第 18 页

cultivation and preserved the name of a town--as Bournemouth, Wareham,

or Swanage. Yet the officer had speedily convinced him how inevitable

such a change had been. The old order had dotted the country with

farmhouses, and every two or three miles was the ruling landlord's

estate, and the place of the inn and cobbler, the grocer's shop and

church--the village. Every eight miles or so was the country town,

where lawyer, corn merchant, wool-stapler, saddler, veterinary surgeon,

doctor, draper, milliner and so forth lived. Every eight miles--simply

because that eight mile marketing journey, four there and back, was as

much as was comfortable for the farmer. But directly the railways came

into play, and after them the light railways, and all the swift new

motor cars that had replaced waggons and horses, and so soon as the high

roads began to be made of wood, and rubber, and Eadhamite, and all sorts

of elastic durable substances--the necessity of having such frequent

market towns disappeared. And the big towns grew. They drew the worker

with the gravitational force of seemingly endless work, the employer

with their suggestions of an infinite ocean of labour.

And as the standard of comfort rose, as the complexity of the mechanism

of living increased life in the country had become more and more costly,

or narrow and impossible. The disappearance of vicar and squire, the

extinction of the general practitioner by the city specialist, had

robbed the village of its last touch of culture. After telephone,

kinematograph and phonograph had replaced newspaper, book, schoolmaster,

and letter, to live outside the range of the electric cables was to live

an isolated savage. In the country were neither means of being clothed

nor fed (according to the refined conceptions of the time), no efficient

doctors for an emergency, no company and no pursuits.

Moreover, mechanical appliances in agriculture made one engineer the

equivalent of thirty labourers. So, inverting the condition of the city

clerk in the days when London was scarce inhabitable because of the

coaly foulness of its air, the labourers now came hurrying by road or

air to the city and its life and delights at night to leave it again in

the morning. The city had swallowed up humanity; man had entered upon a

new stage in his development. First had come the nomad, the hunter, then

had followed the agriculturist of the agricultural state, whose towns

and cities and ports were but the headquarters and markets of the

countryside. And now, logical consequence of an epoch of invention,

was this huge new aggregation of men. Save London, there were only

four other cities in Britain--Edinburgh, Portsmouth, Manchester and

Shrewsbury. Such things as these, simple statements of fact though they

were to contemporary men, strained Graham's imagination to picture. And

when he glanced "over beyond there" at the strange things that existed

on the Continent, it failed him altogether.

He had a vision of city beyond city, cities on great plains, cities

beside great rivers, vast cities along the sea margin, cities girdled by

snowy mountains. Over a great part of the earth the English tongue was

spoken; taken together with its Spanish American and Hindoo and Negro

and "Pidgin" dialects, it was the everyday language of two-thirds of

the people of the earth. On the Continent, save as remote and curious

survivals, three other languages alone held sway--German, which reached

to Antioch and Genoa and jostled Spanish-English at Gdiz, a Gallicised

Russian which met the Indian English in Persia and Kurdistan and the

"Pidgin" English in Pekin, and French still clear and brilliant, the

language of lucidity, which shared the Mediterranean with the Indian

English and German and reached through a negro dialect to the Congo.

And everywhere now, through the city-set earth, save in the administered

"black belt" territories of the tropics, the same cosmopolitan social

organisation prevailed, and everywhere from Pole to Equator his property

and his responsibilities extended. The whole world was civilised; the

whole world dwelt in cities; the whole world was property. Over the

British Empire and throughout America his ownership was scarcely

disguised, Congress and Parliament were usually regarded as antique,

curious gatherings. And even in the two Empires of Russia and Germany,

the influence of his wealth was conceivably of enormous weight. There,

of course, came problems--possibilities, but, uplifted as he was, even

Russia and Germany seemed sufficiently remote. And of the quality of the

black belt administration, and of what that might mean for him he

thought, after the fashion of his former days, not at all. That it

should hang like a threat over the spacious vision before him could not

enter his nineteenth century mind. But his mind turned at once from the

scenery to the thought of a vanished dread. "What of the yellow peril?"

he asked and Asano made him explain. The Chinese spectre had vanished.

Chinaman and European were at peace. The twentieth century had

discovered with reluctant certainty that the average Chinaman was as

civilised, more moral, and far more intelligent than the average

European serf, and had repeated on a gigantic scale the fraternisation

of Scot and Englishman that happened in the seventeenth century. As

Asano put it; "They thought it over. They found we were white men after

all." Graham turned again to the view and his thoughts took a new

direction.

Out of the dim south-west, glittering and strange, voluptuous, and

in some way terrible, shone those Pleasure Cities, of which the

kinematograph-phonograph and the old man in the street had spoken.

Strange places reminiscent of the legendary Sybaris, cities of art and

beauty, mercenary art and mercenary beauty, sterile wonderful cities

of motion and music, whither repaired all who profited by the fierce,

inglorious, economic struggle that went on in the glaring labyrinth

below.

Fierce he knew it was. How fierce he could judge from the fact that

these latter-day people referred back to the England of the nineteenth

century as the figure of an idyllic easy-going life. He turned his eyes

to the scene immediately before him again, trying to conceive the big

factories of that intricate maze.

Northward he knew were the potters, makers not only of earthenware and

china, but of the kindred pastes and compounds a subtler mineralogical

chemistry had devised; there were the makers of statuettes and wall

ornaments and much intricate furniture; there too were the factories

where feverishly competitive authors devised their phonograph discourses

and advertisements and arranged the groupings and developments for their

perpetually startling and novel kinematographic dramatic works. Thence,

too, flashed the world-wide messages, the world-wide falsehoods of the

news-tellers, the chargers of the telephonic machines that had replaced

the newspapers of the past.

To the westward beyond the smashed Council House were the voluminous

offices of municipal control and government; and to the eastward,

towards the port, the trading quarters, the huge public markets, the

theatres, houses of resort, betting palaces, miles of billiard saloons,

baseball and football circuses, wild beast rings and the innumerable

temples of the Christian and quasi-Christian sects, the Mahomedans,

Buddhists, Gnostics, Spook Worshippers, the Incubus Worshippers, the

Furniture Worshippers, and so forth; and to the south again a vast

manufacture of textiles, pickles, wines and condiments. And from point

to point tore the countless multitudes along the roaring mechanical

ways. A gigantic hive, of which the winds were tireless servants, and

the ceaseless wind-vanes an appropriate crown and symbol.

He thought of the unprecedented population that had been sucked up by

this sponge of halls and galleries--the thirty-three million lives that

were playing out each its own brief ineffectual drama below him, and the

complacency that the brightness of the day and the space and splendour

of the view, and above all the sense of his own importance had begotten,

dwindled and perished. Looking down from this height over the city

it became at last possible to conceive this overwhelming multitude of

thirty-three millions, the reality of the responsibility he would take

upon himself, the vastness of the human Maelstrom over which his slender

kingship hung.

He tried to figure the individual life. It astonished him to realise how

little the common man had changed in spite of the visible change in his

conditions. Life and property, indeed, were secure from violence almost

all over the world, zymotic diseases, bacterial diseases of all sorts

had practically vanished, everyone had a sufficiency of food and

clothing, was warmed in the city ways and sheltered from the weather--so

much the almost mechanical progress of science and the physical

organisation of society had accomplished. But the crowd, he was already

beginning to discover, was a crowd still, helpless in the hands of

demagogue and organiser, individually cowardly, individually swayed by

appetite, collectively incalculable. The memory of countless figures in

pale blue canvas came before his mind. Millions of such men and women

below him, he knew, had never been out of the city, had never seen

beyond the little round of unintelligent grudging participation in the

world's business, and unintelligent dissatisfied sharing in its tawdrier

pleasures. He thought of the hopes of his vanished contemporaries,

and for a moment the dream of London in Morris's quaint old _News

from Nowhere_, and the perfect land of Hudson's beautiful _Crystal

Age_--appeared before him in an atmosphere of infinite loss. He thought

of his own hopes.

For in the latter days of that passionate life that lay now so far

behind him, the conception of a free and equal manhood had become a very

real thing to him. He had hoped, as indeed his age had hoped, rashly

taking it for granted, that the sacrifice of the many to the few would

some day cease, that a day was near when every child born of woman

should have a fair and assured chance of happiness. And here, after

two hundred years, the same hope, still unfulfilled, cried passionately

through the city. After two hundred years, he knew, greater than ever,

grown with the city to gigantic proportions, were poverty and helpless

labour and all the sorrows of his time.

Already he knew something of the history of the intervening years.

He had heard now of the moral decay that had followed the collapse of

supernatural religion in the minds of ignoble man, the decline of public

honour, the ascendency of wealth. For men who had lost their belief in

God had still kept their faith in property, and wealth ruled a venial

world.

His Japanese attendant, Asano, in expounding the political history of

the intervening two centuries, drew an apt image from a seed eaten by

insect parasites. First there is the original seed, ripening vigorously

enough. And then comes some insect and lays an egg under the skin, and

behold! in a little while the seed is a hollow shape with an active grub

inside that has eaten out its substance. And then comes some secondary

parasite, some ichneumon fly, and lays an egg within this grub, and

behold! that, too, is a hollow shape, and the new living thing is inside

its predecessor's skin which itself is snug within the seed coat. And

the seed coat still keeps its shape, most people think it a seed still,

and for all one knows it may still think itself a seed, vigorous and

alive. "Your Victorian kingdom," said Asano, "was like that--kingship

with the heart eaten out. The landowners--the barons and gentry--began

ages ago with King John; there were lapses, but they beheaded King

Charles, and ended practically with King George mere husk of a king...

the real power in the hands of their parliament. But the Parliament--the

organ of the land-holding tenant-ruling gentry--did not keep its

power long. The change had already come in the nineteenth century. The

franchises had been broadened until it included masses of ignorant

men, 'urban myriads,' who went in their featureless thousands to vote

together. And the natural consequence of a swarming constituency is the

rule of the party organisation. Power was passing even in the Victorian

time to the party machinery, secret, complex, and corrupt. Very speedily

power was in the hands of great men of business who financed the

machines. A time came when the real power and interest of the Empire

rested visibly between the two party councils, ruling by newspapers and

electoral organisations--two small groups of rich and able men, working

at first in opposition, then presently together."

There was a reaction of a genteel ineffectual sort. There were

numberless books in existence, Asano said, to prove that--the

publication of some of them was as early as Graham's sleep--a whole

literature of reaction in fact. The party of the reaction seems to

have locked itself into its study and rebelled with unflinching

determination--on paper. The urgent necessity of either capturing or

depriving the party councils of power is a common suggestion underlying

all the thoughtful work of the early twentieth century, both in America

and England. In most of these things America was a little earlier than

England, though both countries drove the same way.

That counter-revolution never came. It could never organise and keep

pure. There was not enough of the old sentimentality, the old faith in

righteousness, left among men. Any organisation that became big enough

to influence the polls became complex enough to be undermined, broken

up, or bought outright by capable rich men. Socialistic and Popular,

Reactionary and Purity Parties were all at last mere Stock Exchange

counters, selling their principles to pay for their electioneering. And

the great concern of the rich was naturally to keep property intact, the

board clear for the game of trade. Just as the feudal concern had