him? He proposed it first hopefully, then urgently, at
last in tears and terror.

"No!" said Laurier inexorable. "We must go on! We have something more
than a woman to save. We have to save America!"

The girl never stirred.

And once they passed a madman singing.

And at last they found the President hiding in a small saloon upon the
outskirts of a place called Pinkerville on the Hudson, and gave the
plans of the Butteridge machine into his hands.

CHAPTER XI. THE GREAT COLLAPSE

1

And now the whole fabric of civilisation was bending and giving, and
dropping to pieces and melting in the furnace of the war.

The stages of the swift and universal collapse of the financial and
scientific civilisation with which the twentieth century opened followed
each other very swiftly, so swiftly that upon the foreshortened page of
history--they seem altogether to overlap. To begin with, one sees the
world nearly at a maximum wealth and prosperity. To its inhabitants
indeed it seemed also at a maximum of security. When now in retrospect
the thoughtful observer surveys the intellectual history of this time,
when one reads its surviving fragments of literature, its scraps of
political oratory, the few small voices that chance has selected out of
a thousand million utterances to speak to later days, the most striking
thing of all this web of wisdom and error is surely that hallucination
of security. To men living in our present world state, orderly,
scientific and secured, nothing seems so precarious, so giddily
dangerous, as the fabric of the social order with which the men of the
opening of the twentieth century were content. To us it seems that every
institution and relationship was the fruit of haphazard and tradition
and the manifest sport of chance, their laws each made for some separate
occasion and having no relation to any future needs, their customs
illogical, their education aimless and wasteful. Their method of
economic exploitation indeed impresses a trained and informed mind as
the most frantic and destructive scramble it is possible to conceive;
their credit and monetary system resting on an unsubstantial tradition
of the worthiness of gold, seems a thing almost fantastically unstable.
And they lived in planless cities, for the most part dangerously
congested; their rails and roads and population were distributed over
the earth in the wanton confusion ten thousand irrevelant considerations
had made.

Yet