"I can hardly imagine this to be possible."
"Because, I apprehend, first, that you are laboring under the delusion already mentioned, by which men ever magnify the importance of the events of their own age, and forget how readily future generations will let them slip from their memory, and let documents which contain the record of them slip out of existence; and, secondly, because you do not give yourself time to realize all that is implied in supposing eighteen hundred years to have elapsed, nor to transport yourself fairly into that distant age. As to the first;—let us recollect that the importance of historical events is by no means in proportion to the excitement they produce at the time of their occurrence. We have many exemplifications of this even in our own time; see the rapidity with which every trace of a political storm, which for a moment may have lashed the whole nation into fury, is appeased again: the surface is as smooth after a few short years as if it had never been ruffled at all! In all such cases, the constant tendency is to let the events which have been thus transient in their effects sink into oblivion. But even of those which have been far more significant, (since each future age will teem with fresh events equally significant, all claiming a part in the page of general history,) the importance will be perpetually diminishing in estimate, and still more in interest, from the intenser feeling with which each age will in turn regard the events which stand in immediate proximity to its own. As time rolls on, all of the past that can be spared will be gradually jostled out. Details will be lost; and then, when remote ages turn to reinvestigate the half-forgotten past, the want of those details will issue in the customary problems and 'historic doubts.' In the page of general history, events of a remote age, except those of a surpassing interest, will be reduced to more and more meagre outlines, till abridgments are abridged, and even these compendiums thought tedious. The interval between decade and decade now will be as much as that between century and century then. History will have to employ a sort of Bramah press in her compositions, and its application will compress into mere films the loose and pulpy textures submitted to it by each age. Let human vanity think what it will, many events and many names which seem imperishable will speedily die out of remembrance; many lights in the firmament, destined (as we deem) to shine 'like the stars for ever and ever,' will hereafter be missing from the catalogue of the historic astronomer."
"But, at all events," said the other, "though there are thousands of facts which will be virtually forgotten, it will be at all times easy to ascertain (if a sufficiently strong motive exist) the real character of past, events by a reference to the documents preserved by the press. The press,—the press it is which will preserve us from the doubts of the past."
"I doubt that. Has there been any lack of historic controversy respecting a thousand facts which have transpired since the press was in full activity? You forget, that, in the first place, neither the press, nor any thing else, can preserve any original documents. Time will not be inactive in the future more than in the past; it will have no more respect for printed books than for manuscripts. An immense mass of print is every year silently perishing by mere decay. The original documents to which you refer will, eighteen hundred years hence, have almost all perished; few will be preserved except in copies, and how many disputes that alone will cause, it is hard to say; but we may form some guess from the experience of the past. Of thousands of these documents, again, no importance having been attached to them, and no one having imagined that any importance would ever be attached to them, no copies will have been taken, and there will be here again the usual field for conjectures. This is a common trick of time;—silently destroying what a present age thinks may as well be left to his maw. It is not even discovered that valuable documents are lost, till something turns up to make mankind wish they may be found. But neither is this the sole nor the chief source of future historic doubts. Do not flatter yourself too much on the wonders which the press can work, amongst which one unquestionably is, that it will bury at least as much as it will preserve. Several considerations will suffice to show that here, too, we labor under a delusion. Oblivion will practically cover many events, owing to the mere accumulations of the press itself. You talk of the ease of consulting 'original documents'; but when they lie buried in the depths of national museums, amidst mountain loads of forgotten and decaying literature, it will not be so easy, even supposing the present activity of the press only maintained for eighteen hundred and fifty years (although, in all probability, it will proceed at a rapidly increased ratio),—I say it will not be so easy to lay your hands on what you want. The materials, again, will often exist by that time in dead or half-obsolete languages, or at least in languages full of archaic forms. It will be almost as difficult to unearth and collate the documents which bear upon any events less than the most momentous, as to recover the memorials of Egypt from the pyramids, or of ancient Assyria from the mounds of Nineveh. The historian of a remote period must be a sort of Belzoni or Layard. If we can suppose any thing so extravagant as that the British Museum will be in existence then, having preserved during these centuries (as it does now) all new hooks, and accumulated ancient and foreign literature only at the rate it has during these few years past, the library alone will extend over hundreds of acres at least. This, unless our posterity are fools, can hardly be the case; and therefore much will be rejected and left to the mercy of the great destroyer. But the very existence of any such repository is itself a very doubtful supposition. Comprehensive, indeed, may be the destruction of many large portions of our archives, essentially necessary to minute accuracy at so distant a date; nay, England herself may have ceased to exist. If her subterranean fuel be not exhausted, a cheaper and equally abundant supply of it may have been found elsewhere, and transfer for ever the chief elements of her manufacturing or commercial prosperity; or entirely new and more transcendent sources of science may have done the same thing, and our country may be left, like a stranded vessel, to rot upon the beach! Her furnaces extinguished, her manufactories deserted, her cities decayed, the hum of her busy population silenced, she may present a spectacle of desolation like that of so many other famous nations which have risen, culminated, and set for ever."
"Or," interrupted I, "(and may God avert the omen!) the same ruin may be accomplished still earlier, and by more potent causes. Her nobles enervated by luxury, her lower classes sunk in vice and ignorance, and both the one and the other decaying in piety and religion (a sure result of neglecting that Bible which has directly and indirectly formed her strength), she may have fallen a victim to the consequences of her own degeneracy, or to an irresistible combination of the enemies who envy and hate her. That picture of the splendid imagination of the great historian of our day may be realized, 'when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.'"
"In short," resumed Harrington, "in several ways that appalling catastrophe may have taken place; and, should this be the case, how many questions will be asked of history, but asked in vain! As for Rome,—what other great name in the present strife pitted against England,—for aught we can tell, she may by that time be in desolation far more remediless than when the grim Attilas and Alarics stormed her walls. For aught we know, the agency of those terrible elements which more or less mine the soil of Italy may have made her 'like unto' Herculaneum or Pompeii; or that silent desolater, the malaria, which Dr. Arnold thinks will be perpetual and will increase, may long before that period have reduced, not only the Campagna of Rome, but the whole region of the 'seven hills,' to a pestilential solitude."
"But all this is mere vision?" said Robinson.
"Certainly; but it is the vision of the possible. Similarly wonderful and equally unexpected revolutions have taken place in the history of past nations and empires in a less space of time; and some enormous changes, we know, must happen during the next eighteen hundred and fifty years; and they will tend both to jostle out thousands of events of meaner moment, and to effect a comparative destruction of the memorials of the past. You do not suppose, I presume, that London and Rome are absolutely privileged from the fate which has overtaken Babylon and Memphis. I, for one, therefore, do not expect that the time will arrive when, in the historic investigations of the past, our Strausses will not find abundant scope for ingenious theories; nay, many real sources of perplexity even in reference to events which, at the time of their occurrence, seemed written as 'with a pen of iron on the rock for ever.' But even supposing no other difficulty, I cannot lay small stress upon the mere accumulation of materials on which the historian, two thousand years hence, will have to operate, if he would recover an exact account of the events of our time. It is much the same whether you have to dig into the pyramids of Egypt, or into the catacombs of the buried literature of two thousand years, for the memorials which are to enable you to arrive at the exact truth, at least as to any events of transient interest, however important at the time of their occurrence. It will be like 'hunting for a needle in a bundle of hay,' as the proverb says."
"Still, I cannot imagine that facts like those with which our ears have been ringing during the last eight months, can ever be contested."
"Can you not?" said Harrington. "I cannot imagine any thing more likely than that, eighteen hundred and fifty years hence, such an event, on Strauss's principles, may be shown to be very problematical."