might be gentle and splendid in a gracious one. The world
also has its moods. Think of the mental food of Bismarck's childhood;
the humiliations of Napoleon's victories, the crowded, crowning victory
of the Battle of the Nations.... Everybody in those days, wise or
foolish, believed that the division of the world under a multitude of
governments was inevitable, and that it was going on for thousands of
years more. It WAS inevitable until it was impossible. Any one who had
denied that inevitability publicly would have been counted--oh! a 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 to
be national governments he would make one that was strong at home and
invincible abroad. Because he had fed with a kind of rough appetite upon
what we can see now were very stupid ideas, that does not make him
a stupid man. We've had advantages; we've had unity and collectivism
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 Intelligenza, a conspirator, a prisoner, or an assassin.
You, my dear, would have been breaking dingy windows as a suffragette.'

'NEVER,' said Edith stoutly....

For a time the talk broke into humorous personalities, and the young
people gibed at each other across the 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 brim.

'You know, sir, I've a fancy--it is hard to prove such things--that
civilisation was very near disaster when the atomic bombs came
banging into it, that if there had been no Holsten and no induced
radio-activity, the world would have--smashed--much as it did. Only
instead of its being a smash that opened a way to better things, it
might have been a smash without a recovery. It is part of my business
to understand economics, and from that point of view the century before
Holsten was just a hundred years' crescendo of waste. Only the extreme
individualism of that period, only its utter want of any collective
understanding or purpose can explain that waste. Mankind used up
material--insanely. They had got through three-quarters of all the coal
in the planet, they had used up most of the oil, they had swept away
their forests, and they were running short of tin and copper. Their
wheat areas were getting weary an