The occasion for it had practically been forced or precipitated by the coercive power of scientific opinion. And the curious thing about this same scientific opinion was that it first resisted the overwhelming proof of the subsidence of the isthmus and the elevation of the Caribbean wall of transgression, and then fervently accepted it, with not one scintilla more of demonstration, and in accepting it proposed for itself the unwelcome task of convincing the English people that they should evacuate their country.
It would be hard to conceive of anything to the English mind less conceivable than such a desertion. Its mere mention raised the most violent denunciation and poured a torrent of abuse upon the unfortunate advisors. The thought of it sapped the very foundations of the English sense of existence. It seemed the vertigo of madness. It deranged the most obvious assertions of common sense. It was an impeachment of the English reality. To think of it was a betrayal of trust, a breach of faith, a succinct defiance of the Almighty, a blasphemous rejection of the lessons of history, a timorous surrender to the threats of the weather.
But later, when the Scottish population began to throw its inundating tides of people into England, and the Englishman read at his breakfast table of the floes of ice in the Clyde, and the buried Grampians, the insurmountable drifts about Stirling, and the incipient neve masses on Scuir-na-Gillean, in Skye, the reluctant embarkation of the merchants of Aberdeen, the closing of its great University, the shrinkage of business in Glasgow; when they realized that in truth the Atlantic and Pacific oceans had become united by a broad gateway through which the Gulf Stream, which erstwhile transported the heat of the equator to Europe, now emptied its torrid waters, bathing the western coasts of North America as far north as Alaska, and bringing to that Arctic country almost the same blessing of fructifying warmth with which it had before endowed England; when still further they began to hear, and to realize, by private letters, the affectionate summons and offers of the colonies, the overwhelming loyalty of the brothers across the sea, their frenzied eagerness to place their lands almost gratuitously in the hands of the mother people, and assume towards them the role of honored beneficiaries, then a strange, unwonted wondering began, as to whether it might not be best to look into the matter. And then intelligence aroused, with continued inspection, the impression grew, that indeed the prospects were alarming. The English mind, once startled in a certain direction, soon takes on an impetus proportionate to the inertia of its first movements, and therefore by a natural law of psychology and mechanics gains in accelerated velocity with each succeeding moment. So it was now. The industry of the scientific propaganda, its inventive persistency, was followed by the conversion of the large financial and commercial interests, and then a panic seized the great masses of the nation. Parliament took it up, the papers bulged and teemed with information, discussion, advice, and reports. A determining influence with the large trading classes was the decline, in some instances the positive disappearance of business, while to others not chained in insular possessions, a new world of adventure and chance seemed not altogether undesirable.
The pressure of popular approval hastened, in the Parliament, the formulation of a plan for the slow and careful removal of the population. The Law of Exodus, as it was termed, was a thoroughly English legislative work. And that meant a wise, adequate and deliberate evacuation. It involved a re-tabulation, so to speak, of the wealth and occupations of the individuals of the country, and so adjusted their departure, their association, their duties, their facilities and trades, that the least competition would arise in the new quarters, and then they were also so distributed in the colonies, that they met the requirements of these, as it was ascertained, from the authorities, the latter demanded. Thousands upon thousands had already sailed away, forming for themselves combinations as their acquaintances and connexions permitted, and still other thousands, with property invested abroad made a home in the land in which their support lay. A singular consequence of the situation was the speculative gale it produced in America, where large amounts of unemployed or released capital took flight. It settled tumultuously in Wall Street, voraciously attacking every variety of security, and driving stock values out of sight in a tremendous boom that disconcerted the tried veterans of the famous mart.
All the time the Londoner was himself gaining some convincing insight into the dread nature of the climatic change about him. The snows covered the greater part of the streets of London, the parks became desolate tracts, deserted, uncleared, unused, swept over by the freezing winds, and chased from end to end with buffeted wreaths of snow, whose ghostly swirling columns ran over the wintry exposures like a race of Titanic spirits, crossing each other in cyclonic confusion, or meeting in shivering collisions, dissolving in cloud-bursts of microscopic and penetrating needles of ice. The Thames was almost closed, the shipping stayed idle at the wharfs, almost unmitigated suffering spread among the poor, for miles the streets were only traversed by foot-paths worn by their occupants, and the strangest sights occurred in the smaller reservations like Lincoln Inn Fields, St. Paul’s Churchyard, the Temple Gardens, the Artillery Grounds, Finsbury Circus and other confined spaces. By a freak of circumstances, and the curious and entirely unexpected vagary of the winds, the snow piled up and up in these quarters, because of a peculiar inrush of wind from the converging streets around, and this sweeping effect continued until the mound of snow, circumvallating the buildings, reached to their windows or overtopped them, while in enclosures not pre-empted by buildings, as Highbury Fields, and the various cemeteries, the hills of snow formed colossal billows, which seemed like a phalanx of rigid waves tortured into fantastic pinnacles by the storms of wind. Such spectacles turned back the life-blood of the bravest, and converted the most recalcitrant objectors to the new view of the necessity of leaving the immemorial splendors of England’s Capital.
It was a demoralizing and distressing picture of change, to visit the great docks on the Thames; the London docks, the Commercial and the West India docks, and in the place of the varied throngs, the miscellaneous rabble of laborers in which the forms, faces and even the dresses of the people of the world made a composite aggregate, which was a suggested reflex of the myriad-handed toil and industry of London, a significant hint of the immense wealth and opulent indulgence of the great metropolis—in place of all this, the harsh winds whistled over deserted yards, shrieked through the rigging of idle ships, or blew tempestuous volleys of rime and sleet across the river between Wapping and Rotherhithe. Before this awful change, English fortitude and confidence quailed, or wrapping itself in the reserve of bitterness and distrust, turned silently away, for an instant, at least, driven to confess that the time-honored legend of English destiny had become a perverted and silly shibboleth.
February 12th, which has in meteorology, along with the twelfths of November, May and August, been isolated as the period of the ice saints, viz.: four periods characterized in an unaccountable manner by a fall in temperature—this 12th of February, 1910, had been determined by the Parliament for the closing of the great debate on the Motion of Evacuation. It was this night that Leacraft and Thomsen found so clear and cold, a keen and perilous intensity of cold probably never before experienced in the English islands, unless one, in his inenviable task of comparison could have found an equivalent in the Ice Age itself.
When Leacraft and his companion attained the Victoria Tower, already the debate, on the motion which in an enlarged way had been before the English nation for more than a month, had reached its final stage. Balfour had been chosen to close, in a long peroration, the tremendous forensic display which had been limited to the walls of the Houses of Parliament. But it was only an episodic and distinguished incident in an argument which had convulsed every household in England, which had sent its clamorous assertions and appeals to the whole English-speaking people throughout the world, and which would, by all rational expectations, remain to the end of historic time the most startling venture in language, the most dramatic performance in oratory ever known.
The two men hurried in, past the flaming chandeliers of the beautiful archway. Upon Leacraft showing his particular cards of admission, an attendant escorted them through the Royal Gallery, the House of Peers, the Peers’ Lobby, all of which were deserted. They chased in most indecorous fashion through the marvellous rooms, only intent upon catching the last words of the great speech whose purport and end was to empty those glorious apartments of their human interest, and bring expatriation upon all the memories they harbored. They passed through the Central Hall, the Commons’ Lobby, the Division Lobby, and were expeditiously inserted in the Reporters’ Gallery, where, backed up against the topmost wall, they surveyed the thronged mass beneath them. Every inch of space, every point of observation was packed, and the scene, on which a softened flood of light fell, with an enhancing effect of wonder, was eloquent in picturesque power and interest. Lords and ladies—to-night no interfering screen concealed the women—earls, dukes, baronets, the clergy, even bishops in their robes, merchants, men of science, bankers, and the whole House of Peers, standing at the bar of the House of Commons, were arrayed in a vast and irrelevant assemblage, pierced by one thought, the anguish of a supreme decision. And Balfour!
Upon an erect and stalwart figure, moved by an instinct of regnancy at this sublime instant to stand free of his compeers in the broad way, between the benches of the Government and those of the Opposition, and facing the speaker—all the eyes of that assemblage were riveted. The classic sentences of Macaulay in describing the trial of Warren Hastings—hackneyed as they are by innumerable repetitions—might well apply to this unwonted and intense spectacle; “the long galleries were crowded by an audience such as has rarely excited the fears or the emulations of an orator. There were gathered together from all parts of a great, free, enlightened and prosperous empire, grace and female loveliness and learning, the representatives of every science and every art.” And the comparison can be illuminatively emphasized. At the trial of the illustrious Pro-consul, curiosity in a man, sympathy with a race, admiration for the local splendor of a gorgeous scene, summoned to the hall of William Rufus the resplendent galaxy. But the motives were objective. In the present case, thought Leacraft, how pathetic, how tragic their subjective force. It was as if the children of a home, about to disappear in some horrible engulfment, calmly prepared to leave its threshold, but it was that sorrow multiplied by all the individuals of a nation, and magnified by the moral surrender of the associations of two thousand years. A nervous tension, that was expressed in the almost petrified stare of some faces, the startling pallor of others, the half-open lips, the strained attitudes, the involuntary shudders, the curious grieved looks of inattention, overmastered the assembly. Its contagious thrill seized Leacraft, and brought his mental receptivity up to a quickened pitch of almost deranged alertness, while every sense seemed preternaturally awake.