In the Days of the Comet Read online

  Section 2

  I remember as one thing that struck me very forcibly at the time,the absence of any discussion, any difference of opinion, about thebroad principles of our present state. These men had lived hithertoin a system of conventions and acquired motives, loyalty to a party,loyalty to various secret agreements and understandings, loyaltyto the Crown; they had all been capable of the keenest attentionto precedence, all capable of the most complete suppression ofsubversive doubts and inquiries, all had their religious emotionsunder perfect control. They had seemed protected by invisible butimpenetrable barriers from all the heady and destructive speculations,the socialistic, republican, and communistic theories that one maystill trace through the literature of the last days of the comet.But now it was as if the very moment of the awakening those barriersand defences had vanished, as if the green vapors had washedthrough their minds and dissolved and swept away a hundred oncerigid boundaries and obstacles. They had admitted and assimilatedat once all that was good in the ill-dressed propagandas that hadclamored so vehemently and vainly at the doors of their minds inthe former days. It was exactly like the awakening from an absurdand limiting dream. They had come out together naturally andinevitably upon the broad daylight platform of obvious and reasonableagreement upon which we and all the order of our world now stand.

  Let me try to give the chief things that had vanished from theirminds. There was, first, the ancient system of "ownership" thatmade such an extraordinary tangle of our administration of theland upon which we lived. In the old time no one believed in thatas either just or ideally convenient, but every one accepted it.The community which lived upon the land was supposed to have waivedits necessary connection with the land, except in certain limitedinstances of highway and common. All the rest of the land wascut up in the maddest way into patches and oblongs and trianglesof various sizes between a hundred square miles and a few acres,and placed under the nearly absolute government of a series ofadministrators called landowners. They owned the land almost asa man now owns his hat; they bought it and sold it, and cut it uplike cheese or ham; they were free to ruin it, or leave it waste,or erect upon it horrible and devastating eyesores. If the communityneeded a road or a tramway, if it wanted a town or a village in anyposition, nay, even if it wanted to go to and fro, it had to do soby exorbitant treaties with each of the monarchs whose territorywas involved. No man could find foothold on the face of the earthuntil he had paid toll and homage to one of them. They had practicallyno relations and no duties to the nominal, municipal, or nationalGovernment amidst whose larger areas their own dominions lay. . . .This sounds, I know, like a lunatic's dream, but mankind was thatlunatic; and not only in the old countries of Europe and Asia,where this system had arisen out of the rational delegation of localcontrol to territorial magnates, who had in the universal basenessof those times at last altogether evaded and escaped their duties,did it obtain, but the "new countries," as we called them then--theUnited States of America, the Cape Colony, Australia, and NewZealand--spent much of the nineteenth century in the frantic givingaway of land for ever to any casual person who would take it. Wasthere coal, was there petroleum or gold, was there rich soil orharborage, or the site for a fine city, these obsessed and witlessGovernments cried out for scramblers, and a stream of shabby,tricky, and violent adventurers set out to found a new section ofthe landed aristocracy of the world. After a brief century of hopeand pride, the great republic of the United States of America,the hope as it was deemed of mankind, became for the most part adrifting crowd of landless men; landlords and railway lords, foodlords (for the land is food) and mineral lords ruled its life,gave it Universities as one gave coins to a mendicant, and spentits resources upon such vain, tawdry, and foolish luxuries as theworld had never seen before. Here was a thing none of these statesmenbefore the Change would have regarded as anything but the naturalorder of the world, which not one of them now regarded as anythingbut the mad and vanished illusion of a period of dementia.

  And as it was with the question of the land, so was it alsowith a hundred other systems and institutions and complicated anddisingenuous factors in the life of man. They spoke of trade, andI realized for the first time there could be buying and sellingthat was no loss to any man; they spoke of industrial organization,and one saw it under captains who sought no base advantages. Thehaze of old associations, of personal entanglements and habitualrecognitions had been dispelled from every stage and process ofthe social training of men. Things long hidden appeared discoveredwith an amazing clearness and nakedness. These men who hadawakened, laughed dissolvent laughs, and the old muddle of schoolsand colleges, books and traditions, the old fumbling, half-figurative,half-formal teaching of the Churches, the complex of weakening andconfusing suggestions and hints, amidst which the pride and honorof adolescence doubted and stumbled and fell, became nothing buta curious and pleasantly faded memory. "There must be a commontraining of the young," said Richover; "a frank initiation. We havenot 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 canall be done so easily," but when they said it then, it came to myears with a quality of enormous refreshment and power. It can allbe done so easily, given frankness, given courage. Time was whenthese 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--wasa mere exhausted episode. A truce had already been arrangedby Melmount, and these ministers, after some marveling reminiscences,set aside the matter of peace as a mere question of particulararrangements. . . . The whole scheme of the world's government hadbecome fluid and provisional in their minds, in small details asin great, the unanalyzable tangle of wards and vestries, districtsand municipalities, counties, states, boards, and nations, theinterlacing, overlapping, and conflicting authorities, the felt oflittle interests and claims, in which an innumerable and insatiablemultitude of lawyers, agents, managers, bosses, organizers livedlike fleas in a dirty old coat, the web of the conflicts, jealousies,heated patchings up and jobbings apart, of the old order--theyflung it all on one side.

  "What are the new needs?" said Melmount. "This muddle is too rottento handle. We're beginning again. Well, let us begin afresh."