The World Set Free

Section 5

‘And yet it may be I am unjust to Bismarck,’ said Karenin, following his own thoughts.  ’You see, men belong to their own age; we stand upon a common stock of thought and we fancy we stand upon the ground.  I met a pleasant man the other day, a Maori, whose great-grandfather was a cannibal.  It chanced he had a daguerreotype of the old sinner, and the two were marvellously alike.  One felt that a little juggling with time and either might have been the other.  People are cruel and stupid in a stupid age who might be gentle and splendid in a gracious one.  The world also has its moods.  Think of the mental food of Bismarck’s childhood; the humiliations of Napoleon’s victories, the crowded, crowning victory of the Battle of the Nations….  Everybody in those days, wise or foolish, believed that the division of the world under a multitude of governments was inevitable, and that it was going on for thousands of years more.  It was inevitable until it was impossible.  Any one who had denied that inevitability publicly would have been counted—­oh! a silly fellow.  Old Bismarck was only just a little—­forcible, on the lines of the accepted ideas.  That is all.  He thought that since there had to be national governments he would make one that was strong at home and invincible abroad.  Because he had fed with a kind of rough appetite upon what we can see now were very stupid ideas, that does not make him a stupid man.  We’ve had advantages; we’ve had unity and collectivism blasted into our brains.  Where should we be now but for the grace of science?  I should have been an embittered, spiteful, downtrodden member of the Russian Intelligenza, a conspirator, a prisoner, or an assassin.  You, my dear, would have been breaking dingy windows as a suffragette.’

‘Never,’ said Edith stoutly….

For a time the talk broke into humorous personalities, and the young people gibed at each other across the smiling old administrator, and then presently one of the young scientific men gave things a new turn.  He spoke like one who was full to the brim.

’You know, sir, I’ve a fancy—­it is hard to prove such things—­that civilisation was very near disaster when the atomic bombs came banging into it, that if there had been no Holsten and no induced radio-activity, the world would have—­smashed—­much as it did.  Only instead of its being a smash that opened a way to better things, it might have been a smash without a recovery.  It is part of my business to understand economics, and from that point of view the century before Holsten was just a hundred years’ crescendo of waste.  Only the extreme individualism of that period, only its utter want of any collective understanding or purpose can explain that waste.  Mankind used up material—­insanely.  They had got through three-quarters of all the coal in the planet, they had used up most of the oil, they had swept away their forests, and they were running short of tin and copper.  Their wheat areas were getting weary and populous, and many of the big towns had so lowered the water level of their available hills that they suffered a drought every summer.  The whole system was rushing towards bankruptcy.  And they were spending every year vaster and vaster amounts of power and energy upon military preparations, and continually expanding the debt of industry to capital.  The system was already staggering when Holsten began his researches.  So far as the world in general went there was no sense of danger and no desire for inquiry.  They had no belief that science could save them, nor any idea that there was a need to be saved.  They could not, they would not, see the gulf beneath their feet.  It was pure good luck for mankind at large that any research at all was in progress.  And as I say, sir, if that line of escape hadn’t opened, before now there might have been a crash, revolution, panic, social disintegration, famine, and—­it is conceivable—­complete disorder. . . .  The rails might have rusted on the disused railways by now, the telephone poles have rotted and fallen, the big liners dropped into sheet-iron in the ports; the burnt, deserted cities become the ruinous hiding-places of gangs of robbers.  We might have been brigands in a shattered and attenuated world.  Ah, you may smile, but that had happened before in human history.  The world is still studded with the ruins of broken-down civilisations.  Barbaric bands made their fastness upon the Acropolis, and the tomb of Hadrian became a fortress that warred across the ruins of Rome against the Colosseum….  Had all that possibility of reaction ended so certainly in 1940?  Is it all so very far away even now?’

‘It seems far enough away now,’ said Edith Haydon.

‘But forty years ago?’

‘No,’ said Karenin with his eyes upon the mountains, ’I think you underrate the available intelligence in those early decades of the twentieth century.  Officially, I know, politically, that intelligence didn’t tell—­but it was there.  And I question your hypothesis.  I doubt if that discovery could have been delayed.  There is a kind of inevitable logic now in the progress of research.  For a hundred years and more thought and science have been going their own way regardless of the common events of life.  You see—­they have got loose.  If there had been no Holsten there would have been some similar man.  If atomic energy had not come in one year it would have come in another.  In decadent Rome the march of science had scarcely begun….  Nineveh, Babylon, Athens, Syracuse, Alexandria, these were the first rough experiments in association that made a security, a breathing-space, in which inquiry was born.  Man had to experiment before he found out the way to begin.  But already two hundred years ago he had fairly begun….  The politics and dignities and wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were only the last phoenix blaze of the former civilisation flaring up about the beginnings of the new.  Which we serve….  ’Man lives in the dawn for ever,’ said Karenin.  ’Life is beginning and nothing else but beginning.  It begins everlastingly.  Each step seems vaster than the last, and does but gather us together for the nest.  This Modern State of ours, which would have been a Utopian marvel a hundred years ago, is already the commonplace of life.  But as I sit here and dream of the possibilities in the mind of man that now gather to a head beneath the shelter of its peace, these great mountains here seem but little things….’