CHAPTER VIII - HOW THE WORLD WAS MADE OVER
David possessed a small library of books, nearly all of a scientific nature. Among them, however, I found two histories, and, in spite of their obvious bias and violent character, I was enabled to understand what had happened in the world since my long sleep began.
I learned of the great war that had begun a few days after I entered the cylinder, when Russia and the democracies of Europe stamped out German autocracy and laid the foundations of democratic government. I learned how this democratic spirit burst out in 1945, when all the experiences of the social order, accumulated by mankind since the dawn of history were jettisoned, with all their lessons and all their warnings.
It was extraordinary to me that none of us had realized the changes which had been impending. Warnings there had been, as there always are. They were the decay of parliamentary government in all lands, the breaking down of tradition and authority in every phase; only there was nobody to heed them. Then, previously, whether by acknowledgment or in spite of denial, society had always been founded on servile labor. The harnessing of the tides, and, later, the control of solar power, threw millions out of employment, millions of hungry men with time to think and nothing to reverence.
The book said that the movement could have been stayed by wise measures. But it was doubtful, for a frenzy for change was spreading like wildfire over the civilized world. Now only Spain, restored Russia, and monarchical and prosperous South America resisted it, among Occidental nations.
I read that in 1945 democracy initiated the millennium by bursting all the dykes. Millions were slain. London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Chicago, Winnipeg were burned to ashes, with scores of other cities. Peace was restored fifteen years later by a few military chiefs who came into power owing to the universal exhaustion. At that time whole populations were turning cannibal. All organized industries had been destroyed. The path for reconstruction was clear.
Men called that the period of reaction, but it might have been the period of reconciliation. Both sides failed in the ensuing years; the mob, because it lacked idealism; the leaders, because they failed to recognize the unassailable truth in the old Socialist propaganda, that the era of machinery and of an inexhaustible supply of industrial power had made the systematization of production inevitable. With half the people workless, it was ridiculous that they should suffer and starve because they could not buy the goods rotting in the stuffed warehouses. The system did not fall because it was ridiculous, however, but because it had become unworkable. Production had to be for use, not profit. When profit went, rent had to go, and interest, that leech of society, so long forbidden by the Catholic Church, and no doubt the direst result of the Reformation. Failure to realize this need dragged down the old order in 1978. It fell forever, and with it died all hope of a civilization built on that of the past.
It was then that the writings of the great Wells, since called the Prophet, were discovered and proved the inspiration of the new order. In place of the illogical instinct of nations there was to be a New Republic, based on pure reason, and shining with facets of unanswerable facts. The world was to forget its past as thoroughly as it had forgotten the Stone Age. The new revolution was led by Sanson, I gathered, and swiftly conquered. There ensued two years of worse anarchy than before. India was lost to Britain, and became a democracy, convulsed with civil strife. Our savage wards reverted to barbarism. Australia fell to China. All the world’s archives were destroyed. Picture galleries went up in flames; statues were smashed to pieces; monuments were blasted. The Parthenon perished, the British Museum, the Louvre; east of the Bosphorus there remained hardly a memorial of the past, except St. Peter’s and Cologne Cathedral. But, at the end of the two years, the five Provinces of Britain, France, Skandogermania, Italy, and Hungary found themselves the nucleus of the future Federation of Man, under a pure democracy.
Here, amid fulsome plaudits, the tale ended; but I went to David to ask him for some more particulars. He had seen me reading, and I think he had been prepared for my question.
“I shall be glad to explain anything, Arnold,” he said.
“I have been reading about the new Federation,” I said. “England is, then, no longer independent? And the United States? And Russia and Spain?”
He smiled. “Of course, if you do not know these things, Arnold—” he began. “But surely you are at least aware of the history of your own country?”
“I know nothing,” I answered.
“Well, then, the United States is an independent nation. We have made proposals for a union, but the bosses have not yet come to terms. Spain stamped out her revolution. We were on the point of compelling her to come in when she discovered the secret of the Glow Ray, which would have made the effort unremunerative.”
“What is this Ray?”
“It is a combustion by old light, stored solar energy being transmitted for that and all other power purposes from the great solar works on the Vosges Mountains. Its invention made the old warfare obsolete. Our small-arms are miniature Ray mirrors, charged with a single unit; our big ordnance is supplied from the Vosges by cable connection. The Ray destroys everything that it encounters, not protected by the glow paint which you may have observed on the fronts of our buildings. This is the last and greatest of the coal tar discoveries, and its manufacture is based upon the exact relationship between the disintegrating glow rays and an exact color having a fixed number of vibrations.
“Russia,” he continued, “crushed her revolution, too, as she had crushed earlier anarchistic outbreaks. But though she has discovered the glow paint, she has not the Ray. The Federation is consequently at war with her, for her antiquated ideals make her a menace to civilization. Besides, we need her wheat-fields. We have an army of ten thousand men, two from each of the five Provinces, and have cooped up the young Tsar, Alexander, with his army of a million men, in Tula. His surrender is expected daily.”
“Ten thousand against a million?”
“Yes, with the Ray. However, even ten thousand were difficult to secure, though the pay of each soldier is five units hourly. Twelve men have been killed already. That is the weak point in our civilization, Arnold. In spite of daily lectures by the most gifted orators that the Council can obtain, showing that the desire for immortality is an inherited perversion, and that we are immortal anyway, in the germ-plasm, man is unwilling to die. In time the Council hopes, by reason and education, to rid men of this ancient terror.”
“What is the ethical basis of our government?” I asked.
“Science, which alone survived the destruction of knowledge. The scientific books were saved from the twelve million tons of printed paper, chiefly from the British Museum shelves, that burned for twelve days upon Blackheath; and from the contents of the Bibliotheque Nationale that heated Paris during an entire month.
“A commission quickly synthesized the discoveries of earlier investigators. World councils of scientists laid down the dogmas of universal knowledge in the Vienna Creed, which was adopted without dissentients after those who objected had been put to death. The famous quarrel whether Force is of the same substance as Matter, or a like substance, was decided here. The Sames conquered the Similars, by virtue of a proclamation from Boss Rose.
“We know now that Science has given Nature’s complete and final revelation to mankind. We tolerate no heresies, no independent judgment. In vital matters toleration means only a dead faith. The Modernist idea of criticizing the basic principles of our Science becomes a capital offense, if preached, because the Boss is himself the repository of all knowledge, and the pronouncements of Boss Lembken supreme. It is not that we are bigoted, you understand. It is, indeed, suggested that Science unfolds like a flower, revealing herself in larger scope to each generation. But new discoveries can only be adaptations of what is already known.”
I almost thought that there was irony in his tone; but he met my gaze steadily, challengingly, as if to say, “If these are not your views, declare them.”
“One thing I want to know is this,” I said. “The history books make no mention of the blues and the whites. On what do you base the division of the State into these two groups of citizens?”
“That is Doctor Sanson’s doing,” he answered. “The blues are the defectives, the whites the perfect specimens of the race. The whites alone are admitted to posts of responsibility. But most of them prefer not to labor, and live in seclusion upon State pensions for the sake of the race.
“This is considered Doctor Sanson’s crowning achievement for humanity,” David continued. “Before his advent to power, defectives had been living among the normal population since the dawn of history unrecognized. We have now an intricate system of points of deficiency whereby they can be detected infallibly, based partly upon heredity, partly on measurements, partly craniometry and the Binet-Sanson tests.
“Doctor Sanson has long been anxious to pass his sterilization measure, but he has been unable to persuade the Council to face the fierce, ignorant, popular resentment that it would incur, although this practice is of respectable antiquity in China and the Mohammedan world, and was reintroduced to the Occident by progressive America a whole century ago. Of course, the morons and all below a certain grading are not allowed to reproduce their kind; but Sanson wishes to include the high-grade defectives also. However, that would reduce the total productivity, and thus the question bristles with difficulties.”
As I listened to all this jargon I felt more and more bewildered.
“You appear to have created a new aristocracy, then, based on physical perfection,” I said.
“No, there you are wrong, Arnold,” said David. “Our democracy will never endure hereditary privileges. What it has introduced is hereditary disabilities. We simply disqualify from the white, or normal class, the ninety-five per cent who are below the standard. It was progressive America that first conceived the plan of raising man to the level of the hound and the blooded horse.
“Yet,” he continued, “defectives do crop up, even among the offspring of the whites. They are hard to discover; but by the Sanson tests we can discover defectives who are, to all appearance, flawless. This class exists especially among those of unusual mental power, which is in itself a stigma of deficiency. Then there are the men who write our books and paint our pictures in the art factories. They present an anarchical longing for personal license. But they are isolated and never allowed to mingle with the world. Yes, there are odd kinks in the human brain. For instance, there still exists a preposterous sense of nationality, which is being remedied by a system of forced emigration. The Prophet Wells did not entirely estimate in its exactness the tenacity of this illogical notion.
“Then there was that extraordinary outbreak, the Name War. Who could have anticipated that human beings would object to being classified under letters and numbers, for the sake of statistical simplicity? Yet a misguided fifty thousand chose to meet death rather than give up their names. However, Britain is said to be the province of compromises, and it was agreed that the whites should retain two names, and the blues one.”
“But surely,” I said, “the people did not vote for these restrictions?”
“You do not understand our system of government, Arnold. Naturally there can be no voting in matters of science, sanitation, or statistics. Yet, even here there is an indirect control, for our rulers, who are whites, are elected by ballot annually, by the high-grade defectives of both sexes. The Federal Council, which is not now in session, meets once a year in London, the capital, and consists of five lay bosses, of whom Lembken is chief, and five Science bosses under Sanson. You will appreciate the stability of our government when I tell you that for twenty years every nominated boss has been re-elected.”
I was almost certain of an undertone of irony in his words now.
“You see,” he continued, “non-votes are counted as ayes. Then those opposing the Council must give their reason, which is filed in the Bureau of Complaints. And again all such objections have been found to be invalid, since they have invariably been made by undetected morons, who have been sent to the workshops for life in consequence. Every applicant at the Bureau of Complaints is examined by physicians. That was Sanson’s idea.”
A most ingenious one. Suddenly I became sure that David was testing me; the whole tenor of his conversation had been ironical, hesitating, perhaps, and carefully weighed, lest he was running into danger, but corresponding in no wise to his convictions. But why was he afraid of me?
“Who is this Doctor Sanson?” I asked him.
To my surprise his voice dropped, and, before answering, he cast a cautious glance toward the telephone funnel. Then, rising, he stuffed a sofa cover into it.
“An illegal act,” he said, reseating himself. “If that were known I should be liable to forced labor in the leather factories for several years. Now, Arnold, you see my faith in you. Well, then, I cannot answer you. He is a man of superhuman powers, more feared than any man has ever been feared. There is a popular belief that he was born a thousand years ago, and has wandered from land to land, waiting for the new age to dawn. The Christians called him Antichrist. Nothing has ever been learned as to his origin. He appeared like a conqueror, about the year 1980, to lead the hosts of the revolution to victory.”
“He is the ruler?”
David shook his head. “Boss Lembken is the titular head. But all know that Sanson is supreme, although he chooses to let Boss Lembken hold the reins of power. He could do anything, make any laws he wished, become supreme ruler of earth. He is believed to be immortal, and to have the power of renewing his youth whenever he wishes. Arnold, the people believe that he can bestow immortality upon them and overcome their last enemy, death. That is the secret of their terror of him. And—”
His voice sank to a whisper:
“You have come at a critical time. For this expectancy has set a date. None knows how the rumor started, but during the next few months, ‘soon after the Cold Solstice,’ the prophecy runs, a Messiah is to come to earth, ignorant of his destiny. When he learns it he will offer mankind its ancient liberty. Sanson will offer immortality in place of it. Then will come the most titanic of all struggles, and the result is not known.”
His voice quavered and ceased. And, staring at him, incredulous at first, I realized that David was repeating no foolish, popular tale, but what he himself believed.
Even Science had not succeeded in banishing faith from the hearts of men. She had made it superstition instead. My brain reeled as the dreadful picture David had drawn came home to me.
“David,” I exclaimed impulsively, “you are an educated man and an intelligent one. Why do you not wear the white uniform? Surely you are not a defective?”
“Yes,” he replied. “Under the Sanson law. My father had epileptic seizures in his youth. He had to hide—but some day I will tell you about that. It penalizes me twelve points, and Elizabeth six, thank God!”
And, just as the airscout’s face had expressed fear at my own expletive, so David recoiled in horror at the word that had burst from his lips.
“Arnold,” he said, taking me by the arm, “there is a book—an illegal book, to possess which would mean death. I am going to lend it to you—and after you have read it you can tell me your story.”
CHAPTER IX - THE BOOK
I found the book beneath my pillow. David had been afraid to hand it to me, and I was not surprised. For assuredly the anonymous author would have received the utmost penalty from the Council.
He was a Christian, and he took the ground that democracy, in itself bad, had become impossible when the atheistic deism of the eighteenth century pervaded the minds of the voting masses and took the form of Hæckel’s materialism and that of his school of thinkers.
He claimed that, so far from indicating the spread of enlightenment, it was due to national decay, and had always preceded periods of national reconstruction, instancing Rome and Athens, and the America of a century ago, where democracy had become incompatible with free speech and assembly, an independent judiciary, and a broad and secure freedom.
Written for circulation among those opposed to the Sanson régime, it was a fervent prayer for the deliverance of the world. In it I gathered more of the meaning of the new civilization than I had learned from David.
I read that the War of the Nations was caused by one thing alone: the breaking down of Christianity in Germany, and the revival of the old pagan doctrines, with the ensuing challenge against all that humanity had built up during two thousand years.
But in that period of ferments only a few had seen this meaning. The challenge had been interpreted as one of aristocracy against democracy, largely because democracy, then in the saddle, was the creed of the loudest publicists. For this the writer Wells, known posthumously as “The Prophet,” a man whose penetrating judgment and synthetic mind were fogged by class consciousness, was largely responsible.
The hope of democracy was fair in those after-years, when nations, purged by their ordeal of blood, revived the noble hopes of liberty. Men would have sacrificed everything for their brethren during that first decade of peace. There was a splendid spiritual awakening among the nations. Democracy was the young, smiling god, the guardian of universal peace.
If only, the writer said, that spiritual enlargement had been joined to Christian faith. But the backwash of nineteenth century atheism swamped it. The doctrines of materialism were rooted in the masses. The German virus could not be rooted out without trained leadership and ideals. I recalled Sir Spofforth’s words when I read that. “It must not happen again!” all men had said, when at last peace triumphed. No, not if the spirit of Christ, governing all men, had drawn them into brotherhood. But what if insults had been heaped upon the German people? What hope of peace was there when hate such as this ruled in the mind of the leader of the new faith?
Instead of Christ, these blind philosophers set up their democratic god. They labelled war “dynastic,” and believed democracy would destroy it. Had they not used their eyes? Did they not know that war was the embodiment of hate? Had they never looked on a mob, shouting for war, or was human nature to be changed by education, and through prosperity, so that no nation would ever again gather to itself false doctrines, with hate, and scorn, and pride, and go forth to destroy?
As every century produced its dominant illusion, so now in the twentieth this singular delusion of a democracy progressing through graded virtue unto a perfect day possessed the race. And here the writer paused to draw another instance from America, not, as he was painstaking to explain, because her inhabitants were different from other men, but because they were the same.
He showed how decadence had spread exactly as democracy had spread. He told of the two counties of Ohio where investigation showed the inhabitants to have sold their votes universally—merchants and clergymen, professional men and laborers. Corruption radiated from the English-speaking centers. Law, principle, and integrity had gone first in New England and the South, in the withered branches of Anglo-Saxondom that had broken from the bough. One by one all the traditions of civic honesty had died; and if life was still tolerable in the early twentieth century, when justice was a byword and faith in public men had almost ceased, it was because the State was still largely an abstraction and people could still keep aloof from politics.
All the while there existed the same pitiable belief that this democracy would some day become honest, all-good, all-wise; but this was democracy and the fruits of it, and nowhere had it had a fairer chance to inaugurate the millennium. And the same mob that ran blindly after its blind leaders, responsive to every prejudice, to the old Moloch of race-hatred and the old Mammon of dishonesty, would, had it been allowed, have followed an ideal with its fund of inexhaustible loyalty and self-sacrifice.
Men had not changed. The Amazon and Congo valleys were drenched with the blood of murdered natives, and democracy yawned, just as the blood of Polish women and children, massacred by State troops, cried from the Colorado mining camps. In former days Christian orders arose to uphold justice and to keep down the devil in man. When Christendom was one, labor guilds had arisen under Catholic auspices whereby all men could live in freedom; now the Pope, impotent, could only issue an encyclical against that oppression of labor which, in its turn, begot hatred and war. The sword of Justice had been snapped in the scabbard.
Was this the hope of the world, he asked, this barren, Christless democracy? How many hearts had it broken? How many idealists had sacrificed themselves before this idol, dying with blind faith in a deity that devoured its votaries? Was there no higher hope? Were millions of colored men and women in America to be born forever, black cattle without hope, and die without a part in life? Had not the race at last turned on itself, when the eugenics madness thrust the sword into the heart of every family and made life a more loathsome slavery than any the world had known? What a sinister end to human hopes!
The persecutions of the mob always struck to degrade humanity. And when England developed, in proportion to her democracy, the same corruption as the United States, the same lack of loyalty and public sense, the same violence and the same vindictiveness, that was suspected which happened afterward—that the same types of men would rise to leadership, and her faithful, loyal heroes vanish like smoke in a gale.
And all the time the remedy was at hand; no Moloch of hate, no stock-farm theory of human bodies, but the principles of Christ, imposed to save the world by leaders who had abdicated their responsibility. The mob could never understand the need of abstract justice nor subordinate greed to duty. But for some ideal, however dimly seen, it could obey and sacrifice itself with matchless zeal, even to death.
Truly the Prophet Wells had prophesied of the years to come: “Not only will moral standards be shifting and uncertain, admitting of physiologically sound menages of very variable status, but also vice and depravity, in every form that is not absolutely penal, will be practiced in every grade of magnificence, and condoned.”
A shadow fell across the book. I looked up and saw David. He had been glancing over my shoulder as I read, unconscious of him; and he had reached these words with me.
His eyes flashed, he shook his fist in vehemence of passion. “No, Arnold!” he cried. “We’ll fight as long as we live to remain something better than the beasts; if life is a lie, or a dream, we’ll fight for that!”
No comments:
Post a Comment