leave behind them a series of panels in some public arcade, a row
of carven figures along a terrace, a grove, a pavilion. Or they
give themselves to the penetration of some still opaque riddle in
phenomena as once men gave themselves to the accumulation of
riches. The work that was once the whole substance of social
existence-for most men spent all their lives in earning a
living-is now no more than was the burden upon one of those old
climbers who carried knapsacks of provisions on their backs in
order that they might ascend mountains. It matters little to the
easy charities of our emancipated time that most people who have
made their labour contribution produce neither new beauty nor new
wisdom, but are simply busy about those pleasant activities and
enjoyments that reassure them that they are alive. They help, it
may be, by reception and reverberation, and they hinder nothing.
…
Section 11
Now all this phase of gigantic change in the contours and
appearances of human life which is going on about us, a change as
rapid and as wonderful as the swift ripening of adolescence to
manhood after the barbaric boyish years, is correlated with moral
and mental changes at least as unprecedented. It is not as if old
things were going out of life and new things coming in, it is
rather that the altered circumstances of men are making an appeal
to elements in his nature that have hitherto been suppressed, and
checking tendencies that have hitherto been over-stimulated and
over-developed. He has not so much grown and altered his
essential being as turned new aspects to the light. Such turnings
round into a new attitude the world has seen on a less extensive
scale before. The Highlanders of the seventeenth century, for
example, were cruel and bloodthirsty robbers, in the nineteenth
their descendants were conspicuously trusty and honourable men.
There was not a people in Western Europe in the early twentieth
century that seemed capable of hideous massacres, and none that
had not been guilty of them within the previous two centuries.
The free, frank, kindly, gentle life of the prosperous classes in
any European country before the years of the last wars was in a
different world of thought and feeling from that of the dingy,
suspicious, secretive, and uncharitable existence of the
respectable poor, or the constant personal violence, the squalor
and naive passions of the lowest stratum. Yet there were no real
differences of blood and inherent quality between these worlds;
their differences were all in circumstances, suggestion, and
habits of mind. And turning to more individual instances the
constantly observed difference between one portion of a life and
another consequent upon a religious conversion, were a standing
example of the versatile possibilities of human nature.
The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities
and businesses and economic relations shook them also out of
their old established habits of thought, and out of the lightly
held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.
To borrow a word from the old-fashioned chemists, men were made
nascent; they were released from old ties; for good or evil they
were ready for new associations. The council carried them
forward for good; perhaps if his bombs had reached their
destination King Ferdinand Charles might have carried them back
to an endless chain of evils. But his task would have been a
harder one than the council's. The moral shock of the atomic
bombs had been a profound one, and for a while the cunning side
of the human animal was overpowered by its sincere realisation of
the vital necessity for reconstruction. The litigious and trading
spirits cowered together, scared at their own consequences; men
thought twice before they sought mean advantages in the face of
the unusual eagerness to realise new aspirations, and when at
last the weeds revived again and 'claims' began to sprout, they
sprouted upon the stony soil of law-courts reformed, of laws that
pointed to the future instead of the past, and under the blazing
sunshine of a transforming world. A new literature, a new
interpretation of history were springing into existence, a new
teaching was already in the schools, a new faith in the young.
The worthy man who forestalled the building of a research city
for the English upon the Sussex downs by buying up a series of
estates, was dispossessed and laughed out of court when he made
his demand for some preposterous compensation; the owner of the
discredited Dass patents makes his last appearance upon the
scroll of history as the insolvent proprietor of a paper called
The Cry for Justice, in which he duns the world for a hundred
million pounds. That was the ingenuous Dass's idea of justice,
that he ought to be paid about five million pounds annually
because he had annexed the selvage of one of Holsten's
discoveries. Dass came at last to believe quite firmly in his
right, and he died a victim of conspiracy mania in a private
hospital at Nice. Both of these men would probably have ended
their days enormously wealthy, and of course ennobled in the
England of the opening twentieth century, and it is just this
novelty of their fates that marks the quality of the new age.
The new government early discovered the need of a universal
education to fit men to the great conceptions of its universal
rule. It made no wrangling attacks on the local, racial, and
sectarian forms of religious profession that at that time divided