ANYO

NYONE who does not believe in recurrent moods of despair or derision that the present world is crazy, is himself probably in need of skilled attention. We have been told by one of our most acute and attentive critics that humanity gives him the impression this earth is being used by the other planets as a lunatic asylum. And Anatole France, who has kept an understanding and cynical eye upon our capers for very many years, but who remained obdurately genial and hopeful, at length gives us up. He is sure now we are going the way of the Sumerian and other once dominant civilizations which perished and are dust. It is not that we do not possess the knowledge and intelligence to put our affairs in order, but we are light-minded; our attention is easily diverted; we remain convinced we ought to be more serious till the first toy balloon floats by, and then we go after that.

But younger observers who must count upon some years yet of continued association with their kind dare not thus throw up their hands. They are forced to try to improve us. That may be not even a friendly act, in its motive; they must do so if only to preserve themselves, just as an intelligent steerage passenger would force his advice on demoralized navigators and ignorant saloon passengers when the ship was on a reef. For, whatever else may be in doubt in this world, it is not in doubt that the complex industrial society we have built on the simple axiom of the nut-scramble is wrecked, and that no number of conferences, even international conferences of anxious and highly interested Importances, will ever get the

old notion going freely again. Men everywhere, and even whole nations, are discovering that they have lost heart for so undignified and debasing an activity; the trouble is they have no idea yet as to what they should do in its place.

There is hope, however, for the patient who at last begins to understand, though dimly, what his antics are to his despairing but compassionate friends. And the pleasant truth is we are now beginning to laugh at ourselves. Some of our ridiculous institutions and traditions, which once we regarded with the utmost gravity, now cause us to smile in the way their merits always deserved. Or else we are indifferent to them. I remember, for instance, that not many years before the war there was a by-election in my London suburb. We wanted a new member to represent us- -as the uncritical saying goes in Parliament. Now the culture of this suburb may be described as that of a semi-detached intelligence with a Virginia creeper in front. We attend the vicar's garden parties, and we see nothing curious in a major-general-famous, naturally, like all generals-telling our youngsters at the school's annual prize-giving that the privilege in their higher education is to make foremost fools of them on some battlefield. But certainly if John were to return from any wilderness he now haunts, and from our street corners were to call on us to repent, we should not stop on our way to church; we should consider him a low fellow. We should have done so, anyhow, at the time of this election. There was a dreadful doubt then that the British Navy was comparatively weaker than it ought ever to be. "We want eight," we cried in those

days, "and we won't wait." We meant eight new Dreadnoughts. To disregard the Navy was infidelity; the floating gun platform was the faith of our fathers and the altar of our gods. To speak critically of British warships and sea-power was impious. Yet see what has happened to our minds since then! One of Our numerous "naval experts"-we have specialized in these, and they talk a kind of hornpipe language but never go to sea-wept recently in several deep columns of print about a shameful thing now to be witnessed at a historic naval base. A fleet of British warships, from Dreadnoughts to submarines, with all its priceless gear and appurtenances, and many of its vessels "hush" craft of the war, is there decaying at its moorings. The ships are rusty and dismantled; they are rotting. A bare hint of so monstrous an iniquity ten years ago would have swept any government out of office instantly. Yet to-day nobody was interested enough to pay attention to the sad story. It was even considered, by professional pressmen, bad journalism to print it. Let them rot, we murmured. Yet it is not easy to make such a little fact as significant to others as it is to

us.

But suppose the Druids once upon a time collected all the holy mistletoe and burned it! Suppose Americans ever came to feel it was necessary to revise a line or two in the Declaration of Independence!

Perhaps what gives our present outlook its resemblance to the chaos and inconsequence of lunacy is the hopeful fact that our minds have changed. What would not have surprised us at one time. does so now. Our opinions are dissolving and reforming, but our circumstances are still only the reflection of our old life. In that sense our circumstances are worse even than they used to be. They were once normal and unnoticed; now they are obvious, alien, and acutely discomforting. And in another sense, too, they are worse, for the defects in our old conception of social relationships have at last veritably produced the ruin

always inherent in them. We have changed, and we are pained to discover the world has not changed with us. Our opinions are new, but our world is still the old world. The new light we see is not reflected from material things. It is that lack of correspondence between our renaissance and circumstances which stolidly recall only what we used to be and what we used to want, which makes the world appear now as a bad and silly jest. While outward things are but the projection of what we are, while they are but the desires of the majority of us made manifest, all is well. The drums and fifes, for example, once forced me, as they did most men, into step with the soldiers. Yet a day or two ago, during a procession through central London, the flamboyance of the drum major, and the assurance of the drums, merely caused the following troops, wearing once more their chromatic and traditional uniforms, to look like a parade advertising a Drury Lane pantomime. The glamour had gone from those bonny fellows. They did not seem real. They might have been fitted out by a theatrical costumer. The pageant, counting so deliberately on its old appeal, was merely embarrassing. It made, it was evident to me, a number of witnesses feel a little ashamed. For what are these bearskins and scarlet tunics to that clay-colored figure in a steel helmet, distant, august, and statuesque though cumbered with ugly gear, forever fixed by the memory in the light of one dayfall in Flanders? How do they compare? They are an outrage. They are an impertinence and a desecration.

This discrepancy between what our awakened eyes desire to see and what is still there has a paralyzing effect upon the mind. That is why, I suppose, it is merely the debates and the advice of elder men we chiefly hear, for it is the younger men who are awake, but who are shocked into silence by what they see around them. Many of them are survivors of the great catastrophe. They were guileless at that time, credulous of

the wisdom and good will of their elders, accepted the world as they found it, and moved at once to the solution of the task which, so they were told, was especially their privilege to solve. ("I wish I were young enough," their uncles used to say, with a regret that seemed poignant, but was-and the uncles thanked God for it-idle.) Now those young minds, generous and easily fired to enthusiasm by a selfless ideal—a phenomenon seen only in youth and religious zealots-from being sanctified crusaders in a holy war which was to restore a lost nimbus to this planet, feel that they were merely the duped agents in the traditional moves of competing powers; and they cannot help comparing the lost value of their dead comrades with the living facts. They are, therefore, speechless with astonishment and dismay. Yet it is in the mind of that generation, so unreported and expressionless, but watchful, critical and disillusioned, and intent on all the important hints of tendencies which the newspaper press tucks away in unobtrusive corners, that is of more consequence to us than all the great headlines which delude us into a belief in the urgency of front-page news. It is rarely we see the underlying significance of front-page news. When the Czar's advisers insisted on that poor man signing the order for mobilization one fateful summer's day, did it occur to them that they were insisting on the admittance of Lenin with their own death warrants?

Well, our guides and governors, meddling once with the lock which shut in the Pit, inadvertently touched the secret spring, and opened it. Eblis is free, and much else. There was a night in a distant August, when, in our London suburb, the burst of news from the Continent, so far as we could make anything of it, sounded like the distant uproar of myriads of contending maniacs. This noise kad broken out suddenly, and the rapidity with which its violence spread was stupifying. Then, when we began to listen in real alarm, a muffled door was closed on the noise. We sought one an

other's eyes in an insulated quiet that was ominous. The last shout we caught was that the Germans were in Luxembourg. That news gave us reason enough to look at one another in despair. I took the item to an elderly shoemaker, a man on whom even the vicar used to drop in for an evening pipe. The virtue of the cobbler was that newspapers only made him laugh. On that occasion, I remember, his visitors did most of the talking. The cobbler merely listened. I can see now his hammer upheld, arrested in its descent on a boot to be sure he caught the right word. I should have been warned by his curious silence that night, but it happened that people like the vicar and myself were more confident than usual. The passionate conviction of plenary inspiration most of us feel in wartime is much more certain than a religious revelation ever is. We were sure, of course, that this great affair was outside the scope of a cobbler. It was essentially a matter for educated men of the world; and the cobbler did not laugh once, that evening, I remember. It was when we were leaving that he made his sole contribution to the communal wisdom.

"You think," he remarked, putting his spectacles up on his forehead, "that this war will be over by Christmas. It won't. It will last for years, and when it is over that will be only the end of the first act in the European revolution."

"And how long will that last?" cheerily asked the vicar, turning to smile at him.

"God knows," answered the shoemaker.

Soon after that our cobbler died, and faded instantly into an almost invisible phantom of the past. In those days each hour was more important than all history, and one forgot everything but what was knocking at the door. Presently a time came when it was possible to stop and look at the clock. Five months gone! Instead of averting doom, which seemed right over us, with a series of sweaty improvisations, there was a spell for a little thought, for the enemy was resting in

holes behind wire. A real understanding of our calamity, an idea that the war had dropped on the world as the reward for humanity's common behavior, was even then, the December of 1914, beginning to dawn on the soldiers. But only on the soldiers. By the summer of 1915 you might hear the cynical and weary comments of the French poilus, on war and peace, and on governments, discussed freely, and even with some approving laughter, at almost any British headquarters in the field. It was strange to hear from young British officers of good birth such casual opinions of the sort of job they had before them. Nothing like those ideas was ever entertained on the playing fields of Eton. They were more in the line of my suburban cobbler. In a way, they recalled him to life. "Only the first act in the European revolution!" How many years ago? Call them a century. At least they make a lifetime seem long. The soldiers whose traditional notions, some as old as feudal times, were stripped from them in France, baring their minds to the inclemency of a world in ruin where was exposed the basic morals of that civilization which once even to question was blasphemy and how nice the secret inside of that civilization looked!-were beginning to talk like sensible people whose helplessness and unimportance enable them to be candid. Enough to make a parrot talk so! But now where are those men? From a casual survey of contemporary England you might think they were all in France, populating the cemeteries. We appear unable to count any of them. They are lost, and their thoughts. We must appear to others, therefore, to be going on as before, and as though nothing had happened. Passing through Trafalgar Square, one might note, as I did recently, Nelson's column festooned with laurels for 1805, and its lions chained to the memorial shaft with evergreen. Trafalgar Day! So we keep Guy Fawkes Day. Yet only a few weeks before, on the anniversary of the opening of the Battle of the Somme, when we

lost fifty thousand men in the first twenty minutes, a battle which lasted eight months and cast a permanent shadow over most of our homes, there was but one reminder, I think, in all the British press. Why? Names like Fricourt, Thiepval, la Boisselle, Longueval, High Wood, Morval, the Butte, Guillemont, Sailly-Saillisel, Pozières and Contalmaison, probably strange and unmeaning to most Americans, convey to many Englishmen what no words will ever measure, especially if those English once saw those places; for that immense battleground looked to be the last phase of the Judgment Day. Why was there no reminder of an occasion which presaged the end of our traditions and old habits of thought and acceptances? Is it supposed we have forgotten it?

Is it supposed that that word, the Somme, with all its implications of profound change and dread, has lost its significance? No; I suppose the truth is it is feared that it has not. It is therefore natural for our newspapers to pretend their readers have no desire to hear more of the tragic years, for their proprietors dread what will emerge from the Day of Judgment, naturally.

They have gone, those years, dark, senseless, and confused. What have they to do with the light of day? They have gone, and they are as incredible as a strange dream when we are awake again amidst the familiar briskness of the morning's affairs. The smell of the garden, the cool mockery of the blackbird, the traffic in the street, the shopkeepers at their doors, the new volumes in the window of the bookseller's, the talk in the morning train-all is familiar enough, seems secure and eternal . . . yet, did nothing happen to us in the night?

So it appears. Everybody and everything seems to be the same as usual. Nothing is changed. Our morning paper, evidently, is unaware. Now, Rip Van Winkle could see he was a changeling. His white beard told him that. And his village, which he ought to have known, was foreign to him. The power of an

other world than his had really touched him, in his familiar Catskills, with its black art. Our case, therefore, is worse than his. For, though we feel altered in nature, are sure that even the cast of the mind is not what it was before it crossed that strange midnight, yet nobody acts as though aware of the change. We have the same name. We are doing what our friends expect of us. We live in the same

street.

The

But something has happened to us? More, much more, than is ever admitted. More than our newspapers desire to publish as common knowledge which has not yet been confessed in print. More than New York could guess from what the correspondents of the American press judge is worth the expense of cabling from London. There is an England today which is never in the news. It is never discussed in Parliament. evidence of it is never telegraphed to America. You could suppose its presence to be invisible to all our popular politicians, though some of them, like the Duke of Northumberland, glimpse it as a bedtime bogie, and their ignorance is suitably terrified; they even scream their fright. The England which is still freely reported to the world is a land that no more indicates what is here than does Ptolemy's Chart the ocean to modern navigators. The England which American visitors knew in 1914 has ceased to exist; and when to-day American diplomatists and statesmen talk to the official representatives of England, they are not talking to us, but to the dead.

I suppose an American visitor who was again at Charing Cross would easily recognize the old place again. He might see some change; the motor traffic has increased. If he felt any interest in the subject at all he would search long for the faintest evidence of the Nights of the Maroons when the underground railway stations were dormitories. The same old London! In a long holiday he would certainly learn that we are hard up, notwithstanding the display of expensive

automobiles, and the pearls and diamond-studded tobacco pipes for ladies in Bond Street. Among "the best people," and even in surburbia where it was never nice to admit the body had any functions after the age of two years, an American visitor will discover that today we will talk as freely of sex and its curious extravagances as of the wonders of bee-keeping. When the fences and safeguards go down for the glorious adventure of war, the herd wanders loose; we have discovered it necessary to use even family newspapers to warn the young against the insidious character of venereal disease. We are very interested in spiritualism, esoteric dances and other abnormal matters, that show an unsteady temperature. Our behavior and our conversation are rather like that of a family circle where any subject will serve to keep a guest from surmising that we are preoccupied with a skeleton in the cupboard which faces him. There is a cool levity about all we say which perhaps ought to warn him that we are not normal, and are suppressing a deep mental disturbance. When men front the iron and expressionless visage of destiny itself, and they feel that nothing but unlikely good luck can give them any aid, then the mind will show itself in oblique and giddy mockery; in the same way, youngsters in a dugout used to start the sauciness of Marie Lloyd on a gramophone to hide the noise of their burial. For we realize that the foundations of the British Empire have collapsed. It was past its time, and it has gone. It is on the maps, it is in our Foreign Office, it is boldly asserted in those newspapers which are chiefly reported abroad, but it is only a romantic ghost haunting the battlements of a ruin. Our commercial greatness, nicely adjusted on an export of coal (which now our customers do not want), a staple export supporting the tonnage of our paramount mercantile marine, has gone with it. It was not the War, but the Peace and its Treaty that ruined Europe; and the infatuated English electors who