Chapter XI: The Great Collapse
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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 they thought confidently that this was a secure and permanent
progressive system, and on the strength of some three hundred
years of change and irregular improvement answered the doubter
with, "Things always have gone well. We'll worry through!"
But when we contrast the state of man in the opening of the
twentieth century with the condition of any previous period in
his history, then perhaps we may begin to understand something of
that blind confidence. It was not so much a reasoned confidence
as the inevitable consequence of sustained good fortune. By such
standards as they possessed, things HAD gone amazingly well for
them. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that for the first
time in history whole populations found themselves regularly
supplied with more than enough to eat, and the vital statistics
of the time witness to an amelioration of hygienic conditions
rapid beyond all precedent, and to a vast development of
intelligence and ability in all the arts that make life
wholesome. The level and quality of the average education had
risen tremendously; and at the dawn of the twentieth century
comparatively few people in Western Europe or America were unable
to read or write. Never before had there been such reading
masses. There was wide social security. A common man might
travel safely over three-quarters of the habitable globe, could
go round the earth at a cost of less than the annual earnings of
a skilled artisan. Compared with the liberality and comfort of
the ordinary life of the time, the order of the Roman Empire
under the Antonines was local and limited. And every year, every
month, came some new increment to human achievement, a new
country opened up, new mines, new scientific discoveries, a new
machine!
For those three hundred years, indeed, the movement of the world
seemed wholly beneficial to mankind. Men said, indeed, that
moral organisation was not keeping pace with physical progress, but few attached any meaning to these phrases, the understanding of which lies at the basis of our present safety. Sustaining and constructive forces did indeed for a time more than balance the malign drift of chance and the natural ignorance, prejudice, blind passion, and wasteful self-seeking of mankind.