15 - Evacuation of England- The Twist in the Gulf Stream by Louis Pope Gratacap

This intriguing book begins with a theoretical exploration of a catastrophic geological event but quickly evolves into a profound reflection on the essence of English identity. As it unfolds, it culminates in a passionate defense of America, offering readers a unique perspective on both nations. (Summary by Judi Mason)

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter seven, Part one of the Evacuation of England by L. P. Gratacap.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. In London,
February nineteen ten. In the smoking room of the Bothwell Club,
on cheapside back of Saint Paul's, London, on February twelfth,

(00:22):
in the year of Grace nineteen ten, two men sat
in attitudes of earnest attention. A third man older than either,
with his back to a blazing fire, whose simulated effect
of comfort arose from the curling tendrils of gas flames
that swept over another simulation of heaped up logs, was

(00:44):
speaking with desperate emphasis. He seldom looked at his arrested auditors,
nor indeed moved, except when he raised his head and
his eyes, strained with a hopeless longing, sought the gay
frescoes of the ceiling, or when in pauses of his declamations,
he walked to a window, and, raising the curtain, looked

(01:07):
out upon the city, up to the dome of Saint Paul's,
which rose like an ear koutsk igloo above a plane
of snow. The man was Alexander Laocraft. The auditors were
mister Archibald, Edward Thomson and Jim scaithe both familiar to
the reader as rescued and rescuing in that awful day

(01:29):
of November twenty eighth, when the last little band of citizens,
led by the Provost Marshal, had slipped away in the
storm from Edinburgh. Strange things had happened since then. Much
stranger were in store. The train in which Sir John
C and his companions escaped had made its way with

(01:52):
painful slowness, and before the English line was reached, had
stopped repeatedly until it was necessary to desert it. And
then the weary crowd of refugees had staggered on their
way to a distant station along a countryside emptied of
its inhabitants, with the low houses of the country people

(02:12):
evident only as mounds of snow, and with many struggles,
with mutual assistance, with prayers and suffering, the men pushed
on in the closest companionship. Brought by the terrors and
dangers of the journey into the usual unhesitating intimacy of peril,
they took each other's places in the work of excavation,

(02:35):
helped all to flounder and press through the drifts, divided
their company into the weak and strong, and so allotted
tasks that the co operation of all helped their common progress.
Camps were made in which shelters were clumsily provided with
tents brought from Edinburgh, and which only the industry of
the watchers saved also from burial. In the tossing drifts,

(03:00):
the frugal meals snatched by chance or at the favorable
moments where inequalities of the ground permitted a more regular
distribution and preparation of food. Served well enough. Now and
then they espied a deserted house, and into this they crowded,

(03:20):
enjoying the heat of fires made of the wood work
the floors and windows of the house itself. While they
dried their clothing, changed their shoes, and, gaining a respite
and new strength, sallied out again into the desolate landscape
with its blue gray skies flaming with crimson. When the
day set and the snow cleared, and a sharpened, icy

(03:44):
edge of cold vibrated like an unseen but intensely realized
cord stretched nippingly through the air, the leaders expected to
reach a place called Tway Stone, where a train was
in waiting which would carry themselves of this immediate zone
of the greatest snowfalls. Gruesome sights were encountered, and the

(04:06):
blanched faces of men turned away from the uncovered sepulcher
of a horse and rider, now a child and mother,
and sometimes in the wet morasses, still unfrozen beneath the
towering ridges, the forlorn, immure body of a young woman
with blanketed face and streaming hair. Leacraft and Thomson with

(04:29):
Jim worked unremittingly with the young scotchwoman. They patched up
a rude litter, and they carried her on this trudging
toilsomely along and watching her needs. Their care was affectionate
and touching, and soon other strong men offered their help.
For gradually the sensation gained place. So quickly does the

(04:51):
human fancy cling to the vaporous skirts of superstition, that
the girl's safety meant the rescue of all that her
security came married with it the common wheel. She became
a fetish, and they rejoiced in caring for her, as
if contribution to her welfare conveyed its unseen benefits to

(05:11):
all who engaged in the kind ministry. Nor did she fail,
with the living hopefulness of youth, and with her fresh,
winning loveliness, to establish a return her smile, the lingering
gratitude she showed to all her own usefulness and ready
help at the stop and waiting places, when her eager

(05:32):
intelligence watched and directed the provisioning and cooking rewarded the toilers.
She was quick and resourceful, cheerful in exhortation and advice,
and certainly to Laograft, always lovely. Thomson had forgotten his
first resentment at Leocraft's apparent admiration for his cousin. The

(05:53):
two men had become very intimate. Both felt themselves on
the edge of new events, which were in part to
be shaped by the blind forces of the earth, and
in larger part, as they affected England, by the sagacity
and steadfastness of men. They talked much over these things together.

(06:13):
Both were somber and frightened. The invincible powers of nature,
the unconquerable ferocity of nature, which is deaf to reason,
blind to suffering, made them shrink and quail to meet
its urgency with makeshifts was impossible to resist it. Madness.

(06:34):
The line of retreat was the only line of escape.
They felt this, the thought became oppressively dominant. They began
at first to hint at it. They ended quite quickly too,
in predicting it, with mutual confessions of dismay. Both loved
Miss Tobit. Yet as far as appearances went, only the

(06:56):
guardian spirit of her dreams could have told the direction
of her inclinations. Perhaps both seemed to her too dear,
too much involved in the one peril with herself to
stand apart from each other in any guise or place
of reference. Thomson was a younger man, and he had
the advantage of a handsome face, a fine form, and

(07:20):
a particularly deferential tenderness. Cupid and his mother are not
slow to give such gifts their heartiest commendation, but Thomson
was generous to his somewhat reticent and probably not greatly
feared rival. The prowess of beauty is generally undaunted and
oftentimes magnanimous. When the worst hardships of their journey were over,

(07:44):
and in the less afflicted regions of England, where at
the time the snowfalls were not as deep or the
winds as tempestuous, Liacraft had many chances to talk with
Miss Tobitt, and he found her extremely affable, well informed,
and simple pathetic, certainly not endowed with the mischievous drollery
and the roguish merit of Miss Garrett, and therefore are

(08:07):
not so piquant, tantalizing and desirable, but very kindly and soothing.
The Provost Marshal and most of the party went to Liverpool,
whither before many of the inhabitants of Edinburgh had fled,
but Leacraft and Thomson kept on to London. They found
conditions in London full of fright and trepidation, and the

(08:30):
business interests floundering and collapsed. Laycraft took up his headquarters
at the Bothwell Club, and Thomson and his cousin found
a home and a maiden aunts in clever House Place.
But much as Laocraft would have craved an indulgence of
sympathy and response, the audience of sense and appreciation, and

(08:50):
the agreeable picture before his eyes of acquiesce and if
not admiring beauty, the fatal progress of events in the
world of England kept him away from Miss Tobitt. More
than he wished. These events were far from reassuring they
were directly and successively catastrophic, Their logic seemed inexorable, and

(09:12):
Europe became rigid with attention as it watched, with most
varying feelings of commiseration, the tightening grasp of frost and snow,
wind and tempest upon the destiny of England. Not that
an actual submergence beneath snowdrifts was threatened, a hyperboreal sepulcher
under which every Englishman lay like the excelsior youth, lifeless

(09:37):
but beautiful. No such shocking and shattering misery as had
befallen Scotland, had as yet engulfed England, especially its southern counties.
But the darkening days brought more clearly to the observation
of the most recalcitrant and obtuse, the most reluctant and temporizing,

(09:57):
the fact that England's climate was a roaching that of Labrador,
that the restraints of trade would soon become enormous, that
its products would be unmitigatedly diminished and restricted, and that
it could no longer raise wheat, that its railroads for
half the year would endure a dangerous embargo, that its

(10:18):
population would perish, that its industries would undergo the most
serious curtailment, that foreign ports would absorb its commerce, steal
its prestige, insinuate themselves by its crippled resources into the
markets of the earth. In its place, that the ramifications
of disaster would penetrate its social, intellectual, and political life,

(10:41):
and cloud its mental horizon with the gaunt and stupid
specters of torpor and helplessness. This monstrous dilemma submerged all
minor passions and plunged England into the noisiest outbreak of argument, suggestion,
and pass stricken questionings. Leacraft buried himself in the questions that,

(11:06):
now with the more forward and statesmanly thinkers, were coming
to the front with relentless insistence. Amongst these, conspicuously outstrode
and outshone the rest. H. G. Wells, the brilliant author
and prophet of the New Republicanism, whose book had five
years before roused an intense and frightened protests from the

(11:29):
servitors of antiquity and the selfish lackeys of a superannuated
and mythical class system. Mister Wells, with his trained skill
in scientific deduction and the exercised powers of imagination, with
the reckless and defiant desire to unravel the future, with
the slenderest regard for the prejudices of religion or old

(11:53):
fogey political conservatism, was now half deluded himself with the
sudden dream of starting the English nation on new grounds,
released from the impedimenta of ceremonies and ruins, names and titles,
furnished with a tabula rasa, where the new ideals of
which he set himself up as a sort of avatar

(12:14):
and preacher, might most keenly set and develop themselves. He believed,
as in a measure Liaocraft did himself, that the English
cultists would put on those insignia of the coming eras
which meant intellectual emancipation and a social and civil regime
where the greatest happiness and the widest material prosperity would unite,

(12:38):
in which two would not be wanting a radical rearrangement
of the relations of the sexes hinted at in the
same author's later books, but which again, naturally by many
who followed mister Wells a certain way, was indignantly repudiated.
A more dignified and august group of men, among whom

(12:58):
the names of Churchill, Chamberlain, Roseberry, Balfour, Professor Stubbs, and
Bryce lad had assembled themselves in a council of deeply
concerned and profoundly patriotic advisers. These men secured a very
noble elevation above the wild and unclassified miscellany of men

(13:21):
and women, who, with cries, denunciations, nostrums, whims, hallucinations, guesses
and queries, deluged the pages of the Times, stood at
the corners of the streets where such standing was possible
in the hard weather, and preached their fantastic mental wares.

(13:43):
A still more obvious and ear assailing group were the
religious zealots, who thrive at moments of peril, filling the
brains of their listeners with adjurations, exhortations, prayers, pictures, and prophecies,
for one moment doleful with wailing eggsgrations of past wickedness,
and the next piteously shrieking eloquent appeals for repentance and confession.

(14:08):
The singular and amazing thing in all this was the
convinced assent given to the prediction of science. Whereas at
first the geologists and the meteorologists belittle and ridiculed the
warnings of the President. They now enlarged, extended, and enforced
them with a greater authority and more illuminated reasoning, hardly

(14:30):
believing that the people of England would realize this approaching disaster,
what it meant, what steps should be contemplated to escape
its worst effects, how permanent and deep seated were its causes.
The British Association for the Advancement of Science had resolved
itself into a body of educators. Lectures were given, more

(14:50):
practicable leaflets, circulated, letters published in the leading dailies, and
a comprehensive educational crusade started, whom with one object to
instill a deeper dread of the future, a distrust of
the possibility of the longer occupancy of the British Islands,
and yet a firm reliance that under changed auspices of place,

(15:14):
the same civilization with unchanged features would still continue to
rule the world. Parliament was constantly in session, and to
it the worshipful English householder and pew Renter looked with
unwavering faith, waiting for its sublime wisdom and intrinsic patients

(15:34):
to devise ways and means and some safe policy of safety.
Even the king became earnest, perhaps a little anxious, as
among the most popular doctrinaire plebiscites was the reiterated need
of an abolition of the discarded system of the royal household.
From the midst of all this confusion, organized and disorganized movements,

(15:57):
the collapse of trade, the desertion of work, the sudden
emergence of a thousand voices claiming, clamoring, debating, the physical
wreck of business, the inflamed transcendentalism that saw ahead of
the present moment readjudication, rehabilitation, renovation of all social wrongs.
And with the cruel winter breathing its desolating rigors, the

(16:21):
snow rising in the streets, the poor dying from starvation
or exposure, the steamers crowded to their taffrails, daily exporting
the timid and selfish rich, or the pinched poor escaping
with a bare competency to establish themselves under less penurious skies.

(16:42):
From all this there suddenly grew, in distalwart and national proportions,
the resolve to leave England. It grew with a certain
flaming ardor of noble hopes and resolves. It grew also
with an agony of doubt. The whole implication of the
idea was grievously wounding to pride, and it strained at

(17:05):
the very heart string of the English nature. To go
away from England was to become un englished, to lose
the rich heritage of pastoral beauty, the treasured wealth of
historic associations, the spot and home of literary triumphs, the
soil the air, which, by some impalpable union of efficacies

(17:29):
made the English blood and temperament, and which could not
be taken away to make the same fine product elsewhere.
The pathos of it a nation wandering homeless, with its
lares and penates in its arms, its face darkened with humiliation,
its shoulders that erstwhile bore the burdens of states, bowed

(17:53):
with the shame of enforced desertion. Its voice that summoned
the freemen of the earth to convocation, silent with fear,
or perhaps broken by the irrepressible echo, wrung from its
own anguish at turning its back on the cradle and
the home of its greatness. And yet it grew this

(18:15):
same resolve, and eloquence, and poetry and prayers and science
and statescraft united to make it strong and beautiful to
blend in it the supernatural benisons of religion, the purified
affections of the heart, and the resolute affirmations of conviction.
My friends, It was Laocraft speaking from the fireside of

(18:38):
the Bothwell Club in Cheapside on the night of February twelfth,
nineteen ten. I think the speech today of the Members
from Scotland in Parliament was decisive. It leaves no alternative.
We cannot, hopelessly, in the face of this modern world's competition,
fight out a narrowing chance for existence under the condition

(19:00):
facing us. And it is an unmistakable alternative. Our climate
has changed, and the change is irrevocable, and it is
subversive too. We must go away, taking all that we
have with us. The English nation has reached a sublime crisis.
We transplant our virtues, we will relinquish our failings. We

(19:24):
have a world of our own to choose from, and
we are given an opportunity unparalleled in history. It's a
great chance to begin all over again, expostulated Jim not
at all resumed Leacraft, his voice rising with that peculiar
English intonation of tenuity which often animates their sluggish accents,

(19:47):
if it does not soon soar into nasal squeaks. Not
at all, We leave England with not a thing forgotten
or lost. The machinery of our greatness is in our
history and in ourselves, the products of industry and art,
so far as they are necessary fixtures stay What of it?

(20:08):
A cathedral, a palace here and there They often stand
for things it would be best for us to forget,
and under which perhaps only revolution and violence will make
us forget if we remain as we are. What stirs
my imagination? What grows visibly before me? Both Thomson and
Jim watched intently, the fervent Englishman released into a sort

(20:30):
of mystic clairvoyance. Is a new land which is a
physical unit, which has no known political subdivision, which holds
within it no inherited rages and taunting bitternesses as these
islands do today. Let it be Australia. Let it be
South Africa, though there I admit is the memory of
a bungle. But we enter it a single people, blended

(20:54):
into homogeneity by adversity. And we set about the tremendously
interesting task of we creating England, at least in all
things pertaining to her that are great and lovable. I
fail to see, said Thomson, that the probabilities are that way.
On the contrary, freed from the geographical confinement of neighboring islands,

(21:17):
governed from London, in a new land, Irish, Scotch, English
will segregate again and then scattered, just as might mixed
races of birds, who, while they are in the same
cage mingle, but when they fly out, fall back into
their natural groups. By the most certain of all animal tendencies,
that like seeks like well, and what of it, retorted Leocraft,

(21:40):
These elements are together in a new country. It is one.
There is no history behind it of subjugation and ill treatment.
There can be no reversion to bikeries and recriminations, where
even the monuments in milestones familiarly associated with injustice have disappeared. Besides,
we leave behind the obnoxious, shameless law of entail. At

(22:04):
least we shall be free of that disgrace and at last,
but he added his voice again, singing to a pained whisper,
with what a wrench Well, mister Laocraft spoke up, Jim
Scaith again. It's a mere than moving that has to
be done. There's the new land to be bought and settled.
There's getting there and biding there. There's schools to be built,

(22:28):
and hams and shops. And it seems to me, with
pardon for being so forward, that if it took so
many years to make a great city, it's no fuel's
warped to sail over the seas and put it up again.
Then after a pause, and it's never the old hame,
no resumed lay craft, that is true, it's not the

(22:49):
old home. And a big city, the greatest cannot be
boxed up in straw and packing cloth and get set
up by order in another place, with the precision of
a movable bungalow. Oh but we need not trifle. We
all know that it's no child's work. We expect something
very different from London. We can meet the emergencies of

(23:10):
place and room. Our population can be distributed. Remember we
are on trial, and the new strange chapter opening before
us will bring again into view the inalienable fortitude and
power of the English mind. It's a test. The conditions
are irreversible, and mind and character will win, must win,

(23:33):
or slowly, surely the stars of our ascendancy pale and disappear.
Nature for a moment has thrown us in a great peril.
But was it nature or ourselves that won us? Footholds?
Throughout the world, open coasts await us, hundreds of thousands
will welcome us. The influences of a common language, ancestry,

(23:56):
and institutions have chained together the links of our supremacis
around the world, and made of it an inseparable girdle.
Shall we falter now? When nature again challenges our mind
to quell her hostility, opposing her impediments of sense to
our invisible treasuries of thought, invention, and self confidence. It

(24:18):
is a new step, our best step in the march
of human liberty. We need to be divorced from the
material constance amid which the long fought battle for free
thought and action has been waged. We are yet entangled
in the meshes of tradition, the stumbling blocks of convention,
And now they're shattered we rise to splendid hopes. Or

(24:41):
shall we say it is retribution? It is punishment for
many sins. Let it be so. A chastened pride will
not hurt us, nor will it hurt our chances. Yes,
licraft interrupted Thomson. I feel better to hear you talk
this way, but I must look at some very disagreeable
facts to They are not easily eliminated by words or fancies,

(25:04):
and even seem to evince a provoking facility to become
more numerous the more they are considered. Take the mechanical
problem of transportation. We are some forty millions of people.
The extravagant powers of assimilation of the United States barely
digests the one million of emigrants that come to their
shores each year. What conceivable powers of absorption will dispose

(25:28):
of our forty millions without an attack of industrial guestritis
that will induce the worst political convulsions, and the carrying
skill and capacity of our whole merchant marine cannot in
less than ten years take away this monstrous human cargo,
together with all the colossal accumulation of paraphernalia, stocks, chattels, goods, treasures, books,

(25:55):
and belongings that have gathered in this rich island, until
they seem like a sort of Pectolian alluvium that is
indigenous and irremovable. Think of the women, the children. What
method of dumciliation will you devise to accommodate these armies,
and with this removal comes the crash of all domestic

(26:17):
values railroad stock, gas stock, mill stock, warehouses, land values.
Everything goes with the removal of the human vitality that
gives them worth. It staggers the imagination to think how
the disorganization radiates and increases in all directions. In nineteen
o five six, this great Britain consumed in one industry alone,

(26:42):
nearly four millions of bales of cotton, spun them out
into merchantable goods on her fifty million spindles. Do you
measure the almost unfathomable depths of distress the stoppage of
this one industry means? Is it not better to find
it out here? To defeat nature? If I may be

(27:02):
allowed to copy your own enthusiasm, to put on our
own hes the regalia of the ice king and rule him,
rest from him his own scepter, and excel his power
with the power of this new century of invention. Impossible.
Lacraft's retort was quick and impetuous. Impossible. No expedients of

(27:25):
man will overcome the deliberate intentions of nature. We utilize
her forces, but we may not deflect her purposes. It
is the voice of that very science which has made
us such powerful masters of her utilities, that now tells
us we must go. To quote the words of Professor Darwin,

(27:45):
spoken at the Cape Town meeting of the British Association
for the Advancement of Science, stability is further a property
of relationship to surrounding conditions. It denotes adaptation to environment.
There can be no adaptation to this new environment which
will retain our former greatness. Nature opposes us, indeed in

(28:07):
forcing us away. But we thwart her niggardliness by subterfuge
and endurance and courage. We can make her plastic enough
for our purposes if we do not overstep the limits
of her last negation. The practical question, the panic, the
loss ah well, if all should be as it has been,

(28:28):
if the inequality still remained, the very moral significance and
regeneration which I hope for could not come. It means
the leveling process by which the new Brotherhood is visibly
and violently enforced. And as to place, and means, thousands
upon thousands will establish themselves in America, blessing every community

(28:52):
they enter, and being blessed in turn with opportunity Australia
and South Africa, and Canada, with its millionians upon millions
of square miles of unused land, will furnish us with
new homes. Revivification, regeneration, rehabilitation will be rapid. We shall

(29:13):
not see its final outcome, but we shall know the
virile impulse of self help at its inception. If social differences,
if social pageantry vanish, the constraining push of Christian tolerance
and fellowship succeeds, differences may emerge later, but they will
be differences of endowment and industrious energy, no other. And

(29:36):
as to the transportation problem, it can be solved. We
should not all go at once. It may be a
slow movement, perhaps the slower the better, But see how
we become unified. Like refugees are shipwrecked outcasts. We shall
help each other, and every man's hand will help his neighbor.
But also we shall organize on the basis of each

(29:58):
man's aptitude, the farmer to his plowshare, the mechanic to
his workshop, the preacher to his pulpit, the artist to
his easel, the banker to his counting room. At last,
an ideal assortment of talents. End of Chapter seven, Part

(30:20):
one