In the Days of the Comet

I remember as one thing that struck me very forcibly at the time, the absence of any discussion, any difference of opinion, about the broad principles of our present state.  These men had lived hitherto in a system of conventions and acquired motives, loyalty to a party, loyalty to various secret agreements and understandings, loyalty to the Crown; they had all been capable of the keenest attention to precedence, all capable of the most complete suppression of subversive doubts and inquiries, all had their religious emotions under perfect control.  They had seemed protected by invisible but impenetrable barriers from all the heady and destructive speculations, the socialistic, republican, and communistic theories that one may still trace through the literature of the last days of the comet.  But now it was as if the very moment of the awakening those barriers and defences had vanished, as if the green vapors had washed through their minds and dissolved and swept away a hundred once rigid boundaries and obstacles.  They had admitted and assimilated at once all that was good in the ill-dressed propagandas that had clamored so vehemently and vainly at the doors of their minds in the former days.  It was exactly like the awakening from an absurd and limiting dream.  They had come out together naturally and inevitably upon the broad daylight platform of obvious and reasonable agreement upon which we and all the order of our world now stand.

Let me try to give the chief things that had vanished from their minds.  There was, first, the ancient system of “ownership” that made such an extraordinary tangle of our administration of the land upon which we lived.  In the old time no one believed in that as either just or ideally convenient, but every one accepted it.  The community which lived upon the land was supposed to have waived its necessary connection with the land, except in certain limited instances of highway and common.  All the rest of the land was cut up in the maddest way into patches and oblongs and triangles of various sizes between a hundred square miles and a few acres, and placed under the nearly absolute government of a series of administrators called landowners.  They owned the land almost as a man now owns his hat; they bought it and sold it, and cut it up like cheese or ham; they were free to ruin it, or leave it waste, or erect upon it horrible and devastating eyesores.  If the community needed a road or a tramway, if it wanted a town or a village in any position, nay, even if it wanted to go to and fro, it had to do so by exorbitant treaties with each of the monarchs whose territory was involved.  No man could find foothold on the face of the earth until he had paid toll and homage to one of them.  They had practically no relations and no duties to the nominal, municipal, or national Government amidst whose larger areas their own dominions lay. . . .  This sounds, I know, like a lunatic’s dream, but mankind was that lunatic; and not only in the old countries of Europe and Asia, where this system had arisen out of the rational delegation of local control to territorial magnates, who had in the universal baseness of those times at last altogether evaded and escaped their duties, did it obtain, but the “new countries,” as we called them then—­the United States of America, the Cape Colony, Australia, and New Zealand—­spent much of the nineteenth century in the frantic giving away of land for ever to any casual person who would take it.  Was there coal, was there petroleum or gold, was there rich soil or harborage, or the site for a fine city, these obsessed and witless Governments cried out for scramblers, and a stream of shabby, tricky, and violent adventurers set out to found a new section of the landed aristocracy of the world.  After a brief century of hope and pride, the great republic of the United States of America, the hope as it was deemed of mankind, became for the most part a drifting crowd of landless men; landlords and railway lords, food lords (for the land is food) and mineral lords ruled its life, gave it Universities as one gave coins to a mendicant, and spent its resources upon such vain, tawdry, and foolish luxuries as the world had never seen before.  Here was a thing none of these statesmen before the Change would have regarded as anything but the natural order of the world, which not one of them now regarded as anything but the mad and vanished illusion of a period of dementia.

And as it was with the question of the land, so was it also with a hundred other systems and institutions and complicated and disingenuous factors in the life of man.  They spoke of trade, and I realized for the first time there could be buying and selling that was no loss to any man; they spoke of industrial organization, and one saw it under captains who sought no base advantages.  The haze of old associations, of personal entanglements and habitual recognitions had been dispelled from every stage and process of the social training of men.  Things long hidden appeared discovered with an amazing clearness and nakedness.  These men who had awakened, laughed dissolvent laughs, and the old muddle of schools and colleges, books and traditions, the old fumbling, half-figurative, half-formal teaching of the Churches, the complex of weakening and confusing suggestions and hints, amidst which the pride and honor of adolescence doubted and stumbled and fell, became nothing but a curious and pleasantly faded memory.  “There must be a common training of the young,” said Richover; “a frank initiation.  We have not so much educated them as hidden things from them, and set traps.  And it might have been so easy—­it can all be done so easily.”

That hangs in my memory as the refrain of that council, “It can all be done so easily,” but when they said it then, it came to my ears with a quality of enormous refreshment and power.  It can all be done so easily, given frankness, given courage.  Time was when these platitudes had the freshness and wonder of a gospel.

In this enlarged outlook the war with the Germans—­that mythical, heroic, armed female, Germany, had vanished from men’s imaginations—­was a mere exhausted episode.  A truce had already been arranged by Melmount, and these ministers, after some marveling reminiscences, set aside the matter of peace as a mere question of particular arrangements. . . .  The whole scheme of the world’s government had become fluid and provisional in their minds, in small details as in great, the unanalyzable tangle of wards and vestries, districts and municipalities, counties, states, boards, and nations, the interlacing, overlapping, and conflicting authorities, the felt of little interests and claims, in which an innumerable and insatiable multitude of lawyers, agents, managers, bosses, organizers lived like fleas in a dirty old coat, the web of the conflicts, jealousies, heated patchings up and jobbings apart, of the old order—­they flung it all on one side.

“What are the new needs?” said Melmount.  “This muddle is too rotten to handle.  We’re beginning again.  Well, let us begin afresh.”