The Herald of Peace and International Arbitration/The New Atlantis: A Vision

by S. W. Hibbert

 

The New Atlantis: A Vision.

By S. W. Hibbert.

 

Far is the time, remote from human sight,

When war and discord on the earth shall cease:
Yet every prayer for universal Peace

Avails the blessed time to expedite.—H. COLERIDGE.

 

We were sitting on the deck of one of our great liners in mid-ocean, revelling in the beauty of a calm moonlit night at sea. The "we" consisted of three people—the Poet, the Musician, and (for want of a better title) the Appreciator — myself.

"How peaceful the scene is," I exclaimed, " the very sea would seem asleep!"

"Peace beginning to be" —quoted the Poet—

"Deep as the sleep of the sea
When the stars their faces glass
In its blue tranquillity;
Hearts of all upon Earth,
From the First to the Second Birth,
To rest as the wild waters rest,

With colours of Heaven on their breast."

The words were new to me; I was eagerly asking the names of the author and poem, and did not at first notice that the Musician had slipped away.

"Ah!" said the Poet, "he has an inspiration; let us follow him"; and we hastened after him into the saloon. There, seated at the piano, our gifted friend was soon setting the lines just quoted, with their lilt and haunting cadence, to exquisite music; a fairy air, dainty in the extreme, to a sweet, rippling accompaniment.

At his request the Poet quoted the second verse: —

"Love, which is sunlight of Peace,

Age by age to increase,
Till Anger and Hate are dead,
And Sorrow and Death shall cease.
' Peace on Earth and Goodwill! '
Souls that are gentle and still
Hear the first music of this

Far-off infinite bliss!"

As I retired to rest the refrain rang in my ears. What marvel that the moonlit sea, the Poet's words, and their beautiful setting should weave a spell? I dreamt most wondrously. For lo! methought we drew near to our journey's end and gazed eagerly towards a great roadstead which gradually grew more distinct. It was full of vessels, and, as we glided amongst them, one thing astonished us— there were no men-of-war. On every hand were merchantmen, very fine vessels one and all, with the flags of nearly every nation fluttering at their mast-heads. Then we noticed that although this was evidently an important seaport and a great city, of exposed position, there were no fortifications or guns to be seen! Moreover it was strikingly beautiful, viewed as it was to great advantage from the sea, for everywhere we saw trees and greenery; it looked indeed a "Garden City"; each house, great or small, was surrounded by open ground, almost to the water's edge.

As we stepped on shore a silence fell upon the three of us, a strange and unaccountable hesitation; we did not even know the name of the land upon which we stood. At this moment a kind voice on my right greeted us with, "Good afternoon, gentlemen, I see you have just landed, and are perhaps strangers here." We turned, and saw in the speaker a gentleman of about forty years of age, with a face as kindly as the voice, and we immediately assured him that we were in the position he surmised. He continued, "My name is Alexis, at your service ; I have only been here long enough myself to be able cordially to recommend my hotel. Will you come and see it?" He summoned the hotel—I had almost said "busman"—motordriver or chauffeur would be more correct, and we were soon speeding with all the smoothness of electricity along the broad promenade to a fine building standing back from the roadway in its own grounds. Here everything was on a grand scale, the entrance-hall and reception rooms, and we feared the scale of charges would be equally magnificent

A clear statement of these in every room set our minds at rest, and after we had completed our arrangements and taken some light refreshment, we gladly accepted our new friend's offer to guide us round the city.

"This is my first visit to New Salamis," Mr. Alexis remarked, "it has long been my desire to see it. We Bostonians pride ourselves on being more interested in associations literary and historical than the majority of our New England brothers, and we sent many settlers here at one time."

"The city bears a famous name," I remarked; "you will think it strange, but I do not know what country this is."

He disguised any astonishment and said, " New Salamis was the name given to the capital of the island of Atlantis ; it is so truly sea-born Salamis 1 "

"Atlantis!" we exclaimed with one voice, "I thought Atlantis was a myth! "

Mr. Alexis looked at us in wonder, then replied that the world was amazed when, after the great earthquake in the middle of the twentieth century, the long-submerged island once more rose above water, proving the origin of the shallows to the north-west of Africa.

"But," I cried in bewilderment, "it is only 1904 now; what can you mean?"

"You have voyaged far if you left home so long ago! We count it 2012. How new you will find the conditions around you! Then did you never hear of that vast convulsion which made so many changes? The upheaval in the North Atlantic which raised this island upon which we now walk caused a corresponding depression and sank once more that great sandy waste, once the desert, now the Sahara Sea, which has vastly improved transit in North Africa; it raised and drained the Congo Valley and all the low-lying forest and morass land which made Central Africa so deadly to the white man."

Many more things of great fascination to our twentieth century minds we heard as we strolled through one of the beautiful parks. Presently we emerged on another fine thoroughfare, and remarked on the cleanliness which prevailed, and on the clearness of the atmosphere, the more striking as Mr. Alexis was pointing out that the great buildings we took for erections of flats at least, wore merely factories.

"No smoke?" said our friend; "that is a nuisance no longer submitted to even in England!" and we murmured our approval. "Besides," he continued, "Atlantis has no coal of her own; it was necessary to use electric power, or to make a patent fuel, and both are used, the one as inexpensive as the other. No," to a question from one of us, "Radium will always be costly to produce, and it is only used in hospitals and for scientific purposes."

We now arrived at the portals of a vast temple, a combination of ancient Greek grace, Egyptian proportions, and of modern art. As we entered, the organ pealed out a soul-stirring wave of sound, and an anthem arose from a choir in which the voices of both sexes were exquisitely blended, and the words that they sang were these: —

"Down the dark future, through long generations,

  The echoing sounds grow fainter and then cease;
And like a bell, with solemn, sweet vibrations,
  I hear once more the voice of Christ say ' Peace! '

Peace! and no longer from its brazen portals
  The blast of War's great organ shakes the skies;
But beautiful as songs of the immortals,

  The holy melodies of love arise."

When we came away, I said to Mr. Alexis, "I notice three striking things. Unlike its warlike namesake, New Salamis does not fortify its harbour; there are no tombs of warriors with tattered flags in their cathedral; and the anthems tell of the glories of Peace."

"Ah!" he replied, "now you touch the most far-reaching achievement of these modern days. True, in 1904, you were still subject to the terrible scourge of war."

At this we gazed at him with mingled doubt and delight, and he began to tell us at once how the change had come about.

"Then it seems," he said, " that in your long voyage (that was his kind way of alluding to our ignorance) you never heard of the last great war, in which so many nations became involved, and the engines of death were so passing terrible, that after the carnage ceased, and Peace — so-called — was established, it was universally decided in the great Congress of 1950 that war had become impossible, was a relic of barbarism, and that decision by arbitration must be final. Of course, there were many who demurred ; then' were thousands whose only profession was that of killing, to whom Peace meant monotony ; but gradually that feeling has given way to one of infinite relief. Then, too, Atlantic arose about that time, and the colonists who flocked to her shores determined that she should never learn what war meant. It was said, you remember, that of old she sank with a warrior race upon her, and it seemed she had arisen as a seal upon the world at Peace."

He explained the evidences of wealth and comfort by the immense sums of money accruing to the State which had no vast armaments to keep up. "You will see no poverty here," he added, "nor, indeed, in the Old World either ; everyone is educated to a trade, and has an equal chance in life, and at fifty-five need work no longer. The old are pensioned, if need be, by money once spent on means of destruction."

Then, as if the sum of human happiness on earth were complete, my dream grew faint and fainter ; the voice which told of all these ideals accomplished faded into the strains, of the anthem to which we had listened, and I awoke with its words in my ears like the sound of a silver bell —

"I hear once more the voice of Christ say ' Peace ! '"