“No,” resumed Leacraft, “that is true. It’s not the old home, and a big city—the greatest—cannot be boxed up in straw and packing cloth and get set up by order in another place, with the precision of a movable bungalow. But we need not trifle. We all know that it’s no child’s work. We expect something very different from London. We can meet the emergencies of place and room. Our population can be distributed. Remember, we are on trial, and the new, strange chapter opening before us will bring again into view the inalienable fortitude and power of the English mind. It’s a test. The conditions are irreversible, and mind and character will win—must win—or slowly, surely, the stars of our ascendancy pale and disappear. Nature for a moment has thrown us in a great peril, but was it nature or ourselves that won us footholds throughout the world? Open coasts await us, hundreds of thousands will welcome us. The influences of a common language, ancestry and institutions have chained together the links of our supremacy around the world, and made of it an inseparable girdle. Shall we falter now, when nature again challenges our mind to quell her hostility, opposing her impediments of sense to our invisible treasuries of thought, invention and self-confidence? It is a new step—our best step,—in the march of human liberty. We need to be divorced from the material constants, amid which the long fought battle for free thought and action has been waged. We are yet entangled in the meshes of tradition, the stumbling blocks of convention—and now they are shattered. We rise to splendid hopes. Or shall we say it is retribution, it is punishment for many sins. Let it be so. A chastened pride will not hurt us, nor will it hurt our chances.”
“Yes, Leacraft,” interrupted Thomsen, “I feel better to hear you talk this way, but I must look at some very disagreeable facts, too. They are not easily eliminated by words or fancies, and even seem to evince a provoking facility to become more numerous, the more they are considered. Take the mechanical problem of transportation. We are some forty millions of people. The extravagant powers of assimilation of the United States barely digests the one million of emigrants that come to their shores each year; what conceivable powers of absorption will dispose of our forty millions without an attack of industrial gastritis that will induce the worst political convulsions. And the carrying skill and capacity of our whole merchant marine cannot in less than ten years take away this monstrous human cargo, together with all the colossal accumulation of paraphernalia, stocks, chattels, goods, treasures, books and belongings, that have gathered in this rich island, until they seem like a sort of pactolian alluvium that is indigenous and irremovable. Think of the women, the children! What method of domiciliation will you devise to accommodate these armies? And with this removal comes the crash of all domestic values, railroad stock, gas stock, mill stock, warehouses, land values, everything goes with the removal of the human vitality that gives them worth. It staggers the imagination to think how the disorganization radiates and increases in all directions. In 1905–6 this Great Britain consumed in one industry alone nearly four millions of bales of cotton, spun them out into merchantable goods on her fifty million spindles. Do you measure the almost unfathomable depths of distress the stoppage of this one industry means? Is it not better to fight it out here, to defeat Nature, if I may be allowed to copy your own enthusiasm, to put on our own heads the regalia of the Ice King, and rule him, wrest from him his own sceptre, and excel his power with the power of this new century of invention?”
“Impossible.” Leacraft’s retort was quick and impetuous. “Impossible. No expedients of man overcome the deliberate intentions of Nature. We utilize her forces, but we may not deflect her purposes. It is the voice of that very science which has made us such powerful masters of her utilities that now tells us: We must go. To quote the words of Prof. Darwin, spoken at the Cape Town meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, ‘Stability is further a property of relationship to surrounding conditions; it denotes adaptation to environment’; there can be no adaptation to this new environment, which will retain our former greatness. Nature opposes us, indeed, in forcing us away, but we thwart her niggardliness by subterfuge and endurance and courage. We can make her plastic enough for our purposes if we do not overstep the limits of her last negation. The practical question, the panic, the loss! Ah! Well, if all should be as it has been, if the inequalities still remained, the very moral significance and regeneration which I hope for could not come. It means the levelling process by which the New Brotherhood is visibly and violently enforced. And as to place and means, thousands upon thousands will establish themselves in America, blessing every community they enter, and being blessed in turn with opportunity. Australia and South Africa, and Canada, with millions upon millions of square miles of unused land, will furnish us with new homes. Revivification, regeneration, rehabilitation will be rapid. We shall not see its final outcome, but we shall know the virile impulse of self help at its inception. If social differences, if social pageantry, vanish, the constraining push of Christian tolerance and fellowship succeeds. Differences may emerge later, but they will be differences of endowment and industrious energy; no other. And as to the transportation problem, it can be solved. We should not all go at once. It may be a slow movement; perhaps the slower the better. But see how we become unified. Like refugees or shipwrecked outcasts, we shall help each other, and every man’s hand will help his neighbor, but also we shall organize on the basis of each man’s aptitude; the farmer to his ploughshare, the mechanic to his workshop, the preacher to his pulpit, the artist to his easel, the banker to his counting room; at last, an ideal assortment of talents.”
Thomsen hid a slight yawn, and made a smile of incredulity serve the ends of a salutation of encouragement. “There’s no denying the contagion of your confidence, Leacraft, but really I think that we are all mournfully in the dark as to what we best can do; and in the meanwhile it’s a matter of positive terror what we are going to live on. I brought all the available cash I could for Ethel and myself, but already famine has unfurled its banners, and you know how cramped and shrunk our living has become in London. The Thames alone saves us from starvation. It’s no longer a question of having a bank balance, but the more definite and fundamental one of finding something to buy.
“By the by, Balfour closes the debate at ten to-night. You have admission to the gallery of the Commons. Let us go down. It promises to be a fine effort. I only hope it’s not going to be a funeral oration.”
Leacraft pulled out his watch and found the time a half-hour after nine. Yes, he would go; in fact he had already engaged a boatman at Blackfriars’ Bridge, to be in waiting for him at almost that very moment. Jim stepped to the window and looked out. The night was pure and clear. Huge hummocks of snow encumbered the streets below, and the moon blazed in the keen sky like some target of disaster.
“Weel, Mr. Leacraft, you won’t want me along, and somehow I’d rather sit here and think over your own words, little as I believe it will all come oot so gude-like.”
“No, Jim, keep the fire on, and watch out for us, and you might remember to brew us a stiff snack after your own heart; it won’t come amiss.” Jim assented with alacrity, and Leacraft and Mr. Thomsen, muffled up to their ears, and almost hermetically enclosed in fur ulsters, left the room, descended the stairs, and appeared at the doorway on the street. A tolerable path led through a part of Cheapside, but it was not their intention to follow that thoroughfare; they turned towards the church and clambered along a devious footway, that imitated the sinuous and irregular wanderings of a mountain trail. It led them to Ludgate Hill, where they encountered a few other travellers like themselves making their way to the bridge for the same purpose. Bridge street was just passable, and soon the ice-laden waters of the river were seen, blazoned like some spectacle of enchantment in the deluge of argent light. They found the boatman in the basement of the Hotel Royal, which was dead, to the last stories of its ornamented facade, silent and dark. It was a part of the indications that London already had lost its visitors. The barge men stole out of their retreat, and Leacraft and Thomsen followed them, the shadows of the party printed in ink on the winnowed snow. Two men accompanied the boat; one rowed and the other stood at the prow, pushing off the cakes of ice, and correcting the passage of the boat through the lanes of water, flowing like limpid threads of molten silver between the crunching and veering floes. Leacraft and Thomsen watched with fascinated eyes the broad terrace of the Victoria Embankment, illuminated with the moon’s effulgence, whose unchecked glory met a feeble rivalry in a few sickly gas mantels, and a solitary electric lamp. The noble houses of legislation—and to the eyes of Leacraft they never seemed more imbued with a supremely delicate and elevating beauty—rose from the water’s edge, like some creation of an inspired dreamer, woven of splintered rays of light, with pencilled lines of ebony filched from the darkest night. It embodied a loveliness past even the powers of thought to measure or describe. The houses flamed with light, and the strong light on the clock tower, announced the sitting of Parliament, sent back to the moon a terrestrial radiance, that resembled the pulsations of a fallen star. As they passed the Westminster Bridge, their eyes caught the distant lights of Lambeth Palace. Both knew that to-night the King dined with the Archbishop.
Slowly their boat drew near the landing, and the two men who guided it motioned to its occupants to get ready to disembark, as the landing was deprived of its usual outfit, owing to the clogging cakes of ice which clung to the wall. The heavy nose of the boat was pushed into the wall, and Leacraft and Thomsen scrambled up the steps, and gained the walk which led to the Victoria Arch, and the entrance of the Parliament House. Here a jam was encountered, and the news was soon learned that Balfour had begun his speech an hour before the announced time, and was now engaged in the closing appeal on the motion before the house.
And what was this motion? To explain it, it is necessary to rehearse some of the preceding events, which had finally eventuated in this most marvellous situation; a debate in the House of Parliament as to whether the English people should evacuate England. This momentous and world-moving spectacle was now actually contemplated by the fixed attention of every nation on the earth. Its awful solemnity, the convulsing pathos of it, the immense commercial dislocation it involved, its social agony, the calamitous doubts it summoned as to the stability of Europe itself, and the fiercer sudden question of the meaning of human existence on this planet, it aroused, made the debate of the English Parliament then pending the most extraordinary discussion ever known in human annals.