CHAPTER X.ADDENDUM.
“Histories leave oppressive legacies behind them. They may furnish subjects for art and literature and poetry, but, as in family inheritance, they burden posterity with considerable rubbish. Society does not quickly free itself from superstition, nor from its habits of thinking or of doing things. Even when they become anachronisms we are loathe to part from them, because, to our own detriment, we are fond of them. America has started fresh, and runs on the road of opportunity, while other nations must hobble and limp as best they can, with the clogs of old usage and prejudice hanging on their feet.”
It was the voice of our friend Leacraft, and he was standing on a broad piazza built at the rear of a spacious villa on the topmost slopes of Staten Island, in the harbor of New York city, looking at themotionless ocean far beyond the fringe of land immediately before him, flushed by the setting sun. That luminary with glorious opulence had painted the sky a seething carmine in the west, and imparted its most delicate reminders of the morn to the eastern arches of the heavens, that hung above the sea. The picture was superbly satisfying. There was enough detail in the landscape, enough isolation of house and wood and field, of moor and strand, and not too much. The oncoming twilight softly blended these nearer things, yet left them palpable. But the day still flung its garlands of illumination over the broad skies; and the sensitive surfaces of the water with lavish sympathy repeated on its face the smiles of the blending zenith. And on either side of Leacraft stood Miss Tobit and Mr. Thomsen, and the month was June, and the year, narrated.
Before we satisfy our curiosity more closely as to their relation, or note those changes which five years, however kindly inclined, must leave behind them, let us follow this conversation which of itself 1915, five years after all the happenings previously may unroll some curtains of the past.
“Well,” it was Thomsen who was now speaking, “then I suppose you are not willing to quarrel with the material revolution we have been through, because all that has come between the present and the past, like the sundering of Damocles’ sword, hassaved us from the necessity of denuding ourselves of the old things, turning us loose in a fresh field, where we may play high jinks with all we once venerated, and where we may end by despising ourselves, for the very liberties you seem anxious for us to indulge in.”
Leacraft motioned to the chairs, and the three sat down, in the same order as they stood. The place obviously was Leacraft’s, or he exercised some sort of control over it. And it was Miss Tobit’s voice which next took up the thread of talk—it was noticeable that Leacraft turned eagerly and looked at her, though his earnest face betrayed no symptoms of possession, in truth, a contemplative sadness for a moment rested on his features, vanishing even with its dawn.
“Why give up old things? Why change and change and change? You call it progress. Is it anything but going around in a circle? You will come back to the very things you now reject, and some centuries hence the world will try the old experiments of Feudlism and Chivalry; and Kings by Divine Right will be as popular as elected Presidents—indeed, people may care some day as much as ever to say their prayers and go to church.”
Both Leacraft and Thomsen laughed, but it was Leacraft who retorted, and he leaned far back in the Morris chair, his eyes bent upon the visionary ring of the horizon now webbed with bluescentshades.
“I think there will be no returns, Mrs. Thomsen”—Ah! then Leacraft had lost again—“no Merry-go-round; our path, the path of humanity, is on and on and on, not always straight, not always level, and never final in its destinations. It was a physical chasm that separated the first colonies of this land from Europe. They brought with them traditions, customs, though luckily not of a very silly sort—but the lack of continuity with the whole antecedent history of England practically destroyed that history for them, and they began in untrammelled freedom to think for themselves and determine the essence of manhood, of worth, of liberty, of faith, of brotherhood, and their thinking throve upon nothing so much as the contemplation of the as yet, humanly speaking, unused world about them.
“And the vicissitudes of living, the peril, the undiminished levy made by necessity upon their inventiveness, their industry, their courage, expelled the remaining vestiges of fealty to humbug, the pretense of class, the arrogance of office. They had wrested a living from Nature, under circumstances of unabashed familiarity with the cruelty of the savage, the obduracy of climate, and the grudging responses of a sterile soil, and they estimated worth by the hardihood of men who worked.
“An American essayist has pointed out the emphasislaid by the northern, the Teutonic races, upon individual liberty. He says something like this: The Germanic race has been distinguished at all ages for its political capacity, and the possession of vigorous institutions of self-government; that there grew up among the nations of this race a well ordered system of government, based upon the right of the individual. And why was this? Because they knew of the hardships of living, and the fibre of liberty-loving natures were formed under the kneading strains of perpetual conflict. James McKinnon has pointed out the same thing in his History of Modern Liberty.
“Arbitrary and selfish rule was most quickly crushed in Central Europe. No! we shall not return to the old follies, because we shall not be permitted to return; because struggle with Nature will never cease.”
“Russia has been a cold country,” answered Thomsen; “and if the gauge of liberty is coldness, we should expect to have seen the fruits of popular government ripening, if you will permit the paradox, in its zero atmospheres; or if wildness and natural enemies—those that make housekeeping difficult, and a man’s skin a precious abode for his soul—why have not the negroes of Africa won over the images of rhetoric which have been wasted upon Greece and Rome—both, by-the-by, hot countries?”
“Rome and Greece never knew what Liberty was in the modern sense. Both were types of class government. Before Christianity, there could be no ideal of freedom in its holiest meanings. As for Russia, the germs of liberty are yet buried there, but it is understood; an accident has put the autocracy in power, and like all beneficiaries of a system, its members fight for their living; besides, Russia has not left off its barbarism. But nothing under Heaven will keep her from being free. As to the negro, he lies too far back, too near to the origins, and, in any case, the dangers of the jungle are met by craft, rather than by consecutive exertion and daring.”
“You regret that our new growth in the Pacific—the Australian England—has not put on the features of a republic, instead of preserving the heritage of the kingly and royal class institutions under which the old England flourished. Do you think that nations can safely try experiments, like children playing games, or chemists mixing solutions, which, in the latter case, may at any moment blow their heads off? I think not.”
“I think,” Leacraft slowly replied, while Agnes Ethel Tobit—she who had become inferentially the wife of the handsome Thomsen—arose and, walking to her husband’s side, leaned over the back of his chair, thus looking down upon the speaker, who had turned towards Thomsen, as if her movementwas dictated by a desire to hear his friend more distinctly; “I think that the finest, the most inspiring—yes, the most delicate and subtle virtues flourish in a republic, such as this Republic of the United States is. I confess, I am in love with it; I love its people. They are superbly human, and humanly noble. The American gentleman, and he lives on no particular and restricted level—you find him among the firemen, the policemen, the clerks, the fathers of families—this unique man is always gracious, delightful, unerringly just. I believe that these traits develop most naturally under the dispensations of equality, reasonably understood. I think the most fruitful national life ensues, when a nation stands fundamentally, in its government, and in its social conceptions, for common sense standards, and an unqualified acceptance of the principles of personal freedom. I like these Americans. To me, their ardor, their naturalness, their hearty friendship, their generous self-forgetfulness, and a certain deferential amusement at the foibles of less emancipated cultures, is fascinating. Of course, there are stupid rich Americans, dressed in most obnoxious livery of affectation and imitation, men and women who have treacherous tendencies in their feelings and desires, willing always to kick their own country, and willing to leave it, but never willing to relinquish the luxuries its prosperity has enabled them to enjoy.There are also hateful middle-class Americans, who deteriorate the impressions made by the best aspects of the American heart and mind; but the substance and the spirit of the American life, however much disguised, or, from momentary and economic reasons obscured, is to me the most palatable; it is palpably the best life now shown on the world; it is the most energizing, the most alert, and it carries the power of enormous assimilation, because it is built on the essence of manhood, the respect for the rights of others. I know what is in your thoughts and on the point of your tongue. You would ask: How about the Chinaman, the Negro, and the Japanese, perhaps? That is a long question, and has nothing to do with my contention, for in a nutshell, respect for others’ rights does not involve respect for others’ habits, and generous as the Americans are, they are not so stupid as to wish to imperil, for an unnecessary sentiment, the hard-gained benefits of their own national experiment. They have already leavened the whole earth; it’s not to be expected that they digest all of its rubbish as well. Let the rest of the world do something for itself, and clean its own social sloughs, by a little more admixture of freedom and sympathy.
“All this may seem to you intensely disagreeable, perhaps a little disloyal, but you wrong me. If I might answer your question without more evasion. I would peremptorily declare that I hoped that thenew England in Australia would put on the lineaments, nay, incorporate the very breath and body of this land. I know it has not; possibly it could not; possibly pernicious and selfish instrumentalities have made it impossible. Pardon my intractable enthusiasm, but do not mistrust my heart. It is always England’s. The night is too calm, too beautiful, to disgrace it with wrangling. Let us tell the story of the last years to each other. Mine is a short one, and can come last; but yours? Ah! well I know some of it,” and Leacraft, without constraint or any show of vacillating envy, smiled up in the face of the pretty woman who looked down at him, and deeply that woman’s heart honored him for his magnanimous courage.
There was a pause for an instant, and then Thomsen began. He rose from his chair, and walking to the railing of the piazza, sat on it, half turned to the paling East, half towards Leacraft, and told the story of the transplanted English nation.
That story can be told in more exacting phraseology than the colloquial method permits, and until his narrative becomes more personal, let us authentically review the events he rehearsed, which form a unique historic episode.
With the departure of the King from the shores of England, the actual evacuation of the island began, and the means and ways of transferring the people previously thought out, were carefully applied.
The moment the King and Parliament arrived in Australia, a predicament arose. The King was recognized as king, functional in Australia and in England, functional anywhere the English control was established; but the Parliament of England, as the highest law-giving legislature of the realm, did it supersede the regional legislation of Australia? Was the autonomic power of the provinces of Australia obliterated with the arrival of the supreme legislative body of the British Empire? There was one broad, obvious proposition. The remedy to all doubt, collision, and ambiguity was to resume in Australia the exact conditions which had vanished in England, and now naturally sought a restatement and erection in the land the King and Parliament had reached. And this was generally accepted. There was a cordial and almost precipitate display of adhesion to the new plan. It destroyed the independent existence of the various sections of Australia, and made the continental island a unit under the control of the Parliament, just as England had been. The enthusiasm which greeted this solution was adequate and convincing. It gave renewed hope to the patriotic and loyal souls who prayed and worked for the re-production of the England they had left. The King himself responded to this burst of practical allegiance with a wise and fervent expression of affectionand thankfulness. It was a gem of deliberate composition, and was well received. Meetings of endorsement and proclamations of ratification were made everywhere, and in the tumult of acclamation it escaped notice that a formidable opposition had become organized for a forcible resistance to the whole scheme. This was over-awed or suppressed, not without a show of force, in which Thomsen had been himself engaged, and which brought about some adventures around the region at Mount Harwick, in New South Wales.
Thomsen, after the conclusion had been reached that his own and Miss Tobit’s families should follow the stream of people going to Australia, rather, than was at first intended, to coincide with Leacraft’s wishes for them all to visit America, had sought employment in the Government’s service, among those to whom had been entrusted the regulation of this colossal emigration. He was therefore well acquainted with its various phases and results.
When the King and the Parliament left England, over two millions had preceded them, being naturally, those who accepted the situation, and who, besides, were not specifically limited for their support to investments at home. They went everywhere, many to the continent, many to India, perhaps half to America, which grew more and more, before the eyes of the people, as the most natural,most desirable, the most friendly home. A large number strayed to Africa, and yet others sought the expanding possibilities of South America. Englishmen had acquired such extended interests, drew so largely upon the resources of the entire world for their support, that now in a way they found natural business refuges all over its varied surface. It was a happy consequence of the constraining littleness of their own island.
The financial question was the real difficulty, apart from the harsh bereavement and hardship of the divorce from all their previous living and associations. It was solved, at least partially, by the Government issuing paper money, similar to the greenbacks, which carried the United States through the Civil War. These were furnished to applicants upon deposit of sworn, approved and examined statements of their property of all kinds in England. Twenty-five per cent of the amount thus appearing was given, or rather loaned, to the applicant, and with this he was enabled to make a start in the new quarters he had selected. The plan involved the assumption of an enormous burden by the Government, and an unqualified confidence in it by the people.
Of course, England was not in any sense to become a depopulated island. Its real estate values, though shrunk to slender fractions of their former worth, would yet have some value, and whereas,in the case of a manufacturer, the Government made the loan upon his attested resources in machinery and certified correspondence, the risk was reduced sensibly within discoverable limits. Loss, agitation, dislocations, in many cases ruin, resulted, but the transfer of the manufacturing plants was made most skilfully, and before the factories in England were closed, the same products were being produced in Australia. The menace of the emergency had startled Englishmen into a really reasonable and adequate show of sense, quickness and resource; usually poor business men, torpid and conservative, shackled with a kind of mild and traditional laziness, they became, under the stimulation of the danger of extinction, active and wary, and intensive.
In the meanwhile the climatic changes continued, and the face of the United Kingdom more and more altered under the infliction of the long and tempestuous winters, the cool, shortened summers, and the ice blockade about its coasts. For it had early become apparent that in some inexplicable way, the Arctic currents streamed down from the polar regions with reinforced volume and velocity, bringing with them the discharged masses of ice projected from their usual course westward, by the irruption into the Arctic Ocean through Behring Straits of the united oceanic rivers of the Gulf Stream and the currents from the Yellow Sea.Throughout the spring, the beleaguered coasts were deeply fringed with ice-floes and icebergs, whose chilling emanations created fogs, and wrapt the islands in cheerless cold. Each passing year had made more clear the surpassing wisdom of the evacuation. But a large population found that they could support themselves on the island, made up of the hardy, enduring types, the sailors, fishermen, and the boreal agriculturists—the farmer who entertains life successfully where the earth reluctantly yields her products, and the scant nature furnishes but few of the products of the soil. For now a most extraordinary thing happened. The refrigeration of Northern Europe had driven down towards the south the northern denizens. They eagerly seized the deserted land of the southerners, less accustomed to the niggardly responses of the field, and met the attacks of the climate with the accustomed patience and resistance to which they had become innured in their northern home. In this way the population of Iceland almost bodily left the bleak and ice-bound coasts of the Arctic island, that no longer offered the meagre semblance even of subsistence, which previously maintained its stubbornly hardy occupants. Nothing could have been more fortunate, as it retarded in some measure the shocking decline in the values of the land, and gave to all establishments that might otherwise have been turned into homes for owlsand foxes a partial usefulness. Not indeed that the manufacturing interests would be considerably revived, but warehouses and buildings connected with manufacturing or shipping business would be made into storehouses, and the castles and large manor houses were converted into curious communal colonies, where those boreal people most joyfully repaired and developed profitable communities.
Large numbers of the very poor found in the exodus of the well paid or employed classes above them, a grand chance to renew their own luck. They became keepers of the deserted buildings; they fraternized with the newcomers, and freed from the incubus of a superimposed social repression, became happy and industrious.
To all the brands and grades of the surviving or deserted inhabitants came increasing numbers of Scandinavians; important fractions of the Scotch settled on the coasts of England, and even immigrants from Newfoundland and Canada were tempted to seize the strange opportunity to occupy vast and abandoned cities, which furnished them in many instances with palatial shelters, but which later became repellant and unpleasant abodes, from which they too willingly withdrew to the smaller settlements.
The tragedy of the big cities was complete. They were melancholy wastes, their empty streets seemed baleful and dismal. They gave ghostly thrills ofterror, even in the noon-day, to the passers by—silent graves of past memories—the speechless, vacant, staring windows in the unlit rooms were like the open but expressionless eyes of corpses, and the awful fall of silence through the labyrinth of ways, roads, lanes, places, squares, alleys, descended upon the wanderer, caught by some malign trick of adventure within their voiceless, motionless depths, with the benumbing touch of the grave. He hastened his steps; he ran to escape the deadly stupor, the inexpressible gloom of loneliness, where every aspect betokened life. The solitude of nature inspires, draws to the lips an involuntary prayer, or places in the heart the movements of hope, but this hideous contradiction of signs and effect weighed like lead upon the spirit, and forced from the shrinking heart the ejaculations of despair.
Never on earth was there such a picture of dejected grandeur, as this emptied metropolis of the world presented; never before had a great city become its own tomb, through the flight of its inhabitants; never in any record of disaster, whether by earthquake, pestilence, flood or vulcanism, was there such obliteration as followed the withdrawal of the citizens of London from their own capital.
The thick blanket of the snow was thrown over it in winter, and its emergent domes, pinnacles, obelisks and needles offered a fantastic similitudeto mortuary monuments, or else beneath the yellow moon its piercing whiteness, like a titanic face of someone killed, smote the blue black skies above it with remorse.
But in Australia the English strength revived and broadened; it promised to make a gigantic social revolution; it worked strangely enough in unison with the newly awakened hopes of the King to restore an accustomed prestige to the Crown. This political phenomenon attracted the attention of the civilized world. The King in a most adroit proclamation to the people had peculiarly enlisted their sympathy by his veiled complaint of the habitual loss of power, and the encroachments upon the kingly prerogatives of the self-constituted Cabinet of Ministers. The King’s action was always tacitly prescribed and anticipated. He was a puppet, dressed in regalia, with no shadow of power, real and personal. And this he resented, but his language was the sentences of diplomacy, and lost the individual note entirely in a concerned and measured argument, restrained by every possible regard for the present custom, urging a greater confidence in the King’s wishes, and a larger precinct of action for his judgment. This momentous promulgation was contemptuously referred to by its critics as “the Ourselves” letter, but it met a favorable reception and it enlisted the cordial endorsement of the House of Lords, nor was it altogetherresented by the House of Commons. The achievement of this success led the King into a further step of interference, in the appointments and in the personnel of the Cabinet, and he succeeded further in impressing his wishes upon a number of important bills passing through the Parliament. In short, by a persistent pressure, seconded by friends among the people, and a growing following in the legislature, he had inserted his views, and extorted from the grudging concessions of the Commons’ recognition of the royal prerogatives. He had shown himself unusually active in resource, in suggestions, and in intercourse with the people. His examples had been followed with enthusiasm by the nobility, who, so to speak, spread themselves before the observation of the nation, and exerted an unaccustomed generosity and ubiquitous energy in practically assisting the work of rehabilitation. At a general election, many candidates were discussed and elected upon this issue, viz.: the restoration to the King of kingly power.
“And so, you see,” Thomsen concluded, “the unexpected happens, as it always does. We moved to an ultra-democraticmilieu, a veritable nest of fads and socialistic temerities and experiments, and lo! the reaction sets in, and in Australia the King may recover the power, lost with the Stuarts, and the monarchial principle gets a shove ahead, which, with prosperity, and in England, no impulseshort of the fiat of the Almighty, could have secured for it. A prophet who would have foretold that, would have scored a poor success in 1900 as a state maker.”
Before he had finished speaking, Leacraft had left his chair, and was walking to and fro near the speaker—and then he advanced to the edge of the few steps that led from the piazza to the open swards beneath them, which were fringed by an emergent crown of trees growing thickly in some lower crease or hollow of the ground, beyond which again the eye fell to the foot swells, and the undulations of land far off, in the flats, just beginning to twinkle with lights.
Leacraft spoke slowly, his eyes still fixed upon the distance, as if in revery, but his measured words came clearly to his two friends, carried by a voice which, always melodious and cultured, now gained a sort of passionate yearning, and then again was approved as disinterestedly clean and judicial: “All this is an episode. Nothing more. The future of the races of the world means the widening scope of the Republican idea. There can be no other. Education forbids its extinction. Yes, and Authority endorses it. This sudden foolishness in Australia will only invoke a perilous reaction. There can be to-day in governmental systems only varied applications of the one thought; the rule of the people through an appeal to the people’s choice of rulers.It is fundamentally common sense in an era of enlightenment, to begin with; but since the United States have eclipsed all nations, and raised the standards of individual action beyond all previous estimates, this conclusion has coercively been accepted, that through the influences propagated under this popular freedom of control, the finest, the richest, the sweetest, the most magnanimous types of character are also engendered and completed. A kind of psychological logic is involved. A vast psychic power of selection sets in, and irrevocably the most noble, the most disenthralled natures slowly appear. In comparison with their best results, the representatives of other cultures appear dwindling and abortive. And why? Because in the least limited field of opportunity the unrestrained power of nature to make character must of necessity evolve consummate and supreme examples. Nothing is more demonstrable. It must be conceded, I grant, that at first the crop of temperaments is marked more by rash hardihood, strident vulgarities, and climbing audacity, but these very qualities, which in the naming seem so distasteful, mature naturally, in later generations, into devoted courage, æsthetic spontaneity; juices of the fruit when green form the basis of its later richness.
“I know the tiresome and hackneyed nonsense, and the mean-spirited sneers of the European at theAmerican, for his lack of culture, his defect in polish, his money-getting haste. And it’s all a lie!” Leacraft wheeled round as if on a pivot, and even in the pale light the Thomsens could see that his face flushed, and the stern decision of his voice betrayed the fires of resentment. “Who is it that these precious pretenders of Europe look to when they have famine and disaster; who has taught the lessons of sympathy, of open-hearted helpfulness, and unswerving generosity, or made them recognize in their own natures the almost exterminated seeds of kindness? As to culture, let me tell you in all seriousness that the idle glamour of a scholar’s diction does not weigh a barleycorn as against the flashing splendor of an honest and sincere spirit; as to polish, who made the European regard Woman as something better than the helpless ally of his lust, and the chained companion to his exultant vanity? Woman has gained a new empire of dignity in these new lands; she for once triumphs in the unquenched assertion of her rights. As to money-making greed, where under the canopy will you find a more meanly mercenary race than these same Europeans, inert panderers to pleasure for money, fortune hunters, and silent spectators of atrocities, if the risk of money loss stops their way to succor. I know the dolts and traitors on the American soil, the men and women who sell their birthright for the mess of pottagecontained in a gilded name in Europe, or the hollow mockery of a coat-of-arms. These are the tattooed children of humbug—careless and ungrateful, indolent and self-seeking, lured by that strange beauty which Europe, for some inscrutable reason, seems to keep, and of which even I, an Englishman, feel jealous, for the sake of a country which may not be so good-looking, but which becomes every day more sublimely the appointed pattern of the future state. Well! my friends, you must pardon these ‘wild and whirling words.’ They may strike you as an unseemly tirade, but if you knew this land as well as I do, you, too, might trespass beyond the limits of moderation in its defense. But other matters have for you a less doubtful interest. The great physical revolution which has left its mark no less in the political world than in the material, has become consolidated and solidified into a permanent feature of the earth. The broad engulfment of the land at the isthmus has established an open way to the Pacific from the Atlantic, and the initial formation of the barrier northward from the Caribbean Sea by the erection of a ridge from Cuba to Yucatan, and partially from Jamaica to Honduras, this latter connexion the singular sequel to the disturbance which overwhelmed Kingston in 1907, has advanced far enough to effectually assist the momentous deflection of the Gulf Stream from the Atlantic. And another transformationhas thereby been achieved. The alien mass of hot water pouring into the Pacific at the isthmus, when no longer propelled by the easterly winds, resumes its original impetus of rotary direction, and streams, sweeping northward, along the coasts of California, Oregon and Washington, bringing in its further extension warmth to British America and Alaska. By this amelioration of its climate, Alaska has specially profited. Its numerous mineral resources have been more exhaustively explored, and the wealth of its boundless areas promises returns beyond the wildest dreams of avarice.
“The convulsions which were so dismally foretold, in the social and political fabric of this country, never occurred. They were quite lost sight of in the wonderful happenings of the world, and the trite aphorism that the spirit of discontent is best overcome by an appeal to the spirit of curiosity, obtained an almost ludicrous illustration in the subsidence of every murmur of schism and contention, as the amazement grew over the upset of the temporalities of the world, as the earth readjusted its members for another, let us hope, long and uneventful slumber.
“For myself, perhaps I should deprecate your censure by an apology. It is true, I did not follow the fortunes of my country, though with my mind I ardently canvassed and considered them. The very interests which brought me to this land wereEnglish, and my superintendence and success with them, has in a few ways made the survival of not a few Englishmen possible at this crisis. Really, my best place of helpfulness was here. Jim has been with me, and has proved invaluable, and that poor woman, whom I told you about meeting in Victoria Park, the night before we saw the great procession of evacuation, was found by me, and now Jim is her husband. There’s nothing shocking about it. Her first husband died of consumption. It was a foregone conclusion. Jim showed himself a big-hearted friend, and the girl learned to think the world of him. And when she was alone, what could have been better from any point of view than that she should have married him?
“And for me, Mrs. Thomsen, there is peace, too.” Leacraft moved to the doorway of the broad hall that divided the spacious house. He pushed it open, and as the light from the interior fell upon his face, the visitors saw the smile of an abiding happiness upon the thoughtful countenance, and Agnes Ethel Thomsen utter a prayer of thankfulness thathehad found contentment.