Was it an atheistic world? I had not ventured to question David about this. But I knew that there was no Sunday upon the calendar, and that the tenth day was the civil holiday. That day had fallen already, and endless crowds had marched through the streets, to the music of bands, to play-places in waste spots outside London. The Council supervised the games, which were compulsory. Of all the paternal regulations of the Council, this seemed to me the most arbitrary and oppressive.
“We have to keep the people under discipline,” David explained. “Once they were allowed to wander at will; but they tore up the trees and flowers and strewed paper and broken bottles everywhere.”
That was true. I remembered the public fields of my own age. I recalled how one writer had seen in them a complete indictment of democracy itself.
I was amazed and alarmed increasingly by what I saw in my journeys about the town with David: the large brass tags that gave each person his label, the occupation badges, the insolence of the whites, passing with bodyguards of blues who elbowed all out of their way. And once there came a frantic scramble to make a passage for a tall, black-bearded man in a dark-blue uniform, who passed in the midst of his retinue with clanking sword.
I had noticed these men in uniform about the streets. They strode like conquerors amid a servile populace. I learned that the tall man was Mehemet, a Turk in command of an international force, the bodyguard of Sanson, and devoted to him.
Perhaps it was as well that, before my enlightenment came, I completed a cursory survey of the new civilization. At my request David took me to one of the public schools. I was astonished to discover that no history prior to 1945 was taught, and no geography. The greater part of the curriculum was devoted to scientific and economic subjects. So great had been the progress in knowledge that, on opening some of the text-books, I discovered that I was quite unable to understand them.
I learned that Oxford and Cambridge had disappeared, with the old public schools, in 1945, after a revolution, the anger of the people having been kindled against them on account of their moral influence and the distinctive stamp of character that they produced. To prevent tutors of personality from imparting to their pupils the elements of humane tradition, David told me, the text-books were so written as to eliminate entirely the personal element in instruction, a reform that the prophet Wells had urged rather furiously, and perhaps invidiously, in his own century.
“The Council shapes each citizen’s education from the cradle to the workshop,” said David. “It is very anxious to secure precision of knowledge. For instance, it is a criminal offense for mothers to teach their children fairy stories. It is the duty of the inspectors to question children rigorously, in order to ascertain whether they are acquainted with any of this unscientific, heretical folk-lore.”
“Which has doubtless all perished,” I said.
“On the contrary,” he answered, “an immense quantity of it has come down to us, practically unchanged, through all the revolutions of the past century, and not only that but new tales have arisen. The authorities are at their wits’ end to discover who is responsible for the existence of this masonic secret among the younger generation.”