The Wreck of a World/Chapter 1
THE WRECK OF A WORLD.
CHAPTER I.
In the summer of the year 1948 the English-speaking race had attained the very summit of prosperity. Within the limits of the United States were included no less than one hundred and fifty millions of souls, while the Canadian Provinces held thirty millions more. The Continent of Australia, the Islands of New Zealand, the Settlements of South Africa, and other territories held by the all-colonising Anglo-Saxon had increased in corresponding measure, while the mother-country, though less congested than in the latter part of the nineteenth century, thanks to judicious schemes of emigration, still reckoned in its islands a total of nearly thirty millions. In all it was reckoned that no less than two hundred and seventy millions of persons spoke the English tongue and flourished under English institutions.
Each of the vast sections of the Pan-Britannic Confederation (as it was barbarously called) enjoyed the most complete independence under its own President and Congress, but in the old country a respect for antiquity and history still supported the venerable monarchy, although the hereditary peerage was fast dying out, no new peers having been created for many years, and the heirs of the old families generally dropping their titles. Each year an assembly of the Presidents of the Confederate States, or their Representatives, was held in London, were such matters were discussed as concerned the welfare of the Confederation at large, and question of Foreign Policy determined which virtually controlled the diplomacy of all the European Courts. It will be in the recollection of all that when in the year 1930 the late Czar had collected a vast army and fleet for the subjugation of the Chinese Empire, and war was on the point of being declared, the remonstrances of the Presidents of the Pan-Britannic Confederation in London assembled, who "could not view without regret and alarm the projected attack upon a peaceable power," caused the abandonment of that vast but iniquitous scheme. The moral influence of the free elected representatives of two hundred and seventy millions of Englishmen, whose united armaments would hardly have made up 300,000 men, was sufficient to overawe the master of five millions of soldiers.
With regard to the other states of Europe vast political changes had taken place during the past century. The German-speaking peoples had become united under the House of Hohenzollern. The Hapsburg family, having abandoned the imperial title and their hereditary dominions, reigned as kings of Hungary at Buda-Pesth. Italy was united under the House of Savoy: France, that great disturber of international peace, had after two great wars been partitioned and reduced to impotence; Spain, Portugal and other minor nationalities remained in statu quo. The Grand Turk had removed his Capital to Bagdad, and the King of Bulgaria reigned at Constantinople. The despotism of the Czar, still "tempered with assassination," was otherwise supreme in his desolate dominions.
The Nineteenth Century had ended, as it had begun, in war, and since the terrible European conflict of 1897, which ended in the complete defeat of Russia and France, the overwhelming influence of the Teutonic peoples, that is to say, the Britannic Confederation and the German Empire, has succeeded in establishing a Roman peace unbroken during this Twentieth century.
The great British dependency of India was still held under the paternal despotism of England, which, after making various experiments, had found that the race-antipathies and religious animosities of the natives, together with a rooted incapacity for self-government, rendered it expedient to revert to the old methods of rule so successfully practised by her earlier satraps.
Such was the political condition of the world at the beginning of the unhappy year whose events I am about to describe. Socially the state of things was less satisfactory. The decay of religion and the cultivation of a gospel of selfishness had produced its natural results. Pauperism and misery, formerly relieved by the contributions of the benevolent, was now exclusively administered by a department of the state, and the final triumph of the social economists was won when by an act of Congress it was made a misdemeanour to give a copper or a loaf of bread to a starving beggar. That this rigorous system of state benevolence had its effect in stamping out beggary and reducing pauperism cannot be denied, but that it had likewise a hardening effect upon our citizens by answering once for all in the negative the question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" is I think not less undeniable.
Yet in spite of all drawbacks the period I am describing was one of unexampled prosperity, and there seems no reason in the nature of things why, but for the folly and pusillanimity of mankind, it should not have increased for ages more. Those indeed who like myself have ever maintained in a sceptical age the existence of an overruling Providence that orders all things both in Heaven and Earth cannot fail to see in the calamities that befell our race the fit punishment of the general decadence of religion and morality; while the collapse of all resistance to the unforeseen danger which menaced mankind would seem to be the natural result of that perverted philosophy which preached the duty of selfishness and discredited the ancient virtues of self-sacrifice and devotion.