CHAPTER IX.THE SPECTACLE.
It was two days later than the events narrated above, that Leacraft and Thomsen, with Miss Tobit between them, sat in a crowded window on Hammersmith road watching for the enormous procession that had been slowly winding through London, with offices and services, halts and functions, as the King sadly led the departure of the English people from the Mother of Nations.
And the vast pageant approached. Down Kensington road its first glittering sallies were seen, the block of London police, a gorgeous cavalcade behind them of the peers of the realm, and in the immeasurable distance the shimmering parts, that looked stationary, and yet were coming on with ample speed. The blaring trumpets in the bands drew near, the street was cleared from curb to curb, the dense assemblage, covering stoop androof, and leaning from every window became silent, the reiterated thud of the falling feet was heard, and in an instant the marching host was passing beneath them. The police and the peers of the realm passed in silence or with barely noticeable tokens of recognition. The peers presented a dazzling array, on superbly caparisoned horses, and in the regalia of their separate stations, with a bearing of unmistakable dignity, and possessing in a large measure the impress and gift of English manly beauty, they uttered the note ofcaste. Behind them came the marshalled Church, a wonderful picture; choirs of boys, surpliced and gowned, in open carriages, priests and bishops, in their robes of office, with flying standards of chapel, church or cathedral, golden lambs, crosses and crowns, figures and mottes on white silk or ruby silk, in wavering confusion, while hymns in wavering sopranos rose petulantly, or again with sustained vitality and strength. It appealed to the people strangely. They became very still, and faces contorted with sobs, or heads bowed to hide the unbidden tears for a few moments drew a veil of gloom over the splendid show. After the Church and the peers, a forest of equipages brought in view the marvellous display of the robed and crowned peeresses, and succeeding this shining cloud of matrons, that gave the touch of tenderness, the atmosphere of feminine companionship, andendurance, as if the mothers of England responded in this untoward hour with an embracing sympathy; after them came the King’s Household and the King, with outriders, equerries, and panoplied footmen, a miracle of ostentatious and ceremonial color. His equipage was drawn by ten jet black stallions, with diapers of the King’s colors on their backs, and a line of ancient guardsmen, with pikes in their hands, hedging them in, and a footman in sparkling white at the head of each horse. The King was himself robed in the gowns of his high estate, and was uncovered, the Crown resting on a cushion in front of him. A cheer rent the air, unfurled flags and fluttering handkerchiefs, turned a sea of faces into an ocean of white and red pennants. The King gravely acknowledged the salute and bowed to right and left. He was alone; the Queen had been enthroned among the peeresses. After the King came the Mayor of London, with all the antiquated grandeur of his office, coach, beef eaters, and all, and the people settled back again to their luncheons, which had been interrupted by the King.
Then came the troops. The display was exhaustive. It was conceived upon a scale of imperial magnificence, and it appealed in the succession of its gorgeous units to the historic sense, to that divine purpose of continuity which every Englishman instinctively appropriates to his race and nation.It represented the chronological development of the English army. As its sonorous length defiled before Leacraft, he saw an objective symbol—nay, the corporeal fact—of England’s growing power; regiment after regiment made a pictorial calendar from 1660 to 1900, and to the informed mind what a vista of martial glory, what a presentation of advance and retreat over the tractless wastes of the world, they made! It was a trampling chronicle of woe and fame, shame and satisfaction; it embodied the progress of ideas, the clash of political tendencies, the spreading domination of English rule; it was a panorama of battles, the tide of victory, the ebbing terrors of defeat; it reflected the pages of political designs, political subterfuge, political confusion; the music that swelled from its ranks now sent the long waves of its solemn processional melody through the thrilled spectators, now in limpid folk-songs, quivered delightfully in their ears, and now again summoned them to their feet with the stately and pious invocation of the nation’s hymn.
The scarlet uniforms of the First Life Guards passed, and Maestricht, Boyne, the Peninsular, and Waterloo, flashed in view—the regiment which was raised in Holland by King Charles the Second, and was composed of eighty gentlemen, whose sobriquet of the “cheeses,” along with other Life Guards, had been acquired from the contemptuous refusalof their veterans to serve in them when remodelled, because they were no longer composed of gentlemen, but of cheesemongers.
Again, the Second Life Guards revived the stained memory of the Stuarts, its own exile in the Netherlands, its return with the restoration; and its sea green facings pleasantly restored for a moment the face of the injured Queen Caroline. Here were the Royal Horse Guards, that inherited, or at least might claim the virtues of the Parliamentary army, which fought with dogmas at the ends of their pike-staffs, and convictions in their hearts. Now passed the First Dragoon Guards, that carried on its proud records the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, Oudenarde in 1708, Malplaquet in 1709, Fontenoy in 1745, Waterloo in 1815, and Pekin in 1860, though to Leacraft’s sensitive mind the last was an inscription of disgrace. The beating hoofs of the “Queen’s Bays,” the Second Dragoon Guards, hurried the reminiscent admirer back to Lucknow and the Indian Mutiny. The nodding plumes of the Prince of Wales, with the Rising Sun, and the Red Dragon which came in view with the Third Dragoon Guards, unfailingly recalled to the custodians of English military renown, that the regiment captured the standard and kettle drums of the Bavarian Guards at the Battle of Ramilies. Trampling on the heels of their horses, the lordly “Blue Horse” defiled past, and the Fifth DragoonGuards, which supported the vital legend, “Vestigia nulla retrorsum,” and which captured four standards at the Battle of Blenheim. Still the endless lines advanced, wavered, stood still, and again with rattling and shivering harness, passed. Now it was the Second Dragoons, the Scotch Greys, raised in Scotland, and older than any other dragoons in the British army, that started the furious applause, an ovation not unintelligently bestowed—for it was they who captured the colors of the French at Ramilies, and their standards at Dettingen. Now it was the “Black Dragoons,” the Sixth, on its glistening horses—once part of the Inniskilling forces, and still bearing as its crest the Castle of Inniskilling; now the Eighth Hussars, whose Protestant fealty had made their founders defenders of William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne, and who, with signal power, captured forty-four stands of colors and seventy-two guns at the Battle of Leswarree. Now the Fifteenth Hussars, who bore upon their helmets the dazzling inscription, “Five Battalions of French defeated and taken by this Regiment, with their Colors, and nine pieces of cannon, at Emsdorf, 16th of July, 1760.” Swelling hearts greeted the Grenadier Guards, rich in the legacy of the fame of the defeated French Imperial Guards.
Here were the Dublin Fusileers—the “Green Linnets,” the “Die Hards”—the East Surries—theWest Yorks—and Devons, who had been part of that indiscriminate blunder and glory—the Boer War.
And now the infantry, in closing ranks, unrolled the endless phalanxes. Where regiments, as entire units, were absent, companies took their places, and English cheers saluted the swinging standards. The Thirty-fifth, which took the Royal Roussillon French Grenadiers at the Battle of Quebec—the Thirty-fourth, which impregnably covered the retreat from Fontenoy—the Thirty-ninth, which defended Gibraltar in 1780, and captured the insurgents’ guns and standards at Maharajpore, in 1843, along with the Fortieth—the Forty-second, with the red heckle in its bonnets, to commemorate its capture of the French standards of the “Invincible Legion,” in 1801, as well as for its distinguished ardor in the Battle of Guildermalsen, in 1795, and the “Little Fighting Toms” stirred the crowds, and even to those who regarded the pageant with glances of bitterness, as the hollow mask of a cruel abdication, even to their glassy stare, this epic review brought a momentary gleam of gratitude and pride.
Here was the Forty-sixth, whose colonel, with the English nonchalence which always wins so enduring a regard with Englishmen, in spite of a kind of artifice of mere stubbornness in it, preached a sermon to his men, under a heavy fire, about theLacedemonians and their discipline—and which, at least to an American, awoke only hateful memories—and here the Fiftieth, “The Blind Half Hundred,” who fought with damaged eyes in Egypt, and who shone resplendent with courage and gallant sacrifice at Vimiera—Ah! and here was the Fifty-seventh—“the Die Hards”—which had thirty bullets through the King’s colors, and only one officer out of twenty-four, and one hundred and sixty-eight men out of five hundred and eighty-four left standing at Albuera. The people shouted and stormed, an avalanche of flags suddenly sprang up over the walled street, and at points showers of flowers and bags of fruit descended in a tornado of delight. Surely, if Englishmen had such blood in them, the nation would yet live.
Here were the men from India, the regiments of the Seventy-third, the Seventy-fourth, wearing the badge of the “elephant,” the Seventy-sixth, too, that unfurled its victorious pennants at the Battle of Leswarree, and the Seventy-seventh and Seventy-eighth, and on, on, straight in the line, brave squadrons, whose illusive recognition in a numeral, connoted glorious deeds, defiant strength, the prodigal powers of the brave. The thundering salutations drowned the rollicking music of “Clear the Way,” the cry at Barrosso, which with fife and drum announced the approach of the Eighty-seventh—the Prince of Wales’ own Irish—and theEighty-eighth, the Connaught Rangers, whose more loving sobriquet was “The Devil’s Own Connaught Boys,” from its gallantry in action, and its irregularities in quarters. Uniform and vanity with reciprocal enhancement made the Argyleshire Highlanders and the Gordon Highlanders and the Sutherland Highlanders an envious spectacle to manly youth, a vision of ingratiating heroes to feminine beauty. Again India sprang back to memory, perhaps not without, to souls of Leacraft’s fibre, inflicting some stinging stabs of remorse, when the One Hundred Foot, the One Hundred and Second Foot, “the Lambs,” the One Hundred and Third Foot, “the Old Toughs,” the One Hundred and Fourth Foot, and Seventh, and Eighth, and Ninth marched past, with ear shattering dim, in resplendent waves of color, and expressing the English temperament of reserved force, and intelligent determination, with, to the more analytical observer, a suggestion of brutal power in their sturdy and inelastic tramp.
And then came the people of the Earth, from the ends of the world they came; the wild, the exotic, the uncouth, the suave, and treacherous, the mystic, the benign, the terrible, in all garbs, in vestures of wool and silk and cotton, in no small numbers without much vesture. It was a web of hues, a carpet of figures and dyes, a lithe and sinuous and portentous living worm, each zone of itsimmense length, as it swayed and twisted and halted, and then slipped on with ludicrous indecision and disorder, made up of races, ethnic blotches or flowers from the round prolific globe. The army had been history, the procession now became psychological, a review of temperaments, endowments, climates, proclivities and talents; nay it wore the aspect of a zoological medley, a vast menagery of animal products, that with growl and scream, trumpetings or fluttering wings gave to the congeries of men and women who walked among them, or with them, the sentiment and resemblance of the parade of the beasts before Adam. As if with England’s dislodgement, the shaken countries of the earth emptied out their populations in her wake, disturbed in all their resting places by her calamity; spilled from their hidden corners into the shining light of day, and bringing with them the animals of the fields and the birds of the air. And the air itself was cruelly brilliant. The severity of outlines, the sharp shadows, the nipping frostiness in the shades, where the sun was not found, told the weary story that England had lost her climate, and was swept back in a normal alignment with the cold and feeble countries of the pole.
What is this odd group accentuated in the midst of all this confusion of types by a more bizarre strangeness, the quizzical fatuity and simperingidiocy of devotion—grinningshikarisfrom the Tibet with prayer wheels—from the lofty valleys of Baltistan and Ladakh, from Kargil and Maulbek Chamba—incredible children from the East with their rotating brass wheels, with a woman or so, proudly walking among them carrying a burden of wealth in her turquoise and carnelian encrusted pberak bound around her head and terminating in a black knotted fringe behind her neck.
And straggling on their tracks come the Malays from Pinang and Dindings, from Malaca and Singapore, the small brown men, enduring, brighteyed, straight black-haired, in jackets, trousers and sarongs—the tartan skirt fastened around the waist, and reaching to the knee—and with a raja sprinkled among them with a yellow umbrella over him, a dandy nonchalance printing his sleek cheek with dimples. And India, the nursery of religions, of dreams, of talking and sleeping and famishing men, followed, and for an instant Leacraft thought of Kim’s journey “from Umballa through Kalka and the Pinjore gardens near by up to Simla,” which Kipling told; he thought on “the flush of the morning laid along the distant snows; the branched cacti; tier upon tier the stony hillsides; the voices of a thousand water channels; the chatter of the monkeys, the solemn deodars, climbing one after another, with down-drooped branches; the vista of the plains rolled far out beneath them;the incessant twanging of the tonga horns and the wild rush of the led horses, the halt for prayers, the evening conference by the halting places, when camels and bullocks chewed solemnly together.”
He closed his eyes in a revery, and the next opened them upon the very thing. Here were the bullocks, the monkeys, the camels, and here too came the hulking elephants. Dravidians from the southern peninsular, in shawls; the Hill tribes, in coats; the high caste Hindus, in skirts and turbans; Mussulmen from Cashmere, and a few Indian Princes, with their suites, in a coruscation of gem stones, made up a train of spectacles that drew the eager crowds together, almost to the obliteration of the narrow string of exotics that, a little shabbily, shuffled along between them, with however the Princes on horseback or swung in state in palanquins.
But here came Egypt bearing her witness of the universality of that power which, with her, at least, had seemed to play the part of a benevolent trustee and guide. No longer the impetuous crowds crushed the line of march; behind the blaring band that now approached rode Lord Kitchener, Sirdar of the Egyptian army who had resumed his ancient post and from an overwrought sentiment for exoneration, announced his desire to remain there and thus efface the irreconcileable differences which had caused Lord Curzon’s retirement from India.It was a magnanimous action and had deeply ingratiated this popular hero in the favor of the nation. Lord Kitchener, with his staff, preceded, in military stateliness, and with smart precision, five regiments or groups of Egyptian soldiers. These were combined or selected so as to make a bouquet of colors, but essentially business like also in their serious regularity, a demeanor fortified to the point of affectation by the plaudits and unconcealed admiration of the hosts of people on the streets, and protruding from every point above them. There were Arab lancers—in light blue uniforms, almost too delicate in tone for daily travel, the bodies of the camel corps, with the blackest type of men in the Sudanese infantry regiments, assimilating to the soil of the desert in the color of their khaki costume, and then other details of the military organization, gleaming in immaculate white trousers and coats. It was unmistakably effective, and it imparted moral strength to this illimitable advertisement of physical power. It recalled the campaigns of Khartum and Omdurman, and memorialized that time-worn boast of the English rehabilitation of Egypt; a fact certainly, but not to be distinguished as a very incredible achievement.
The spectacle closed with Zulus and Hottentots, the bushmen of Australia, some dejected New Zealanders, and a picturesque assortment of Jamaican negroes, who tramped along with amusement intheir staring eyes, and a raggedness of deportment, reflecting the wasteful and careless way of the tropics. Nor were there wanting Greeks from Cyprus. And at the last the loyalty of the Colonies was splendidly emphasized, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Natal, Bermuda, the Bahamas, contributed a final burst of patriotic zeal, and seemed to open the wide earth, to their kindred in the English island, for home-making and re-establishment. Nor was the show of devotion fortuitous or hollow. It was sincere. It represented a suddenrapprochement, an instantaneous and valid impulse of sympathy and support. Nothing had ever happened in the history of the English people, which had had so vital an influence in stimulating unity among the English themselves, which so peremptorily flung them into each other’s arms, and in a great peril summoned to the surface the inextinguishable claims of blood, ancestry, tradition, instincts, and pride, advancing them to a solidarity never before realised. Its effects were very apparent. The pictures of Hope, lit up by the imaginative flamings of Ambition, almost at times, at this dread moment, gave to the future in the new habitations awaiting them, an unexpected salubrity and beauty. The English leaders dreamed of new achievements, a new literature, a greatness vastly exceeding all historic records.
Three days after the parade, which Leacraft sawso magniloquently evolved in the streets of London, at Tilbury, the King left English soil, to transplant the symbols and the functions of the English government to Australia, and to begin the new experiment. The hills, the fields, the shores, were all too contracted to hold the army and the people, gathered in one sublime throb of loyalty and affection to witness the inexpressible event. The King wearing the uniform of a Field Marshall issued from a royal tent and with uncovered head moved towards the shore where his barge was moored. The moment was statuesque; the immeasurable multitude with a wave of heart breaking emotion uncovered; the national hymn played by a string and wind orchestra of four hundred pieces pierced the air with its magnificent undulation of melody, and a selected chorus led the engulfing tide of song. Amid the surges of vocal outpouring the parks of artillery belched their resounding salutes, the lines of war vessels with their crews at attention returned the iron throated call, and the King standing below the sweeping oars, turned for an instant towards the shore, and then regained his first posture of immovable fixture upon the pregnable sides of the Dreadnought, whither each stroke of those fateful oarsmen was swiftly sending him.
The suspense was insupportable, the poignant crushing terror of it all, the incredible predicamentof a nation bodily leaving its birth place, stunned the crowds, and in silence with a thousand varying episodes throughout its interminable acres, the populace stood, dumb as the unresponsive rock, apparently as apathetic as the herding cows.
Then at sunfall the Dreadnought, followed by an escort of cruisers heavily churned the waters, and passed down the Thames, from its mouth into the Channel, and so on to the open sea, and with it went the concentrated expression of the Idea of the English empire—the King. How strangely immobile is Nature! A race which had covered its literary vestures with the garlands of poetry, wrought from the imagery in nature’s picture-book, which had spent its brain and industry in winning for nature new devotees, and new sacrifices of praises and idolatry, which had enthroned among its chiefest charms its surrender to the control of nature, in this hour of torturing doubt, disenthronement and eviction won no sign of recognition. The day closed brightly. The sun went down in a sky of unchecked splendor, and the moon-illuminated night bathed the ancient bastions of Tilbury with an argent sheen. The terrible event found no reflection in the august calmness and serenity of Nature. “Its withers were unwrung.” Enveloped in the processes of decay and change, the lapse of a kingdom was but a paltry contribution to the chronicle of destroyed continents, and shatteredworlds. There was no contact between its mechanism and the obliteration of a sentiment, or an idea, or moral regime. Nothing short of a change in atmospheric pressure would bring tears to its face, or agony in its deportment. And what in any case was this desertion of a land, the removal of a people? It was subordinated to fluctuations of an oceanic river, to the up and down shiverings of the crust of the earth. It was a part of the huge drama part of the inlaid order of things, as determined at creation, when the ways and means of shaping the world, and all things in it, were inaugurated. Why should the disappearance of a condition shock a system of disappearances and appearances, which is another name for the unceasing orbit of revolutions in the face of the earth, and which is nature? An individual counts for nothing in the lapse of twenty-four hours gone or come. Why in the aeons gone and the aeons yet to come should the migration of a people, or the emptying of a vestige of the earth’s surface merit notice? And so the elements did not hasten to weep, or storm, or furiously proclaim their commiseration, and the whispering calls of the half revived summer from pond and wood and meadow retained their old time sweetness.
Thus it happened, but from the mouth of men and women, and prompted deeply in their yearning soul, rose clouds of prayers that night, for thesafety of the King, and ever and anon as troops marched over the roads in the cold summer night the hymn:
Lord of the Wave and Deep,Save those at Sea,Their path upon the Ocean keep,And let them seeThy hand each passing day,Thy Ministry of Peace.
Lord of the Wave and Deep,Save those at Sea,Their path upon the Ocean keep,And let them seeThy hand each passing day,Thy Ministry of Peace.
Lord of the Wave and Deep,Save those at Sea,Their path upon the Ocean keep,And let them seeThy hand each passing day,Thy Ministry of Peace.
Lord of the Wave and Deep,
Save those at Sea,
Their path upon the Ocean keep,
And let them see
Thy hand each passing day,
Thy Ministry of Peace.
was played with bewitching plaintiveness. Men and women stopped and sang it aloud as the regiments went by, and sometimes a company of troopers added with resounding vigor their sonorous refrain.
The Prime Minister and Mr. Birrell, and Mr. Asquith, who had been associated in 1906, in the famous dead lock between the Commons and the House of Lords over the Educational Bill, prepared on the departure of the King a statement which really was a programme of evacuation. It contemplated a progressive transference of the people from England, a slowly consummated shrinkage of the business facilities and the moderated outflow of capital to the new centres of English activity. In this way some check would ensue to the frightful fall in the land values and rentals, apart from the practical consideration of the physical impossibility of at once removing forty millions of people. The government had usurped unusual powers in the creation of a Committee of Direction, which by a house to house canvass, anexhaustive survey of all titles, and a comparative estimate of the hardship imposed by emigration to different families, with immense labor, had prepared an itemized list of departure of the families of London. This plan had been copied in the large cities of the kingdom, and a co-operative scheme framed, which comprised a detailed prescription of the time of sailing, and the places of settlement for all persons listed. These lists were commonly referred to as the “Doomsday Rolls.” The scope of the committee’s power was comprehensive. It prohibited to individuals and to societies, federations and unions, independent action, without explicit conference with the committee. It proved to be a most helpful device, and lessened to the lowest possible percentage of hardship the suffering of the people.
Leacraft and his new friends freed themselves from the jurisdiction of the committee, by announcing their intention to go to America, and upon ample evidence of their ability to do so, and their independent financial standing.
It was fully understood that the evacuation was to be a sustained, gradual movement, with, however, an irreversible determination to make it finally complete. It was not believed that England had become utterly uninhabitable, or that some vestiges of its former occupation might not be still maintained. A part of the plan of evacuation involvedan affectionate care of its greater monuments of architecture, if possible, though the fierceness of the winter winds augured unhappily for the success of this design. A regency of love at any rate was to be established, and as many links as possible of connection, sentimental and real, were to be left unbroken.
And Edinburgh? Thomsen had woefully noted every day the scanty paragraphs which entered the papers, and which gave brief intimations of the devastating and continuous storms, which, through the winter, swept over Scotland. As if, in order that the impending changes might be most forcibly realized, and the loss of time averted from too leniently interpreting the enormous seasonal metamorphosis going on, nature had exhausted her power in developing disaster. Terrific gales had lashed the rocky coasts, fierce insatiable blizzards had devouringly raged in the interior, and the pitiless and untired skies had emptied avalanches of snow upon the southern counties of Scotland. Edinburgh became a storm centre. With whirling inconstancy the storms beat upon the doomed city from the East and West; buildings were almost buried in the banked up and superimposed drifts, crested ranges were in the streets, and palisades of snow tortured into fantastic shapes, towered over the outer eminences, fed from the blinding torrents of flakes driven off from the Pentland hills and theSalisbury Crags. These summits alone, in the whitened waste, lifted their scraped crowns to the thickened skies. Edinburgh had become a city of the Frost King, and his slumbering legions bivouacked on and around it, except when aroused to riotous commotions by the sudden descent of the whistling armies of the wind.
These details were rather incoherently reported, as the spring advanced, and an occasional survivor from the north made his way out of the beleaguered capital. When the spring had fairly ripened into summer, an energetic effort was made to reach Edinburgh, and it succeeded. Scotland at that time became inundated, and though the enormous accumulations of snow refused at once to surrender their blockade, they were so deeply broached and undermined that the North British line pushed a train forward to the edge of the city, though unable to reach its depot in the heart of the city, by reason of the hammered wedge of snow which it encountered under the Castle’s cliffs.
After cutting their way out, to the Lothian Road, the explorers began investigations and were horror stricken to find that immense conflagration had broken out, destroying great sections of the city, which owed its partial survival to the masses of invading snow. These fires had started in the houses occupied by the domestic bandits, who had seized the finest residences, provisioned them fromthe stores, and surrendered themselves to an orgy of rapine and indulgence, by which their own fears were stifled, through the excesses of their drunken dissipation. Hundreds of these unfortunates had perished in the flames, their recklessness had invoked. The picture of the noble and beautiful city was shocking. The fires had made inroads upon the attractive Princes street, and in the portions west of the Caledonian station, towards the Donaldson hospital, gaping openings and swept acres revealed the unchecked fury of the flames. While it was probable that the city might, with a return of auspicious conditions resume some of its old beauty it was also too plain that the veto of Nature had been indelibly written across all such plans. Glaciers had already begun their formation in the Highlands, and the incipient development of an Ice Age was forcibly proclaimed on every hand. The logic of events was unanswerable. The United Kingdom throughout all its parts must participate again in the benighted life of Labrador and Siberia.
And Europe throughout its borders felt the poignant exasperation of the Arctic goad. It trembled with a new apprehension. The touch of those icy fingers, stretched out in myriad lines of approach, swarming like wavering steel points in thick onslaught from the crowded skies, made it suddenly anxious. It corrected its habits, it took council ofpiety and played with beseeching care its pretty role of devotee. Its ridiculous and wicked society, with futile haste filled the churches, and tried to forget its inherited cruelty, and even turned with an unexpected solicitude to the consideration of improving, in some sure way, the state of the untitled majority. Its scientific men rushed into congresses and explored their text books, and read and reread hopeless papers on thewhyandhowof it, but being unable to invent another Gulf Stream, retired into dismal prognostications of a returning Ice Age. In fact deluded, as scientific men often are, by language, they embraced the thought of a “returning Ice Cap,” which would successfully force its way from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. They nervously began measurements of the Alpine glaciers, took temperatures, wandered up in the higher regions of the atmosphere in balloons, sounded the floor of the ocean, established meteorological stations everywhere, and became so excited and convinced that they were happily on hand at a critical geological juncture, that they succeeded in supplying a technical ground for panic.
The statesmen and economists were more useful. They estimated the results of any continued lowering of the temperatures, the effects of climatic alterations on life and production, especially in grain, and found that the southern countries of Europe were in some danger, and the northern countriesvery really threatened with a commercial overthrow, as England had been. They too turned to the colonies of their respective countries for refuge. It looked as if the bursting receptacles of European Culture were about to explode and scatter over the ends of the world the germinal seeds of its civilization.