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been to keep the board clear for hunting and war. The whole world was

exploited, a battle field of businesses; and financial convulsions, the

scourge of currency manipulation, tariff wars, made more human misery

during the twentieth century--because the wretchedness was dreary life

instead of speedy death--than had war, pestilence and famine, in the

darkest hours of earlier history.

His own part in the development of this time he now knew clearly enough.

Through the successive phases in the development of this mechanical

civilisation, aiding and presently directing its development, there had

grown a new power, the Council, the board of his trustees. At first it

had been a mere chance union of the millions of Isbister and Warming, a

mere property holding company, the creation of two childless testators'

whims, but the collective talent of its first constitution had speedily

guided it to a vast influence, until by title deed, loan and share,

under a hundred disguises and pseudonyms it had ramified through the

fabric of the American and English States.

Wielding an enormous influence and patronage, the Council had early

assumed a political aspect; and in its development it had continually

used its wealth to tip the beam of political decisions and its political

advantages to grasp yet more and more wealth. At last the party

organisations of two hemispheres were in its hands; it became an inner

council of political control. Its last struggle was with the tacit

alliance of the great Jewish families. But these families were linked

only by a feeble sentiment, at any time inheritance might fling a huge

fragment of their resources to a minor, a woman or a fool, marriages and

legacies alienated hundreds of thousands at one blow. The Council had no

such breach in its continuity. Steadily, steadfastly it grew.

The original Council was not simply twelve men of exceptional ability;

they fused, it was a council of genius. It struck boldly for riches,

for political influence, and the two subserved each other. With amazing

foresight it spent great sums of money on the art of flying, holding

that invention back against an hour foreseen. It used the patent laws,

and a thousand half-legal expedients, to hamper all investigators who

refused to work with it. In the old days it never missed a capable man.

It paid his price. Its policy in those days was vigorous--unerring,

and against it as it grew steadily and incessantly was only the chaotic

selfish rule of the casually rich. In a hundred years Graham had become

almost exclusive owner of Africa, of South America, of France, of

London, of England and all its influence--for all practical purposes,

that is--a power in North America--then the dominant power in America.

The Council bought and organised China, drilled Asia, crippled the Old

World empires, undermined them financially, fought and defeated them.

And this spreading usurpation of the world was so dexterously

performed--a proteus--hundreds of banks, companies, syndicates, masked

the Council's operations--that it was already far advanced before common

men suspected the tyranny that had come. The Council never hesitated,

never faltered. Means of communication, land, buildings, governments,

municipalities, the territorial companies of the tropics, every human

enterprise, it gathered greedily. And it drilled and marshalled its men,

its railway police, its roadway police, its house guards, and drain and

cable guards, its hosts of land-workers. Their unions it did not fight,

but it undermined and betrayed and bought them. It bought the world

at last. And, finally, its culminating stroke was the introduction of

flying.

When the Council, in conflict with the workers in some of its huge

monopolies, did something flagrantly illegal and that without even the

ordinary civility of bribery, the old Law, alarmed for the profits of

its complaisance, looked about it for weapons. But there were no

more armies, no fighting navies; the age of Peace had' come. The

only possible war ships were the great steam vessels of the Council's

Navigation Trust. The police forces they controlled; the police of

the railways, of the ships, of their agricultural estates, their

time-keepers and order-keepers, outnumbered the neglected little forces

of the old country and municipal organisations ten to one. And they

produced flying machines. There were men alive still who could remember

the last great debate in the London House of Commons--the legal party,

the party against the Council was in a minority, but it made a desperate

fight--and how the members came crowding out upon the terrace to see

these great unfamiliar winged shapes circling quietly overhead. The

Council had soared to its power. The last sham of a democracy that had

permitted unlimited irresponsible property was at an end.

Within one hundred and fifty years of Graham's falling asleep, his

Council had thrown off its disguises and ruled openly, supreme in his

name. Elections had become a cheerful formality, a septennial folly,

an ancient unmeaning custom; a social Parliament as ineffectual as the

convocation of the Established Church in Victorian times assembled now

and then; and a legitimate King of England, disinherited, drunken

and witless, played foolishly in a second-rate music-hall. So the

magnificent dream of the nineteenth century, the noble project of

universal individual liberty and universal happiness, touched by a

disease of honour, crippled by a superstition of absolute property,

crippled by the religious feuds that had robbed the common citizens of

education, robbed men of standards of conduct, and brought the sanctions

of morality to utter contempt, had worked itself out in the face of

invention and ignoble enterprise, first to a warring plutocracy, and

finally to the rule of a supreme plutocrat. His Council at last

had ceased even to trouble to have its decrees endorsed by the

constitutional authorities, and he a motionless, sunken, yellow-skinned

figure had lain, neither dead nor living, recognisably and immediately

Master of the Earth. And awoke at last to find himself--Master of that

inheritance! Awoke to stand under the cloudless empty sky and gaze down

upon the greatness of his dominion.

To what end had he awakened? Was this city, this hive of hopeless

toilers, the final refutation of his ancient hopes? Or was the fire of

liberty, the fire that had blazed and waned in the years of his past

life, still smouldering below there? He thought of the stir and impulse

of the song of the revolution. Was that song merely the trick of a

demagogue, to be forgotten when its purpose was served? Was the hope

that still stirred within him only the memory of abandoned things,

the vestige of a creed outworn? Or had it a wider meaning, an import

interwoven with the destiny of man? To what end had he awakened, what

was there for him to do? Humanity was spread below him like a map. He

thought of the millions and millions of humanity following each other

unceasingly for ever out of the darkness of non-existence into the

darkness of death. To what end? Aim there must be, but it transcended

his power of thought. He saw for the first time clearly his own infinite

littleness, saw stark and terrible the tragic contrast of human strength

and the craving of the human heart. For that little while he knew

himself for the petty accident he was, and knew therewith the greatness

of his desire. And suddenly his littleness was intolerable, his

aspiration was intolerable, and there came to him an irresistible

impulse to pray. And he prayed. He prayed vague, incoherent,

contradictory things, his soul strained up through time and space and

all the fleeting multitudinous confusion of being, towards something--he

scarcely knew what--towards something that could comprehend his striving

and endure.

A man and a woman were far below on a roof space to the southward

enjoying the freshness of the morning air. The man had brought out a

perspective glass to spy upon the Council House and he was showing her

how to use it. Presently their curiosity was satisfied, they could see

no traces of bloodshed from their position, and after a survey of the

empty sky she came round to the crow's nest. And there she saw two

little black figures, so small it was hard to believe they were men,

one who watched and one who gesticulated with hands outstretched to the

silent emptiness of Heaven.

She handed the glass to the man. He looked and exclaimed:

"I believe it is the Master. Yes. I am sure. It is the Master!"

He lowered the glass and looked at her. "Waving his hands about almost

as if he was praying. I wonder what he is up to. Worshipping the sun?

There weren't Parses in this country in his time, were there?"

He looked again. "He's stopped it now. It was a chance attitude, I

suppose." He put down the glass and became meditative. "He won't have

anything to do but enjoy himself--just enjoy himself. Ostrog will boss

the show of course. Ostrog will have to, because of keeping all these

Labourer fools in bounds. Them and their song! And got it all by

sleeping, dear eyes--just sleeping. It's a wonderful world."

CHAPTER XV. PROMINENT PEOPLE

The state apartments of the Wind Vane Keeper would have seemed

astonishingly intricate to Graham had he entered them fresh from his

nineteenth century life, but already he was growing accustomed to the

scale of the new time. They can scarcely be described as halls and

rooms, seeing that a complicated system of arches, bridges, passages and

galleries divided and united every part of the great space. He came

out through one of the now familiar sliding panels upon a. plateau of

landing at the head of a flight of very broad and gentle steps, with

men and women far more brilliantly dressed than any he had hitherto seen

ascending and descending. From this position he looked down a vista of

intricate ornament in lustreless white and mauve and purple, spanned by

bridges that seemed wrought of porcelain and filigree, and terminating

far off in a cloudy mystery of perforated screens.

Glancing upward, he saw tier above tier of ascending galleries

with faces looking down upon him. The air was full of the babble of

innumerable voices and of a music that descended from above, a gay and

exhilarating music whose source he never discovered.

The central aisle was thick with people, but by no means uncomfortably

crowded; altogether that assembly must have numbered many thousands.

They were brilliantly, even fantastically dressed, the men as fancifully

as the women, for the sobering influence of the Puritan conception of

dignity upon masculine dress had long since passed away. The hair of

the men, too, though it was rarely worn long, was commonly curled in

a manner that suggested the barber, and baldness had vanished from

the earth. Frizzy straight-cut masses that would have charmed Rossetti

abounded, and one gentleman, who was pointed out to Graham under the

mysterious title of an "amorist", wore his hair in two becoming plaits a

la Marguerite. The pigtail was in evidence; it would seem that citizens

of Chinese extraction were no longer ashamed of their race. There was

little uniformity of fashion apparent in the forms of clothing worn. The

more shapely men displayed their symmetry in trunk hose, and here were

puffs and slashes, and there a cloak and there a robe. The fashions of

the days of Leo the Tenth were perhaps the prevailing influence, but

the aesthetic conceptions of the far east were also patent. Masculine

embonpoint, which, in Victorian times, would have been subjected to

the tightly buttoned perils, the ruthless exaggeration of tight-legged

tight-armed evening dress, now formed but the basis of a wealth of

dignity and drooping folds. Graceful slenderness abounded' also. To

Graham, a typically stiff man from a typically stiff period, not only

did these men seem altogether too graceful in person, but altogether too

expressive in their vividly expressive faces. They gesticulated, they

expressed surprise, interest, amusement, above all, they expressed

the emotions excited in their minds by the ladies about them with

astonishing frankness. Even at the first glance it was evident that

women were in a great majority.

The ladies in the company of these gentlemen displayed in dress, bearing

and manner alike, less emphasis and more intricacy. Some affected a

classical simplicity of robing and subtlety of fold, after the fashion

of the First French Empire, and flashed conquering arms and shoulders as

Graham passed. Others had closely-fitting dresses without seam or belt

at the waist, sometimes with long folds falling from the shoulders. The

delightful confidences of evening dress had not been diminished by the

passage of two centuries.

Everyone's movements seemed graceful. Graham remarked to Lincoln that

he saw men as Raphael's cartoons walking, and Lincoln told him that

the attainment of an appropriate set of gestures was part of every

rich person's education. The Master's entry was greeted with a sort of

tittering applause, but these people showed their distinguished manners

by not crowding upon him nor annoying him by any persistent scrutiny, as

he descended the steps towards the floor of the aisle.

He had already learnt from Lincoln that these were the leaders of

existing London society; almost every person there that night was either

a powerful official or the immediate connexion of a powerful official.

Many had returned from the European Pleasure Cities expressly to welcome

him. The aeronautic authorities, whose defection had played a part

in the overthrow of the Council only second to Graham's were very

prominent, and so, too, was the Wind Vane Control. Amongst others there

were several of the more prominent officers of the Food Trust; the

controller of the European Piggeries had a particularly melancholy and

interesting countenance and a daintily cynical manner. A bishop in full

canonicals passed athwart Graham's vision, conversing with a gentleman