“These critics,” said Mr Copper, whose intelligence was sufficiently narrow to be acute, “these critics, you see, they disregard the capital a man lays out in building up a reputation. It’s nothing to them. They just think they have the right to run him down exactly as they please. There’s hardly a business that could stand it. This case was touch—and-go, but our chap went too far in his abuse. It’s plain sense you got to put it down. There isn’t a thing in heaven or earth that’s safe while this criticism runs loose. So now at every election I ask the candidates whether they agree to back my Control of Criticism Bill. Had it drafted and printed all right and proper. You didn’t know of that? I get pledges from both sides, always, but somehow they never seem to push it through up there. Hammer away, I say, hammer away. No need to talk about it. It’s just my hobby, so to speak. You wouldn’t care to have a copy of my Bill? You needn’t read it....”
All Morningside Prospect was agreed that rates and taxes had increased, were increasing and ought to be diminished. The vote was something given to the free-born citizen primarily to defend him against these assaults upon his peace of mind. So that as the election drew near, Morningside Prospect really made an effort to distinguish between the competing candidates who were seeking their suffrages, in this particular respect. Would they keep rates down and taxes down? All candidates promised gladly and there the matter ended. Brighthampton was a complex constituency with a slum district harbouring a swarm of skilled and semi-skilled workers. Morningside Prospect believed that these people of the back streets were mainly engaged in almost incredibly rapid multiplication, and shared the outspoken indignation of Dean Inge at decent people being asked to provide health and education for this unbridled pullullation of the “Unfit.” Like Oliver Twist, these creatures were always asking for more, stimulated in their extravagant demands by agitators, whom Morningside Prospect believed to be invariably of foreign origin and incredible malignity. So that there was a third party in the Brighthampton constituency, known to Morningside Prospect as the “Squandermaniacs”, a Labour Party dominated by some Russian agent, Bill Smith or McAndrew, apprehensions by a vigorous advocacy of peace and to induce his fellow Tewlers (var. Anglicanus) to confirm his hope for a world in which there would be no more war, but everything else going on as usual. With all their facilities some of his subsidiaries did a bit of arms smuggling, but Sir Humbert did his very utmost not to know anything about that. He did not hesitate, as the passions of electioneering rose, to call Sir Adrian a war-monger. But this was a gross libel. Sir Adrian was not a war-monger; he was a wholesale iron-monger.
If he had really wanted to sell war to the world, he would not have confined himself to the big battleship business. He would have gone in for financially less important equipment, for air and undersea attacks, warfare in narrow seas and with amphibious craft. But at the time of the Abyssinian crisis, when Mussolini threatened the British fleet with dive bombing, the British government had to give in ignominiously because their ships had no anti-aircraft ammunition. Little matters of that sort were chicken-food to Sir Adrian. Nothing could prove more convincingly that at heart Sir Adrian and Sir Humbert were equally pacificist and equally prepared to carry on with business during business hours and retire to their own magnificent versions of Morningside, to peerages, great mansions, ranches, yachts, mistresses, as convinced as Edward Albert that all that was going on for ever. We do these worthy men injustice to impute either wickedness or intelligence to them. They were just outsize Tewlers.
Whenever an opportunity to abolish war by any sort of vote arose, Morningside Prospect voted without hesitation and abolished it. War has been abolished again and again since 1918. The League of Nations put an end to war, the Kellogg Pact abolished it, a Peace Pledge taken by millions refused all further participation in warfare. What more could you have? People went on making weapons out of habit, and to terminate their employment too abruptly would have caused considerable financial inconvenience. There were, however, a number of international Conferences, inspired by the noblest sentiments, to limit and restrain armaments, for which now there could never be any positive use. You cannot be too careful, as Sir Adrian insisted. There is a negative use for armaments in these matters. Peace in a world of sovereign states is necessarily a neutralisation, an equalisation, a careful balance of gun against gun and ship against ship. You even let the belligerent Germans have a carefully-rationed army and fleet. How could they sustain public security and maintain their national self-respect without these things? What uniforms could they wear? What decorations? The adjustment of forces is no doubt a delicate one, but how else is Security possible? The Foreign Office and the Diplomatic Service saw to that with a peculiar wisdom and subtlety above the understanding of common men.... ,
All round the world, and according to their scope and scale, the Morningsides, happy in this dangerously balanced Security, pursued the even tenor of their ways, oblivious, deliberately oblivious, to the time bomb of Destiny, that ticked more and more audibly beneath their feet, Only belatedly did a certain rocking of the ground and queer outbreaks of stink and steam, assume a personal significance. Only with extreme reluctance would Edward Albert allow himself to think that this heaving danger might after all be addressed to him.
The ingredients and factors in this time bomb that is now blowing all the Morningside Prospects, all the self-complacencies of the world of Homo Tewler sky high, are gradually being made plain by the distressful criticism of its scattered victims. Man’s own unregulated and surprising inventions and discoveries have made all the earth one simultaneous community, and released such a volume of available physical and undirected human energy as superannuates all the religious, traditional, historical methods that have hitherto kept the species going. Our circumstances demand a world-wide moral and intellectual revolution beyond all the precedents and possibilities of former times. To the very last the Tewlers in any position of advantage have been sitting upon the safety-valves of expression, of warning, information and any adaptation, until what might have been a deliberate readjustment has become a violent explosion, an explosion that will now either blow Homo Tewler far up the scale of conscious being or out of the universe altogether. In which latter case we, here and now, are the last men addressing ourselves to a posterity which will never exist.
This is a sweeping statement. But you cannot write about a germ or an atom nowadays without the universe coming in We can take nothing for granted because we have realised the reciprocity of part and Whole. Our next succeeding Book must focus down again upon Edward Albert, and tell how the explosion hit and lifted him and his at last out of the contentment of Morningside Prospect altogether.
BOOK V.
How Edward Albert Tewler Was Overtaken by a Storm of War and Destruction and What He Said and Did in It
I. Catspaws
The unpleasant buzzing of disturbing ideas and untoward events that Edward Albert had kept at a distance for the first ten years of his contentment in Morningside Prospect crept nearer to him by such imperceptible degrees that it is almost impossible to mark any definite date for the end of his agreeable stagnation. Take Morningside Prospect throughout the week of years that preceded the actual onset of the Great Warfare. What touch of foreboding wrinkled the smooth reflection it presented to the world? What catspaws warned it of the gathering hurricane?
The World War of 1914-18 had not struck the Tewler imagination as bringing with it a new ordering of life for mankind. It was, from the Tewler point of view, a fight like a dog-fight for the upper hand among things called Powers, essentially the same in their nature. They rose and they fell, like football clubs. It was just another chapter of the old history. The academic Tewlers who taught history throughout the world knew nothing, and almost passionately wanted to know nothing, of the space-time process that continually puts a fresh face on life and continually sweeps away the working appearances of the past. Their mental equipment could not handle such ideas. So how could they be expected to transmit them?