The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1914-11-06
(Continued.9

cated great ships TOT no other purpose l but war; Were there no sane men, in those | days?' asked the young man, ito stand I against that idolatry?'' 'Tn state of despair,'' said Edith | Hayden. 'sHe is so far off-and there are men alive still who were alive when Bis l marck dted,'' said the young man.
 e4And yet it may be I am unjust to Bismarck said Karenin, following his 1 own thoughts. You see, men belong l to their own age. We stand upon a common stock of thought, and we fan 1 cy we stand upon the ground I met a l pleasant man the other day, a Maori, 1 whose great-gra andfather was a canni- bal. It chanced he had daguerreo= type of the old sinner, and the two were mary elously 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- gra cious one The world also has it's moods. Think of the mental food of R1smarck's childhood humiliations of Napoleon's victories, the crowded, erowning victory of the Battle of the Nations. Everybody in those days, wise or foolish. believed that the divi- sion of the world under 8 multitude of governments was inevitable and that 1t was going on for thousands of years more It was inevitable until it. was impossible Any one who had denied the inevitabtlity publicly would have been counted-oh, 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 5 to be national governments he would make one that was strong at home and invincible abroad. Because he had fed with kkind of rough appetite upon what we can see now were4Eery stupid ideas, that does not make him stupid man. We've had advantages; we've had unity and coI1ectiyism 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 InteIIfgenza, a conspirator, prisoner or an assassin. You, my dear, would have been breaking dingy windows as a suffragette.
 ssNever.s said Edith stoutly
 For a time the talk broke into hu- morous personalities, and the young l people gibed at each other across the 1 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 brinn.
 You know. sir. I've a fancy-it is hard to prove such things-thaf civ (ilization was very near disaster when the atomic bombs came banging into it; that if there had been no Holsten l and no induced radio activity the world would have -smashed-much as l 1t did. Only instead of its being a l smash that opened a way to better things it might have been a smash without recovery. It is part or my business to understand economies, an6 from that point of view the century 1 before Holsten was just a hundred years crescendo of waste Only the l extreme individualism of that period only its utter want of any collective l understanding or purpose, can explain I that waste. Mankind used up mate rial-insanely. They had got througt three-quarters of all the coal in tht planet; they had used up most of tht |, oil: they had swept away their forests l and they were running short of tin ane copper. Their wheat areas were get ting weary and populous, and many 1 of the big towns had so lowered Lht | water level of their available hills tha
 they suffered drought every summer 1 The whole system was rushing toward 1 bankruptcy. And they were spending every year vasterl and vaster amount of power and energy upon militar. preparations and continually expand ing the debt of industry to capital The system was already stagger1ni
 when HoIsten began his researches | II jva3f nj there was no sense of danger and m desire for inquiry. They had no be 1 lief that science could save them no any idea that there was need to b saved They could not they wouit
 not. see the gulf beneath their feet. was pure, good luck for mankind a
 large that any research at all was il
 progress. And as I say, sir, if tha
 line of escape hadn't opened, befor
 now there might have been a crash revolution, panic, social disintegration
 famine. and-it is conceiva ble-com
 plete disorder. The rails might hay
 rusted on the disused railways by now
 the telephone, poles have routed an
 fallen, the big liners dropped int
 sheet iron in the ports: the burnt, de
 serted cities become the ruinous hid
 ing places of gangs of robbers. W
 might have been brigands in a shat
 tered and attenuated world An, yo
 may smile, but that had happened be
 fore in human history. The world still studded with the ruins of broke
 down civilizations Barbaric band
 made their fastness upon the Metropolis
 and the, tomb of Hadrian became
 fortress that warred across the ruin
 of Rome against the Colosseum. Ha
 all that possibility of reaction ended s
 certainly in 1e40? Is it all so very ia
 away even now? ?''
 Ut seems far enough away now,
 said Edith Haydon.
 sBut forty years ago?
 ..No,s, said Karenin. with his eye