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educated and highly favoured leading and ruling men, voluntarily

setting themselves to the task of reshaping the world, has thus

far remained a dream.

H. G. WELLS.

EASTON GLEBE,

DUNMOW, 1921.

CONTENTS

PRELUDE

THE SUN SNARERS

CHAPTER THE FIRST

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY

CHAPTER THE SECOND

THE LAST WAR

CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE ENDING OF WAR

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

THE NEW PHASE

CHAPTER THE FIFTH

THE LAST DAYS OF MARCUS KARENIN

PRELUDE

THE SUN SNARERS

Section I

THE history of mankind is the history of the attainment of

external power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal. From

the outset of his terrestrial career we find him supplementing

the natural strength and bodily weapons of a beast by the heat of

burning and the rough implement of stone. So he passed beyond

the ape. From that he expands. Presently he added to himself the

power of the horse and the ox, he borrowed the carrying strength

of water and the driving force of the wind, he quickened his fire

by blowing, and his simple tools, pointed first with copper and

then with iron, increased and varied and became more elaborate

and efficient. He sheltered his heat in houses and made his way

easier by paths and roads. He complicated his social

relationships and increased his efficiency by the division of

labour. He began to store up knowledge. Contrivance followed

contrivance, each making it possible for a man to do more.

Always down the lengthening record, save for a set-back ever and

again, he is doing more… A quarter of a million years ago the

utmost man was a savage, a being scarcely articulate, sheltering

in holes in the rocks, armed with a rough-hewn flint or a

fire-pointed stick, naked, living in small family groups, killed

by some younger man so soon as his first virile activity

declined. Over most of the great wildernesses of earth you would

have sought him in vain; only in a few temperate and sub-tropical

river valleys would you have found the squatting lairs of his

little herds, a male, a few females, a child or so.

He knew no future then, no kind of life except the life he led.

He fled the cave-bear over the rocks full of iron ore and the

promise of sword and spear; he froze to death upon a ledge of

coal; he drank water muddy with the clay that would one day make

cups of porcelain; he chewed the ear of wild wheat he had plucked

and gazed with a dim speculation in his eyes at the birds that

soared beyond his reach. Or suddenly he became aware of the scent

of another male and rose up roaring, his roars the formless

precursors of moral admonitions. For he was a great

individualist, that original, he suffered none other than

himself.

So through the long generations, this heavy precursor, this

ancestor of all of us, fought and bred and perished, changing

almost imperceptibly.

Yet he changed. That keen chisel of necessity which sharpened

the tiger's claw age by age and fined down the clumsy Orchippus

to the swift grace of the horse, was at work upon him-is at work

upon him still. The clumsier and more stupidly fierce among him

were killed soonest and oftenest; the finer hand, the quicker

eye, the bigger brain, the better balanced body prevailed; age by

age, the implements were a little better made, the man a little

more delicately adjusted to his possibilities. He became more

social; his herd grew larger; no longer did each man kill or

drive out his growing sons; a system of taboos made them

tolerable to him, and they revered him alive and soon even after

he was dead, and were his allies against the beasts and the rest

of mankind. (But they were forbidden to touch the women of the

tribe, they had to go out and capture women for themselves, and

each son fled from his stepmother and hid from her lest the anger

of the Old Man should be roused. All the world over, even to this

day, these ancient inevitable taboos can be traced.) And now

instead of caves came huts and hovels, and the fire was better

tended and there were wrappings and garments; and so aided, the

creature spread into colder climates, carrying food with him,

storing food-until sometimes the neglected grass-seed sprouted

again and gave a first hint of agriculture.

And already there were the beginnings of leisure and thought.

Man began to think. There were times when he was fed, when his

lusts and his fears were all appeased, when the sun shone upon

the squatting-place and dim stirrings of speculation lit his

eyes. He scratched upon a bone and found resemblance and pursued

it and began pictorial art, moulded the soft, warm clay of the

river brink between his fingers, and found a pleasure in its

patternings and repetitions, shaped it into the form of vessels,

and found that it would hold water. He watched the streaming

river, and wondered from what bountiful breast this incessant

water came; he blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he

might snare it and spear it as it went down to its resting-place

amidst the distant hills. Then he was roused to convey to his

brother that once indeed he had done so-at least that some one

had done so-he mixed that perhaps with another dream almost as

daring, that one day a mammoth had been beset; and therewith

began fiction-pointing a way to achievement-and the august

prophetic procession of tales.

For scores and hundreds of centuries, for myriads of generations

that life of our fathers went on. From the beginning to the

ripening of that phase of human life, from the first clumsy

eolith of rudely chipped flint to the first implements of

polished stone, was two or three thousand centuries, ten or

fifteen thousand generations. So slowly, by human standards, did

humanity gather itself together out of the dim intimations of the

beast. And that first glimmering of speculation, that first

story of achievement, that story-teller bright-eyed and flushed

under his matted hair, gesticulating to his gaping, incredulous

listener, gripping his wrist to keep him attentive, was the most

marvellous beginning this world has ever seen. It doomed the

mammoths, and it began the setting of that snare that shall catch

the sun.

Section 2

That dream was but a moment in a man's life, whose proper

business it seemed was to get food and kill his fellows and beget

after the manner of all that belongs to the fellowship of the

beasts. About him, hidden from him by the thinnest of veils, were