[We are privileged to-day to publish an unwritten chapter from Mr. H. G. Wells’ History of the World. It is entitled “The Slime Age,” and has a topical interest since it outlines the methods of production of the Crisis, the only article of which the supply to-day exceeds the demand.]
Out of all this muddle and confusion and slipshod thinking there arose one man with a purpose, one man who fixed his eyes on a single inevitable goal and walked straight at it, not minding what or whom he trod upon on the way. His purpose was the mass-production of crises, and he created crises as rabbits create their young, nine at a time. In those fuddled incompetent days before the Great War the crisis was a little-known phenomenon. Here and there in the drab routine of peaceful corpulent years there flashed in the prosperous firmament the baleful light of a great anxiety. Agadir was one; Carson and his gun-runners was another. But they were few; they came like rare comets and were forgotten.
Then in the Great War a new habit was born in the minds of the people, the habit of crises. Even then at first they came decently, in ordered succession—Mons, Ypres, the Coalition, Gallipoli. But the people’s craving was insatiable; the people cried for more crises.
Then this man stood up and said to the people, “I will give you crises.”
And he did. Instead of a casual crisis here and there, to every year a crisis or two, he gave them a crisis every month, every week, every day, and still they were not satisfied. And so, at last, out of all the muddle and waste and pettifogging stupidity this man created crises as men create matches, by the gross. And this was how he created them:—
Extract from “The Slime,” April 3rd, a paragraph in the Foreign Intelligence:—
“Bobadig, April 1st.
“A party of French mules, passing to their quarters in the vilayet of Arimabug, were to-day attacked by an Australian sheep on the staff of the British Military Mission. It is feared that many of the mules were injured. Feeling runs high among the peasantry, incensed already by the failure of the British Government to provide mosquito-nets for the sacred goats.”
Extract from a leading article in “The Slime,” April 6th, on Land Tenure in Wales:—
“ ... Parliament to-day will be occupied with the preposterous Budget proposals, but we hope our legislators will find time to press the Prime Minister for an explanation of the outrageous incident at Bobadig reported in our columns last week. There is only too good reason to fear that the policy of alternate violence and inertia, against which we have so often protested, has at last inflamed the law-abiding animals of Bobadig ...”