, broke up even before they reached the scene and occupied themselves in brutal looting and battle of their own. And a score of great riots in the other cities of earth had similar results.
Civilization seemed crashing, with this oncoming dissolution of its organization and institutions. Had humanity gone insane, indeed? Swiftly, with full realization of the peril upon it by then, a conference of the world's most noted scientists had been called some days before at New York, to explain and to halt, if possible, this wave of seeming insanity that was gripping more of the masses of humanity each day and that was disintegrating civilization.
But when those scientists met, the world learned that they had a hundred different explanations of the thing, no two agreeing. The famous American alienist who had voiced his opinion days before reiterated his belief that the minds of men were giving way en masse beneath the strain of modern civilization. A Rumanian bacteriologist claimed that the thing was the result of a contagious new brain disease spreading over earth, and claimed even to have isolated the bacterium of that disease. The scientists, gripped seemingly by something of the erratic condition of mind they were striving to explain, argued these theories and others with utmost passion, sometimes attacking each other. An English physicist, who suggested that earth was passing through strange mind-affecting gases in space, was assaulted by the proponent of another theory. And still more furious and incredulous, the world learned, was the reception given to the explanation of a New York biologist named Ferson, who claimed that the whole great terror was the result of the human races slipping backward on the road of evolution!
"World atavism! A throwback of all the world's life on the road of evolution!" So, they learned, Ferson had cried to the assembled scientists. "All earth's animal life is beginning to slip back, and man, as the most recently developed animal, is slipping first, is going back toward the savage state, toward the cave-man or troglodyte, toward the ape! He is losing control of his passions as he goes back, which accounts for the violence that now fills earth! And he is losing the mental capacity of modern man, which accounts for his inability to operate longer our modern machines! A world atavism that is beginning with the atavism of the human races!"
"But what could cause such world atavism as that?" the incredulous scientists had cried.