In the meanwhile the climatic changes continued, and the face of the United Kingdom more and more altered under the infliction of the long and tempestuous winters, the cool, shortened summers, and the ice blockade about its coasts. For it had early become apparent that in some inexplicable way, the Arctic currents streamed down from the polar regions with reinforced volume and velocity, bringing with them the discharged masses of ice projected from their usual course westward, by the irruption into the Arctic Ocean through Behring Straits of the united oceanic rivers of the Gulf Stream and the currents from the Yellow Sea. Throughout the spring, the beleaguered coasts were deeply fringed with ice-floes and icebergs, whose chilling emanations created fogs, and wrapt the islands in cheerless cold. Each passing year had made more clear the surpassing wisdom of the evacuation. But a large population found that they could support themselves on the island, made up of the hardy, enduring types, the sailors, fishermen, and the boreal agriculturists—the farmer who entertains life successfully where the earth reluctantly yields her products, and the scant nature furnishes but few of the products of the soil. For now a most extraordinary thing happened. The refrigeration of Northern Europe had driven down towards the south the northern denizens. They eagerly seized the deserted land of the southerners, less accustomed to the niggardly responses of the field, and met the attacks of the climate with the accustomed patience and resistance to which they had become innured in their northern home. In this way the population of Iceland almost bodily left the bleak and ice-bound coasts of the Arctic island, that no longer offered the meagre semblance even of subsistence, which previously maintained its stubbornly hardy occupants. Nothing could have been more fortunate, as it retarded in some measure the shocking decline in the values of the land, and gave to all establishments that might otherwise have been turned into homes for owls and foxes a partial usefulness. Not indeed that the manufacturing interests would be considerably revived, but warehouses and buildings connected with manufacturing or shipping business would be made into storehouses, and the castles and large manor houses were converted into curious communal colonies, where those boreal people most joyfully repaired and developed profitable communities.
Large numbers of the very poor found in the exodus of the well paid or employed classes above them, a grand chance to renew their own luck. They became keepers of the deserted buildings; they fraternized with the newcomers, and freed from the incubus of a superimposed social repression, became happy and industrious.
To all the brands and grades of the surviving or deserted inhabitants came increasing numbers of Scandinavians; important fractions of the Scotch settled on the coasts of England, and even immigrants from Newfoundland and Canada were tempted to seize the strange opportunity to occupy vast and abandoned cities, which furnished them in many instances with palatial shelters, but which later became repellant and unpleasant abodes, from which they too willingly withdrew to the smaller settlements.
The tragedy of the big cities was complete. They were melancholy wastes, their empty streets seemed baleful and dismal. They gave ghostly thrills of terror, even in the noon-day, to the passers by—silent graves of past memories—the speechless, vacant, staring windows in the unlit rooms were like the open but expressionless eyes of corpses, and the awful fall of silence through the labyrinth of ways, roads, lanes, places, squares, alleys, descended upon the wanderer, caught by some malign trick of adventure within their voiceless, motionless depths, with the benumbing touch of the grave. He hastened his steps; he ran to escape the deadly stupor, the inexpressible gloom of loneliness, where every aspect betokened life. The solitude of nature inspires, draws to the lips an involuntary prayer, or places in the heart the movements of hope, but this hideous contradiction of signs and effect weighed like lead upon the spirit, and forced from the shrinking heart the ejaculations of despair.
Never on earth was there such a picture of dejected grandeur, as this emptied metropolis of the world presented; never before had a great city become its own tomb, through the flight of its inhabitants; never in any record of disaster, whether by earthquake, pestilence, flood or vulcanism, was there such obliteration as followed the withdrawal of the citizens of London from their own capital.
The thick blanket of the snow was thrown over it in winter, and its emergent domes, pinnacles, obelisks and needles offered a fantastic similitude to mortuary monuments, or else beneath the yellow moon its piercing whiteness, like a titanic face of someone killed, smote the blue black skies above it with remorse.
But in Australia the English strength revived and broadened; it promised to make a gigantic social revolution; it worked strangely enough in unison with the newly awakened hopes of the King to restore an accustomed prestige to the Crown. This political phenomenon attracted the attention of the civilized world. The King in a most adroit proclamation to the people had peculiarly enlisted their sympathy by his veiled complaint of the habitual loss of power, and the encroachments upon the kingly prerogatives of the self-constituted Cabinet of Ministers. The King’s action was always tacitly prescribed and anticipated. He was a puppet, dressed in regalia, with no shadow of power, real and personal. And this he resented, but his language was the sentences of diplomacy, and lost the individual note entirely in a concerned and measured argument, restrained by every possible regard for the present custom, urging a greater confidence in the King’s wishes, and a larger precinct of action for his judgment. This momentous promulgation was contemptuously referred to by its critics as “the Ourselves” letter, but it met a favorable reception and it enlisted the cordial endorsement of the House of Lords, nor was it altogether resented by the House of Commons. The achievement of this success led the King into a further step of interference, in the appointments and in the personnel of the Cabinet, and he succeeded further in impressing his wishes upon a number of important bills passing through the Parliament. In short, by a persistent pressure, seconded by friends among the people, and a growing following in the legislature, he had inserted his views, and extorted from the grudging concessions of the Commons’ recognition of the royal prerogatives. He had shown himself unusually active in resource, in suggestions, and in intercourse with the people. His examples had been followed with enthusiasm by the nobility, who, so to speak, spread themselves before the observation of the nation, and exerted an unaccustomed generosity and ubiquitous energy in practically assisting the work of rehabilitation. At a general election, many candidates were discussed and elected upon this issue, viz.: the restoration to the King of kingly power.
“And so, you see,” Thomsen concluded, “the unexpected happens, as it always does. We moved to an ultra-democratic milieu, a veritable nest of fads and socialistic temerities and experiments, and lo! the reaction sets in, and in Australia the King may recover the power, lost with the Stuarts, and the monarchial principle gets a shove ahead, which, with prosperity, and in England, no impulse short of the fiat of the Almighty, could have secured for it. A prophet who would have foretold that, would have scored a poor success in 1900 as a state maker.”
Before he had finished speaking, Leacraft had left his chair, and was walking to and fro near the speaker—and then he advanced to the edge of the few steps that led from the piazza to the open swards beneath them, which were fringed by an emergent crown of trees growing thickly in some lower crease or hollow of the ground, beyond which again the eye fell to the foot swells, and the undulations of land far off, in the flats, just beginning to twinkle with lights.
Leacraft spoke slowly, his eyes still fixed upon the distance, as if in revery, but his measured words came clearly to his two friends, carried by a voice which, always melodious and cultured, now gained a sort of passionate yearning, and then again was approved as disinterestedly clean and judicial: “All this is an episode. Nothing more. The future of the races of the world means the widening scope of the Republican idea. There can be no other. Education forbids its extinction. Yes, and Authority endorses it. This sudden foolishness in Australia will only invoke a perilous reaction. There can be to-day in governmental systems only varied applications of the one thought; the rule of the people through an appeal to the people’s choice of rulers. It is fundamentally common sense in an era of enlightenment, to begin with; but since the United States have eclipsed all nations, and raised the standards of individual action beyond all previous estimates, this conclusion has coercively been accepted, that through the influences propagated under this popular freedom of control, the finest, the richest, the sweetest, the most magnanimous types of character are also engendered and completed. A kind of psychological logic is involved. A vast psychic power of selection sets in, and irrevocably the most noble, the most disenthralled natures slowly appear. In comparison with their best results, the representatives of other cultures appear dwindling and abortive. And why? Because in the least limited field of opportunity the unrestrained power of nature to make character must of necessity evolve consummate and supreme examples. Nothing is more demonstrable. It must be conceded, I grant, that at first the crop of temperaments is marked more by rash hardihood, strident vulgarities, and climbing audacity, but these very qualities, which in the naming seem so distasteful, mature naturally, in later generations, into devoted courage, æsthetic spontaneity; juices of the fruit when green form the basis of its later richness.