centuries of successful war. In all history, there is no record of any nation that has retained its character or vitality through centuries of successful peace. If we would venture that higher and harder enterprise with reasonable hope of achievement, we must first recognise its conditions and dangers, which we show no disposition to do, and we shall need some better guidance than will come from the muddled wobblings of Dean Inge, or the vicious cowardice of the gospel of Marie Stopes.
We need not observe these facts in any spirit of pessimism, for they are only formidable the while we fail to observe them. But it would be foolish to ignore their significance. It is not a trivial circumstance that the English post-office, which once prided itself on the certainty with which it would deliver any communication entrusted to it, however badly addressed, now takes an equal pride in the ingenuity with which it can find reasons for failing to do so. But it will not be the first time that England has seen evil days and survived them.
Quiet, uncomplaining, oppressed with a weight of taxation which is without excuse, as it is without precedent, shamefully told that the payment of these exactions is more important than their children’s lives, there are still in England, unless my faith is mistaken, a million of uncorrupted homes, where children are received with love, and privations are met with courage.
The pressure of unjust taxation may yet find a Hampden to resist it. A materialistic “science” may yet rouse a prophet to deride its superstitions, and to denounce its counsels of degradation.
However cunningly entrenched may be the bureaucracy which controls us, it is a fundamental law that it cannot endure unless its spirit be one of service rather than of acquisition.
Feudalism was impregnable until its ideal of service faltered. The monasteries would have endured until today, had they been content to express the ideality which conceived them.
Our “captains of industry” may become the rulers of their race, or they may end beneath the feet of a howling mob. The decision does not rest with the mob, nor with chance, nor with a settled destiny. It rests with them. If they be more concerned for their own wealth than for the welfare of those they lead, even the stupidity of the Labour party (which is almost absolute) will be sufficient for their undoing.
We may contemplate the probability that our civilisation may be swept away by physical catastrophe, and be succeeded by a period of simpler and more primitive life, from which new complexities will develop, without pessimism, and, if we understand the nature and purpose of human life intelligently, without regret.
Even if this civilisation were realised as the highest that the earth has borne, and could it be freed from various sinister practices, (such as that of usury), which are so woven into its fabric that it may be doubted whether it could survive their removal, we might still contemplate its conclusion with equanimity, or even with satisfaction.
Having won a game, we do not desire to remain static in victory. We clear the field for the contest which is sure to follow. But whether our civilisation be of such quality that it could be accounted pessimistic, from any standpoint, to anticipate its destruction, is not beyond argument. It might be considered evidence of an exceptionally sanguine temperament.
—S. Fowler Wright
PRELUDE
To an observer from a distant planet the whole movement would have appeared trivial. There was probably no point at which land either sank or rose to one five-thousandth of the earth’s diameter. But water and land were so nearly at one level that the slightest tremor was sufficient either to drain or flood them.
The surface trembled, and was still, and the Himalayas were untroubled, and the great tableland of Central Asia was still behind them, but the tides lapped the foothills to the south, and India was no more, and China a forgotten dream.
Once before the earth had trembled along the volcanic fissure which was then the fertile Eden of the human race, and a hundred legends and the Mediterranean were its mementoes.
Now it sank again, slightly and gently, along the same path. It was as though it breathed in its sleep, but scarcely turned, and Southern Europe was gone, and Germany a desolation that the seas had swept over.
Ocean covered the plain of the Mississippi, and broke against the barrier of the Rockies. The next day it receded, leaving the naked wrecks of a civilisation that a night had ended.
There were different changes southward, where the Saharan desert wrinkled into the greatest mountain range that the world had seen, and the sea creatures of the West Atlantic learnt in bewildered death that the ocean had failed them.
In the Indian tropics a hundred leagues of sea-slime that had known the weight of mile-deep waters streamed naked to a torrid sun.
The subsistence of the first night must have been comparatively local. It was nothing more than an extension of the Mediterranean basin, which had flooded the lower lands of Spain and Italy and part of France.
In England, as in Europe generally, the intervening day had been used in such attempts at escape as may be made by a cockroach in the middle floor when the lantern finds it.
The sea offered nothing, for the western coast was piled with the wreckage of the North Atlantic and the Irish Sea. There were no ships coming to the southern ports that day. There had been none in sight when its dawn had risen. The night-wind had swept the Channel clear, and if any had outlived the gale, which is not to be reasonably supposed, they must have been hurried far to south, where wind and water poured into the vortex.
The air offered a slight hope for the few who could avail themselves of its possibility. When the wind lessened, during the day, there were those who tried it, and may have lived, if they were able to find a place of safety before the storm resumed, but at best they could not have been many, and their hope was slender.
To most there came the blind instinct of northward flight, and as the pressure of the gale slackened, it had crowded many of the main roads with burdened stumbling crowds, or jammed them with motor vehicles which could make little progress against uprooted trees, and fallen poles, and blown wreckage, which confronted every mile of the smooth surfaces on which they had been accustomed to the high speed for which they paid so frequently in the deaths of their drivers, and in the slaughter of their fellowmen.
Now, when they felt that speed would have been their salvation, they could not gain it; but it would have availed them nothing. When the horror of the next night was over, Scotland, Wales, and all the heights of Northern England had disappeared forever. Only, by some freak of fate, the cause of which is beyond knowing, some portions of the midland plain were still above the ocean level, with unimpaired fertility, and some life upon them. Larger portions had been drowned by the wild floods that receded when all life had ended, and the salt-soaked fields could only return in the course of gradual years to a reduced fertility. There was little of human life that remained, even in the higher ground, for those whom fire and storm had spared fled northward, to their own undoing, and few from the pasture-country to southward (one of the least populated portions of the England of that time) had had the good fortune to come so far, and no farther; but life there was, both of beast and man—life equally released from its accustomed slavery, lawless, confused, and incompetent.
The wild creatures of the woods adapted themselves the more readily to the new conditions. The change was only one of reduced caution, or of an added boldness. Man had ceased to count for the moment, and the fox walked where he would. To the rabbit it meant only that, if he had one foe the less, the others slaughtered with an assured impunity. To his undrowsing watchfulness it made no change at all.
Rats increased in the deserted ruins, and the owls fed freely.
