Save those at Sea,
Their path upon the Ocean keep,
And let them see
Thy hand each passing day,
Thy Ministry of Peace.
was played with bewitching plaintiveness. Men and women stopped and sang it aloud as the regiments went by, and sometimes a company of troopers added with resounding vigor their sonorous refrain.
The Prime Minister and Mr. Birrell, and Mr. Asquith, who had been associated in 1906, in the famous dead lock between the Commons and the House of Lords over the Educational Bill, prepared on the departure of the King a statement which really was a programme of evacuation. It contemplated a progressive transference of the people from England, a slowly consummated shrinkage of the business facilities and the moderated outflow of capital to the new centres of English activity. In this way some check would ensue to the frightful fall in the land values and rentals, apart from the practical consideration of the physical impossibility of at once removing forty millions of people. The government had usurped unusual powers in the creation of a Committee of Direction, which by a house to house canvass, an exhaustive survey of all titles, and a comparative estimate of the hardship imposed by emigration to different families, with immense labor, had prepared an itemized list of departure of the families of London. This plan had been copied in the large cities of the kingdom, and a co-operative scheme framed, which comprised a detailed prescription of the time of sailing, and the places of settlement for all persons listed. These lists were commonly referred to as the “Doomsday Rolls.” The scope of the committee’s power was comprehensive. It prohibited to individuals and to societies, federations and unions, independent action, without explicit conference with the committee. It proved to be a most helpful device, and lessened to the lowest possible percentage of hardship the suffering of the people.
Leacraft and his new friends freed themselves from the jurisdiction of the committee, by announcing their intention to go to America, and upon ample evidence of their ability to do so, and their independent financial standing.
It was fully understood that the evacuation was to be a sustained, gradual movement, with, however, an irreversible determination to make it finally complete. It was not believed that England had become utterly uninhabitable, or that some vestiges of its former occupation might not be still maintained. A part of the plan of evacuation involved an affectionate care of its greater monuments of architecture, if possible, though the fierceness of the winter winds augured unhappily for the success of this design. A regency of love at any rate was to be established, and as many links as possible of connection, sentimental and real, were to be left unbroken.
And Edinburgh? Thomsen had woefully noted every day the scanty paragraphs which entered the papers, and which gave brief intimations of the devastating and continuous storms, which, through the winter, swept over Scotland. As if, in order that the impending changes might be most forcibly realized, and the loss of time averted from too leniently interpreting the enormous seasonal metamorphosis going on, nature had exhausted her power in developing disaster. Terrific gales had lashed the rocky coasts, fierce insatiable blizzards had devouringly raged in the interior, and the pitiless and untired skies had emptied avalanches of snow upon the southern counties of Scotland. Edinburgh became a storm centre. With whirling inconstancy the storms beat upon the doomed city from the East and West; buildings were almost buried in the banked up and superimposed drifts, crested ranges were in the streets, and palisades of snow tortured into fantastic shapes, towered over the outer eminences, fed from the blinding torrents of flakes driven off from the Pentland hills and the Salisbury Crags. These summits alone, in the whitened waste, lifted their scraped crowns to the thickened skies. Edinburgh had become a city of the Frost King, and his slumbering legions bivouacked on and around it, except when aroused to riotous commotions by the sudden descent of the whistling armies of the wind.