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Anticipations Chapter 4 Part 2 · The H. G. Wells Library

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Speaker 1: Chapter four B of Anticipations. This is a LibriVox recording.
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Speaker 1: All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
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Speaker 1: information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Anticipations
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Speaker 1: by H. G. Wells, Chapter four B. Quite similar households
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Speaker 1: to this would be even more common among those neither
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Speaker 1: independent nor engaged in work of a primarily functional nature,
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Speaker 1: but endeavoring quite ostensibly to acquire wealth by political or
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Speaker 1: business ingenuity and activity, And also among the great multitude
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Speaker 1: of artists, writers, and that sort of people whose works
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Speaker 1: are their children. In comparison with the state of affairs
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Speaker 1: fifty years ago, the child infested household is already conspicuously
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Speaker 1: rare in these classes. These are two highly probable menages
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Speaker 1: among the central mass of the people of the coming time,
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Speaker 1: but there will be many others. A naje adieu, one
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Speaker 1: may remark, though it may be without the presence of children,
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Speaker 1: is not necessarily childless. Parentage is certainly part of the
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Speaker 1: pride of many men, though curiously enough it does not
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Speaker 1: appear to be felt among modern European married women as
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Speaker 1: any part of their honor. Many men will probably achieve parentage. Therefore,
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Speaker 1: who will not succeed in inducing or who may possibly
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Speaker 1: even be very loath to permit their wives to undertake
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Speaker 1: more than the first beginnings of motherhood from the moment
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Speaker 1: of its birth, unless it is kept as a pet.
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Speaker 1: The child of such marriages will be nourished, taught, and
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Speaker 1: trained almost as though it were an orphan. It will
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Speaker 1: have a succession of bottles and foster mothers for body
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Speaker 1: and mind from the very beginning. Side by side with
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Speaker 1: this increasing number of childless homes, therefore, there may develop
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Speaker 1: a system of kindergarten boarding schools. Indeed, to a certain extent,
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Speaker 1: such schools already exist, and it is one of the
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Speaker 1: unperceived contrasts of this and any former time, how common
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Speaker 1: such a separation of parents and children becomes, except in
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Speaker 1: the case of the illegitimate and orphans, and the children
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Speaker 1: of impossible many public house children, for example, or wretched homes.
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Speaker 1: Boarding schools, until quite recently were used only for quite
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Speaker 1: big boys and girls, but now at every seaside town,
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Speaker 1: for example, one sees a multitude of preparatory schools, which
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Speaker 1: are really not simply educational institutions, but supplementary homes. In
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Speaker 1: many cases these are conducted and very largely staffed by
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Speaker 1: unmarried girls and women who are indeed in effect assistant mothers.
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Speaker 1: This class of capable schoolmistresses is one of the most
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Speaker 1: interesting social developments of this period. For the most part,
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Speaker 1: they are women who, from emotional fastidiousness, intellectual egotism, or
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Speaker 1: an honest lack of passion, have refused the common lot
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Speaker 1: of marriage. Women often of exceptional character and restraint, and
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Speaker 1: it is well that at any rate their intelligence and
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Speaker 1: character should not pass fruitlessly out of being assuredly for
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Speaker 1: this type the future has much in store. There are, however,
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Speaker 1: still other possibilities to be considered in this matter. In
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Speaker 1: these anticipations, it is impossible to ignore the forces making
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Speaker 1: for a considerable relaxation of the institution of permanent monogamous
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Speaker 1: marriage in the coming years, and of a much greater
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Speaker 1: variety of establishments than is suggested by these possibilities. Within
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Speaker 1: the pale I guess, without attempting to refer to statistics,
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Speaker 1: that our present society must show a quite unprecedented number
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Speaker 1: and increasing number of male and female celibates, not religious celibates,
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Speaker 1: but people, for the most part, whose standard of personal
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Speaker 1: comfort has such a relation to their earning power that
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Speaker 1: they sure or cannot enter the matrimonial grouping. The institution
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Speaker 1: of permanent monogamous marriage, except in the ideal Roman Catholic community,
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Speaker 1: where it is based on the sanction of an authority,
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Speaker 1: which in real Roman Catholic countries a large proportion of
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Speaker 1: the men declined to obey, is sustained at present entirely
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Speaker 1: by the inertia of custom and by a number of
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Speaker 1: sentimental and practical considerations, considerations that may very possibly undergo
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Speaker 1: modification in the face of the altered relationship of husband
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Speaker 1: and wife that the present development of childless minages is
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Speaker 1: bringing about. The practical and sustaining reason for monogamy is
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Speaker 1: the stability it gives to the family. The value of
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Speaker 1: a stable family lies in the orderly upbringing, in an
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Speaker 1: atmosphere of affection that it secures in most cases for
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Speaker 1: its more or less numerous children. The monogamous family has
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Speaker 1: indisputably been the civilizing unit of the pre mechanical civilized state.
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Speaker 1: It must be remembered that both a husband and wife
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Speaker 1: in most cases monogamic life marriage involves an element of sacrifice.
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Speaker 1: It is an institution of late appearance in the history
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Speaker 1: of mankind, and it does not completely fit the psychology
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Speaker 1: or physiology of any but very exceptional characters in either sex.
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Speaker 1: For the man, it commonly involves considerable restraint. He must
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Speaker 1: ride his imagination on the curb or exceed the code
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Speaker 1: in an extremely dishonoring, furtive, and unsatisfactory manner, while publicly
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Speaker 1: professing an impossible virtue. For the woman, it commonly implies
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Speaker 1: many uncongenial submissions. There are probably few married couples who
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Speaker 1: have escaped distressful phases of bitterness and tears within the
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Speaker 1: constraint of their in most cases practically insoluble bond. But
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Speaker 1: on the other hand, and as a reward that to
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Speaker 1: the soberer, mainly agricultural civilization of the past, and among
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Speaker 1: the middling class of people at any rate, has sufficed,
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Speaker 1: there comes the great development of associations and tendernesses that
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Speaker 1: arise out of intimate cooperation in an established home, and
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Speaker 1: particularly out of the linking love and interest of children's lives.
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Speaker 1: But how does this fit into the childless, disunited, and
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Speaker 1: probably shifting minage of our second picture. It must be
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Speaker 1: borne in mind that it has been the middling and
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Speaker 1: lower classes of people the tenants and agriculturists, the shopkeepers,
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Speaker 1: and so forth, men needing before all things, the absolutely
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Speaker 1: loyal help of wives that has sustained permanent monogamic marriage.
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Speaker 1: Whenever it has been sustained, public monogamy has existed on
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Speaker 1: its merits, that is, on the merits of the wife.
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Speaker 1: Merely ostensible reasons have never sufficed. No sort of religious
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Speaker 1: conviction without a real practical utility has ever availed to
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Speaker 1: keep classes of men unhampered by circumstances to its restrictions
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Speaker 1: in all times, and holding all sorts of beliefs. The
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Speaker 1: specimen the humanity of courts and nobilities is to be
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Speaker 1: found developing the most complex qualifications of the Code in
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Speaker 1: some quiet corner of Elycium. The bishops of the Early Georges,
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Speaker 1: the ecclesiastical dignitaries of the contemporary French and Spanish courts,
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Speaker 1: the patriarchs of vanished Byzantium, will find a common topic
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Speaker 1: with the spiritual advisers of the kingdoms of the East.
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Speaker 1: In this difficult theme, the theme of the concessions permissible
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Speaker 1: and expedient to earnest believers encumbered with leisure and a
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Speaker 1: superfluity of power, It is not necessary to discuss religious development. Therefore,
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Speaker 1: before deciding this issue, we are dealing now with things
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Speaker 1: deeper and forces infinitely more powerful than the mere convictions
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Speaker 1: of men. Will a generation to whom marriage will be
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Speaker 1: no longer necessarily associated with the birth and rearing of children,
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Speaker 1: or with the immediate cooperation and sympathy of husband and
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Speaker 1: wife in common proceedings retain its present feeling for the
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Speaker 1: extreme sanctity of the permanent bond. Will the agreeable unemployed,
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Speaker 1: childless woman with a high conception of her personal rights,
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Speaker 1: who is spending her husband's earnings or income in some pleasant,
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Speaker 1: discrepant manner, a type of woman there are excellent reasons
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Speaker 1: for anticipating, will become more frequent. Will she continue to
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Speaker 1: share the honors and privileges of the wife, mother, and
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Speaker 1: helper of the old dispensation? And in particular, will the
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Speaker 1: great gulf that is now fixed by custom between her
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Speaker 1: and the agreeable unmarried lady who is similarly employed remain
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Speaker 1: so inexorably wide? Charity is in the air, And why
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Speaker 1: should not charming people meet one another? And where is
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Speaker 1: either of these ladies to find the support that will
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Speaker 1: enable her to insist upon the monopoly, that conventional sentiment,
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Speaker 1: so far as it finds expression, concedes her the danger
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Speaker 1: to them both of the theory of equal liberty is
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Speaker 1: evident enough. On the other hand, in the case of
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Speaker 1: the unmarried mother who may be helped to hold her own,
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Speaker 1: or who may be holding her own in the world,
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Speaker 1: where will the moral censor of the year nineteen fifty
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Speaker 1: find his congenial following to gather stones. Much as we
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Speaker 1: may regret it, it does very greatly affect the realities
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Speaker 1: of this matter. That, with the increased migration of people
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Speaker 1: from home to home, amidst that large urban regions that
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Speaker 1: we have concluded will certainly obtain in the future, even
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Speaker 1: if moral reprobation and minor social inconveniences do still attach
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Speaker 1: to certain sorts of status, it will probably be increasingly
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Speaker 1: difficult to determine the status of people who wish to
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Speaker 1: conceal it for any but criminal ends. In another direction,
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Speaker 1: there must be a movement towards the relaxation of the
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Speaker 1: marriage law and of divorce that will complicate status very confusingly.
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Speaker 1: In the past, it has been possible to sustain several
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Speaker 1: contrasting moral systems in each of the practically autonomous states
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Speaker 1: of the world. But with the development and cheapening of
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Speaker 1: travel and migration that is as yet only in its
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Speaker 1: opening phase, an increasing conflict between dissimilar moral restrictions must appear.
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Speaker 1: Even at present, with only the most prosperous classes of
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Speaker 1: the American and Western European countries migrating at all freely,
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Speaker 1: there is a growing amount of inconvenience arising out of these,
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Speaker 1: from the point of view of social physiology, quite arbitrary differences.
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Speaker 1: A man or woman may, for example, have been the
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Speaker 1: injured party in some conjugal complication, may have established a
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Speaker 1: domicile and divorced the erring spouse in certain of the
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Speaker 1: United States, may have married again there with absolute local propriety,
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Speaker 1: and may be a bigamist and a criminal in England.
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Speaker 1: A child may be a legal child in Denmark or
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Speaker 1: Australia and a bastard in this austere a climate. These
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Speaker 1: things are, however, only the first intimations of much more
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Speaker 1: profound reactions. Almost all the great European powers and the
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Speaker 1: United States also are extending their boundaries to include great
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Speaker 1: masses of non Christian, polygamous peoples, and they are permeating
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Speaker 1: these peoples with railways, printed matter, and all the stimulants
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Speaker 1: of our present state. With the spread of these conveniences,
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Speaker 1: there is no corresponding spread of Christianity. These people will
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Speaker 1: not always remain in the ring fence of their present regions.
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Speaker 1: Their superseded princes and rulers, and public masters and managers
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Speaker 1: will presently come to swell the shareholding mass of the
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Speaker 1: appropriating empire. Europeans, on the other hand, will drift into
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Speaker 1: these districts, and, under the influence of their customs, into marriages,
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Speaker 1: and interracial reaction will increase. In a world which is
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Speaker 1: steadily abolishing locality, the compromise of local concessions of localized
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Speaker 1: recognition of the custom of the country cannot permanently avail.
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Speaker 1: Statesmen will have to face the alternative of either widening
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Speaker 1: the permissible variations of the marriage contract, or of acute
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Speaker 1: racial and religious stresses, of a vast variety of possible
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Speaker 1: legal betrayals, and the appearance of a body of self
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Speaker 1: respecting people outside the law and public respect, a body
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Speaker 1: that will confer a touch of credit upon because it
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Speaker 1: will share the stigma of the deliberately dissolute and criminal.
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Speaker 1: And whether the moral law shrivels relatively by mere exclusiveness,
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Speaker 1: as in religious matters. The Church of England, for example,
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Speaker 1: has shriveled to the proportions of a mere sectarian practice,
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Speaker 1: or whether it broadens itself to sustain justice in a
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Speaker 1: variety of sexual contracts. The net result, so far as
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Speaker 1: our present purpose goes, will be the same. All these
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Speaker 1: forces making for moral relaxation in the coming time will
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Speaker 1: probably be greatly enhanced by the line of development. Certain
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Speaker 1: sections of the irresponsible wealthy will almost certainly follow. Let
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Speaker 1: me repeat that the shareholding rich man of the new
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Speaker 1: time is in a position of freedom almost unparalleled in
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Speaker 1: the history of men. He has sold his permission to
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Speaker 1: control and experiment with the material wealth of the community
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Speaker 1: for freedom, for freedom from care, labor responsibility, custom, local usage,
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Speaker 1: and local attachment. He may come back again into public
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Speaker 1: affairs if he likes, that is his private concern, within
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Speaker 1: the limits of the law and his capacity and courage.
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Speaker 1: He may do as the imagination of his heart directs.
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Speaker 1: Now such an experimental and imperfect creature as man, a
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Speaker 1: creature urged by such imperious passions, so weakened imagination, and
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Speaker 1: controlled by so feeble a reason receives such absolute freedom
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Speaker 1: as this only at infinite peril. To a great number
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Speaker 1: of these people in the second or third generation, this
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Speaker 1: freedom will mean vice, the subversion of passion to inconsequent pleasures.
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Speaker 1: We have on record in the personal history of the
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Speaker 1: Roman emperors how freedom and uncontrolled power took one representative
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Speaker 1: group of men, men not entirely of one blood nor
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Speaker 1: of one bias, but reinforced by the arbitrary caprice of
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Speaker 1: adoption and political revolution. We have in the history of
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Speaker 1: the Russian empresses a glimpse of similar feminine possibilities. We
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Speaker 1: are moving towards a time when, through this confusion of
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Speaker 1: moral standards I have foretold, the pressure of public opinion
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Speaker 1: in these matters must be greatly relaxed, when religion will
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Speaker 1: no longer speak with a unanimous voice, and when freedom
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Speaker 1: of escape from disapproving neighbors will be greatly facilitated. In
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Speaker 1: the past, when depravity had a center about a court,
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Speaker 1: the contagion of its example was limited to the court region.
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Speaker 1: But every idle rich man of this great, various and
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Speaker 1: widely diffused class will play to a certain extent the
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Speaker 1: moral role of a court in these days of universal
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Speaker 1: reading and vivid journalism. Every novel infraction of the code
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Speaker 1: will be known, of, thought about, and more or less
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Speaker 1: thoroughly discussed by an enormous and increasing proportion of the
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Speaker 1: common people. In the past, it has been possible for
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Speaker 1: the churches to maintain an attitude of respectful regret towards
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Speaker 1: the lapses of the great, and even to cooperate in
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Speaker 1: these lapses with a sympathetic privacy, while maintaining a wholesome
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Speaker 1: rigor towards vulgar weiss. But in the coming time there
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Speaker 1: will be no great, but many rich. The middling sort
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Speaker 1: of people will probably be better educated as a whole
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Speaker 1: than the rich, and the days of their deferential treatment
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Speaker 1: are at an end. It is foolish, in view of
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Speaker 1: all these things not to anticipate and prepare for a
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Speaker 1: state of things where not only will moral standards be
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Speaker 1: shifting and uncertain, admitting of physiologically soundner nages of very
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Speaker 1: variable status, but also in vice and depravity in every
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Speaker 1: form that is not absolutely penal will be practiced in
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Speaker 1: every grade of magnificence and condoned. This means that not
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Speaker 1: only will status cease to be simple and become complex
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Speaker 1: and varied, but that outside the system of manages now recognized,
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Speaker 1: and under the disguise of which all other menages shelter,
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Speaker 1: there will be a vast, drifting and unstable population, grouped
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Speaker 1: in almost every conceivable form of relation. The world of
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Speaker 1: Georgian England was a world of homes. The world of
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Speaker 1: the coming time will still have its homes, its real mothers,
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Speaker 1: the custodians of the human succession, and its cared for children,
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Speaker 1: the inheritors of the future. But in addition to this
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Speaker 1: home world frothing tumultuously over and amidst these stable rocks,
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Speaker 1: there will be an enormous complex of establishments and hotels,
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Speaker 1: and sterile households and flats, and all the elaborate furnishings
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Speaker 1: and appliances of a luxurious extinction. And since in the
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Speaker 1: present social chaos there does not yet exist any considerable
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Speaker 1: body of citizens comparable to the agricultural and commercial middle
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Speaker 1: class of England during the period of limited monarchy, that
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Speaker 1: will be practically unanimous in upholding any body of rules
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Speaker 1: of moral restraint, Since there will probably not appear for
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Speaker 1: some generations anybody propounding with wide reaching authority a new,
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Speaker 1: definitely different code to replace the one that is now
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Speaker 1: likely to be increasingly disregarded. It follows that the present code,
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Speaker 1: with a few interlined qualifications and grudging legal concessions, will
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Speaker 1: remain nominally operative in sentiment and practice, while being practically disregarded, glossed,
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Speaker 1: or replaced in numberless directions. It must be pointed out
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Speaker 1: that in effect what is here forecast for questions of
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Speaker 1: man nage and moral restraints has already happened to a
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Speaker 1: very large extent in religious matters. There was a time
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Speaker 1: when it was held, and I think rightly, that a
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Speaker 1: man's religious beliefs, and particularly his method of expressing them,
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Speaker 1: was a part not of his individual but of his
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Speaker 1: social life. But the great upheavals of the Reformation resulted
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Speaker 1: finally in a compromise, a sort of truce that has
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Speaker 1: put religious belief very largely out of intercourse and discussion.
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Speaker 1: It is conceded that within the bounds of the general
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Speaker 1: peace and security, a man may believe and express his
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Speaker 1: belief in matters of religion as he pleases, not because
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Speaker 1: it is better so, but because for the present epoch
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Speaker 1: there is no way nor hope of attaining unanimous truth.
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Speaker 1: There is a decided tendency that will I believe prevail
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Speaker 1: towards the same compromise. In the question of private morals.
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Speaker 1: There is a convention to avoid all discussion of creeds
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Speaker 1: in general social intercourse, and a similar convention to avoid
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Speaker 1: the point of status in relation to marriage. One may
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Speaker 1: very reasonably anticipate will be similarly recognized. But this impending
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Speaker 1: dissolution of a common standard of morals does not mean
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Speaker 1: universal depravity until some great reconstruction obtains, any more than
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Speaker 1: the obsolescence of the Conventical Act means universal irreligion. It
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Speaker 1: means that for one morality, there will be many moralities.
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Speaker 1: Each human being will, in the face of circumstances, work
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Speaker 1: out his or her particular early training as his or
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Speaker 1: her character determines. And although there will be a general
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Speaker 1: convention upon which the most diverse people will meet, it
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Speaker 1: will only be with persons who have come to identical
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Speaker 1: or similar conclusions in the matter of moral conduct, and
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Speaker 1: who are living in similar menages. Just as now, it
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Speaker 1: is only with people whose conversation implies a certain community
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Speaker 1: or kinship of religious belief that really frequent and intimate
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Speaker 1: intercourse will go on. In other words, there will be
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Speaker 1: a process of moral segregation set up. Footnote. I use
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Speaker 1: the words segregation here and always, as it is used
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Speaker 1: by mineralogists to express the slow conveyance of diffused matter
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Speaker 1: upon centers of aggregation. Such a process, as, for example,
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Speaker 1: must have occurred in the growth of flints end footnote. Indeed,
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Speaker 1: such a process is probably already in operation. Amidst the
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Speaker 1: deliquescent social mass, people will be drawn together into little
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Speaker 1: groups of similar minages having much in common. And this
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Speaker 1: in view of the considerations advanced in the first two chapters.
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Speaker 1: Considerations all converging on the practical evolution of distances and
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Speaker 1: the general freedom of people to live anywhere they like
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Speaker 1: over large areas, will mean very frequently an actual local segregation.
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Speaker 1: There will be districts that will be clearly recognized and
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Speaker 1: marked as nice fast regions, areas of ramshackle bohemianism, regions
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Speaker 1: of earnest and active work, old fashioned corners and hilltops.
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Speaker 1: Whole regions will be set aside for the purposes of
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Speaker 1: opulent enjoyment, a thing already happening indeed at points along
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Speaker 1: the Riviera today. Already the superficial possibilities of such as
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Speaker 1: segregation have been glanced at. It has been pointed out
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Speaker 1: that the enormous urban region of the future may present
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Speaker 1: an extraordinary variety of districts, suburbs, and subordinate centers within
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Speaker 1: its limiting boundaries. And here we have a very definite
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Speaker 1: enforcement of that probability. In the previous chapter, I spoke
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Speaker 1: of boating centers and horsey suburbs, and picturesque hilly districts,
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Speaker 1: and living places by the sea of promenade centres and
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Speaker 1: theatrical districts. I hinted at various fashions in architecture and
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Speaker 1: such like things. But these exterior appearsances will be but
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Speaker 1: the outward and visible sign of inward and more spiritual distinctions.
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Speaker 1: The people who live in the good hunting country and
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Speaker 1: about that glittering grandstand will no longer be even pretending
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Speaker 1: to live under the same code as those picturesque musical
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Speaker 1: people who have concentrated on the canoe dotted river, where
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Speaker 1: the promenaders gather and the bands are playing, and the
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Speaker 1: pretty little theaters compete. The pleasure seeker will be seeking
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Speaker 1: such pleasure as he pleases, no longer debased by furtiveness
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Speaker 1: and innuendo, going his primrose path to a congenial, picturesque,
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Speaker 1: happy and highly desirable extinction. Just over the hills, perhaps
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Speaker 1: a handful of opulent shareholders will be pleasantly preserving the
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Speaker 1: old traditions of a landed aristocracy, with servants, tenants, vicar
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Speaker 1: and other dependents, all complete, and what from the point
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Speaker 1: of view of social physiology will really be an arrested
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Speaker 1: contingent of the abyss, but all nicely washed and done
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Speaker 1: good to. Will pursue home industries in model cottages in
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Speaker 1: a quite old English and exemplary manner. Here the windmills
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Speaker 1: will spin, and the waterfalls be trapped to gather force,
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Speaker 1: and the quiet eyed master of the machinery will have
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Speaker 1: his office and perhaps his private home. Here about the
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Speaker 1: great college and its big laboratories, there will be men
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Speaker 1: and women reasoning and studying. And here where the homes thicken,
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Speaker 1: among the ripe gardens, one will hear the laughter of
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Speaker 1: playing children, the singing of children in their schools, and
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Speaker 1: see their little figures going to and fro amidst the
23:37
Speaker 1: trees and flowers. And these segregations, based primarily on a
23:42
Speaker 1: difference in moral ideas and pursuits and ideals, will probably
23:47
Speaker 1: round off and complete themselves at last as distinct and
23:50
Speaker 1: separate cultures. As the moral ideas realize themselves in manage
23:55
Speaker 1: and habits. So the ideals will seek to find expression
23:58
Speaker 1: in a literature, and the passive drifting together will pass
24:02
Speaker 1: over into a phase of more or less conscious and
24:05
Speaker 1: intentional organization. The segregating groups will develop fashions of costume,
24:10
Speaker 1: types of manners and bearing, and even perhaps be characterized
24:15
Speaker 1: by a certain type of facial expression. And this gives
24:19
Speaker 1: us a glimpse an aspect of the immediate future of literature.
24:25
Speaker 1: The kingdoms of the past were little things, and above
24:28
Speaker 1: the massive peasants who lived and obeyed and died, there
24:32
Speaker 1: was just one little culture to which all must needs conform.
24:36
Speaker 1: The literature was universal within the limits of its language.
24:41
Speaker 1: Where differences of view arose, there were violent controversies, polemics,
24:45
Speaker 1: and persecutions until one or other rendering had won its ascendancy.
24:51
Speaker 1: But this new world into which we are passing will
24:54
Speaker 1: for several generations at least, albeit it will be freely
24:57
Speaker 1: into communicating and like a whispering gallery for things outspoken,
25:01
Speaker 1: possess no universal ideals, no universal conventions. There will be
25:07
Speaker 1: the literature of the thought and effort of this sort
25:10
Speaker 1: of people, and the literature thought and effort of that footnote.
25:15
Speaker 1: Already this is becoming apparent enough. The literary boom, for example,
25:20
Speaker 1: affected the entire reading public of the early nineteenth century.
25:24
Speaker 1: It was no figure of speech that every one was
25:27
Speaker 1: reading Byron or puzzling about the Waverley Mystery, that first
25:31
Speaker 1: and most successful use of the unknown author Dodge. The
25:35
Speaker 1: booming of Dickens, too, forced him even into the reluctant
25:38
Speaker 1: hands of Omar's Fitzgerald. But the factory siren voice of
25:43
Speaker 1: the modern boomster touches whole sections of the reading public
25:46
Speaker 1: no more than foghorns going down channel. One would as
25:50
Speaker 1: soon think of Skinner's soap for one's library as So
25:54
Speaker 1: and So's hundred thousand copy success. Instead of everyone talking
25:59
Speaker 1: of the great new book, quite considerable numbers are shamelessly
26:03
Speaker 1: admitting they don't read that sort of thing. One gets
26:06
Speaker 1: used to literary booms, just as one gets used to
26:09
Speaker 1: motor cars. They are no longer marvelous, universally significant things,
26:14
Speaker 1: but merely something that goes by with much unnecessary noise
26:18
Speaker 1: and leaves a faint offense in the air, distinctly we segregate,
26:23
Speaker 1: and while no one dominates. While for all this balling,
26:26
Speaker 1: there are really no great authors of imperial dimensions, Indeed,
26:30
Speaker 1: no great success is to compare with the Waverley boom
26:33
Speaker 1: or the boom of mccaulay's history. Many men too fine,
26:37
Speaker 1: too subtle, too aberrant, too unusually fresh for any but
26:41
Speaker 1: exceptional readers. Men who would probably have failed to get
26:44
Speaker 1: a hearing at all in the past can now subsist
26:47
Speaker 1: quite happily with the little sect they have found, or
26:50
Speaker 1: that has found them. They live safely in their islands.
26:55
Speaker 1: A little while ago they could not have lived at all,
26:58
Speaker 1: or could have lived only on the shame for bread
27:00
Speaker 1: of patronage. And yet it is these very men who
27:04
Speaker 1: are often most covetously bitter against the vulgar preferences of
27:08
Speaker 1: the present day. End footnote. Life is already most wonderfully
27:13
Speaker 1: arbitrary and experimental, and for the coming century this must
27:18
Speaker 1: be its essential social history. A great drifting and unrest
27:22
Speaker 1: of people are shifting and regrouping and breaking up again
27:26
Speaker 1: of groups great multitudes seeking to find themselves the safe
27:32
Speaker 1: life in the old order, where one did this because
27:34
Speaker 1: it was right, and that because it was the custom
27:37
Speaker 1: when one shunned this and hated that. As lead runs
27:40
Speaker 1: into a mold, all that is passing away. And presently,
27:45
Speaker 1: as the new sentry opens out, there will become more
27:48
Speaker 1: and more distinct the emergent many new cultures and settled ways.
27:53
Speaker 1: The gray expanse of life to day is gray not
27:56
Speaker 1: in its essence, but because of the minute, confused ming
28:00
Speaker 1: and mutual canceling of many colored lives. Presently, these tints
28:05
Speaker 1: and shades will gather together here as a mass of
28:08
Speaker 1: one color, and there as a mass of another. And
28:12
Speaker 1: as these colors intensify, and the tradition of the former
28:15
Speaker 1: order fades. As these cultures become more and more shaped
28:19
Speaker 1: and conscious, as the new literatures grow in substance and power,
28:23
Speaker 1: as differences develop from speculative matter of opinion to definite intentions,
28:28
Speaker 1: as contrasts and affinities grow sharper and clearer, there must
28:32
Speaker 1: follow some very extensive modifications in the collective public life.
28:38
Speaker 1: But one series of tints, one color must needs have
28:42
Speaker 1: a heightening value amidst this iridescent display. While the forces
28:46
Speaker 1: at work in the wealthy and purely speculative groups of
28:49
Speaker 1: society make for disintegration, and in many cases for positive elimination.
28:55
Speaker 1: The forces that bring together the really functional people will
28:59
Speaker 1: tend more and more to impose upon them certain common
29:02
Speaker 1: characteristics and beliefs, and the discovery of a group of
29:06
Speaker 1: similar and compatible class interests upon which they can unite
29:10
Speaker 1: the practical people. The engineering and medical and scientific people
29:15
Speaker 1: will become more and more homogeneous in their fundamental culture,
29:19
Speaker 1: more and more distinctly aware of a common general reason
29:23
Speaker 1: in things, and of a common difference from the less
29:26
Speaker 1: functional masses and from any sort of people in the past.
29:30
Speaker 1: They will have in their positive science a common ground
29:33
Speaker 1: for understanding the real pride of life, the real reason
29:37
Speaker 1: for the incidental nastiness of vice. And so they will
29:40
Speaker 1: be a sanely reproductive class, and above all an educating class.
29:46
Speaker 1: Just how much they will have kept or changed of
29:48
Speaker 1: the deliquescent morality of to day, when in a hundred
29:52
Speaker 1: years or so they do distinctively and powerfully emerge, I
29:55
Speaker 1: cannot speculate. Now. They will certainly be a moral people.
30:00
Speaker 1: They will have developed the literature of their needs. They
30:02
Speaker 1: will have discussed and tested and thrashed out many things.
30:06
Speaker 1: They will be clear where we are confused, resolved where
30:10
Speaker 1: we are undecided and weak. In the districts of industrial possibility,
30:15
Speaker 1: in the healthier quarters of the town regions, away from
30:18
Speaker 1: the swamps and away from the glare of the midnight lights,
30:21
Speaker 1: these people will be gathered together. They will be linked
30:25
Speaker 1: in professions through the agency of great and sober papers
30:29
Speaker 1: in England, The Lancet, the British Medical Journal, and the
30:33
Speaker 1: already great periodicals of the engineering trades foreshadow something, but
30:37
Speaker 1: only a very little of what these papers may be.
30:41
Speaker 1: The best of the wealthy will gravitate to their attracting centers,
30:45
Speaker 1: unless some great catastrophe in nature break down all that
30:49
Speaker 1: man has built. These great, kindred groups of capable men
30:52
Speaker 1: and educated, adequate women must be under the operation of
30:56
Speaker 1: the forces we have considered so far. The element finally
31:00
Speaker 1: emergent amidst the vast confusions of the coming time. End
31:06
Speaker 1: of Chapter four b recording by John Trevidck