This on its best side, but there was a worse side. There was moral depravity; there was ruthless wickedness; there was a set so smart that they defied decency and rectitude, and travelled on the currents of their passions to all the maelstroms of moral rottenness. The King himself had violated the measures of sobriety and faithfulness. And this imposing and historical structure, must now totter to its fall before the drifting snowflake. Truly the simple shall confound the wise. Leacraft turned from his melancholy thoughts to the friendly face of Sir John, who, catching his eye, resumed his conversation.
“This map will make it quite plain that the position of our nation as a commercial, as a political fabric, is a geographical absurdity, a necessary paradox. Look!” and Sir John pinned down the map on the table, and drew Leacraft down towards its attentive examination. “Here! is an occular demonstration of our false position, a charted proof that we are in a wrong place, a spot of possible change, that will reverse all previous experiences if the right conditions supervene. The change has come, and Scotland returns to its appointed allegiance. It belongs to the Kings of the Ice. See,” and he leaned over the map in a kind of ecstacy of despair, speaking rapidly as his fingers traced the lines he indicated. “See! consider these enormities. Land’s End and the Scilly Islands, where palms grow, are on the degree of 50 degree north latitude, which is the same as Notre Dame Bay in New Foundland, the same as Manitoba, the same as the most northern Kurile Islands. Do you know what the temperature of these places are? I will tell you. The average winter temperature of northern New Foundland is 10 degrees, that of Manitoba 9 degrees, and that of the Kurile Islands, 12 degrees.
“The average temperature of Land’s End is 40 degrees. Well, that may not strike you as a contrast so sharp as to warrant my dire prediction, but you must learn to see in average temperatures much more than is simply indicated in the mere differences in degrees. Averages are utterly misleading, so far as they mean habitable conditions. A temperature of 0 for six months, and a temperature of 80 degrees, for the remaining six months furnishes the harmless average of 40 degrees, but a land suffering from the affliction of a climate such as that, would be useless for the larger purposes of a civilized community. Averages produce an impression of uniformity, whereas they conceal the most obstreperous changes—and a small difference, such as you observe between the temperature of the Scilly islands, and these inclement and impossible districts of Canada or Kamtchatka, means that though all are on the same latitude, they are as diversely adapted for modern life as the tropics and the north pole. Why are the Scilly islands adapted for tulips and spring peas, when Manitoba yet sleeps in snow?
“From the point of view of a primary instruction in temperature, hottest at the equator, coldest at the pole, and graded all the way between; it is a preposterous caprice. It is a caprice. And a civilization flourishing under the auspices of a caprice, will come to grief. Climate is a symbol of vagaries, contradictions and sudden affinities. It is the atmospheric expression for the feminine and the poetic in men. As a matter of fact contingencies of interfering land surfaces, of changing barometric pressure, of oceanic tides, of air currents, of solar radiation, combine into a labyrinth of possibilities to make places that ought to be cold, hot, and vice versa.
“But they are evanescent possibilities, and the founders of empires who rely on them will some day be brought back with stunning, abject terror, as we now are, to the realization of first principles, that latitudes are invincible barriers to the diffusion of the race, and that the nations neglecting their plain meaning court disaster. Well; you know the explanation of all these whims of nature. The old story; the Gulf Stream with its millions of units of heat forced northward by wind pressure, and accelerated eastward by the equatorial velocity it starts out with, our insular position bathed in oceanic waters, holding immense deposits of the sun’s heat; the open seas north of us; the great furnace stores of heat in Africa, like a nearby factory heating our thin coasts. That is common knowledge—but these accidents of position, these migratory tides are holding in check invincible tendencies. Like a child’s push against an evenly balanced boulder they keep off the descent of disaster, but like another child’s push in the opposite direction, a sudden alteration of coast lines reduces our boasted exemption to a shadow, and London, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Glasgow, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Hamburgh—the great cities of the world—pay at last the penalty of an infringement of nature’s Common Law.
“Heat is life, and cold is death, and no blank optimism may hope for national achievement in the frosts of winter. Our civilization, the civilization of northern Europe, has overstepped the limits of climatic permission, as this globe is made. We are the victims of a deception. Primary conditions of temperature are returning, a meteorological hoax is exploded, and 50 degrees north latitude will mean in Europe what it has always meant elsewhere. But look at Edinburgh, look at these isothermals on the map, attributing to her the temperature of far southern latitudes. Too obvious an absurdity to last. True enough. Yes, but fugitive; an episode only. So flat a contradiction of the economy of this round earth should never have misled us. And we have had warnings—”
Mr. C— stopped; his agitation fairly choked him. Leacraft sympathized with the gentleman’s distress. His bitterness of heart had created a mental hallucination, an unbalanced affectation of epigram. Leacraft interposed: “Well, Sir John, the empire of Great Britain has no reason to regret its existence, even if it is based on a climatic fallacy. There have been some things done in it which no change in temperature will obliterate, unless the Ice Age is returning and we all decline into extinction north and south, and the Earth is again without form and void. You speak of caprices. How can you tell this is not a caprice, too, a monstrous subterfuge of Nature to teach us a lesson, letting us come back again when we are better, when we can feel and keep grateful to Her for letting us live at all. You err in deduction Sir John. A round Earth exposed to the sun’s heat with a zenith movement from 23,28 north latitude to 23,28 south latitude, must exhibit water currents flowing north, and bringing with them equatorial temperatures. Such a fact is as normal as that the same earth must be colder at the poles than at the equator. You are involved in a sophism, because you assume a principle which is imaginary, so far as its invariable truth is concerned.
“And what warnings have we ever had?”
“Warnings!” said Sir John, after a moment’s silence during which he regarded Leacraft with a guarded hopefulness, “Warnings! Many.” And he took out a note book from which he read. “The winters of 1544, 1608, 1709, were terrific—the thermometer at Paris in 1709, sank to nine degrees below zero Fah. In 1788–1789, the river Seine froze over in November. Then there was 1794–5, 1798–9, when the rivers of Europe were frozen over. In 1795, the mercury in Paris registered ten degrees below zero, although at the same time in London the temperature was nearly seven degrees above zero. And then we have 1812–3 when Napoleon failed, defeated by the cold rather than the Russians. In 1819–20, in 1829–30, in 1840–41, in 1853–4, 1870–71, during the Franco-German war, with the cold greater at the south than in the north of France, and when—this is worth noting—the Gulf Stream was driven backward by a north wind, and banked up, as it were, at Spain and Portugal; in all these years there were intensely cold winters, which if continued, and reinforced by storms, and increased by the disappearance of some of the helpful agencies that now keeps up our supply of caloric, would mean, could only mean our extinction.
“Now as for degrees of cold—I quote from Flammarion—‘the greatest cold yet experienced has been twenty-four degrees below zero in France, five degrees below in England, twelve below in Belgium and Holland, sixty-seven degrees in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, forty-six in Russia, thirty-two in Germany, ten degrees below in Spain and Portugal.’ These are Fahrenheit records. These severities tell us our danger.”