16 - 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 two of the Evacuation of England by L. P. Gratacap.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Thompson hid
a slight yawn and made a smile of incredulity. Serve
the ends of a salutation of encouragement. There's no denying

(00:22):
the contagion of your confidence, Liocraft. But really I think
that we are all mournfully in the dark as to
what we best can do. And in the meanwhile it's
a matter of positive terror what we are going to
live on. I brought all the available cash I could
for Ethel and myself, but already famine has unfurled its banners.

(00:43):
And you know how cramped and shrunk our living has
become in London. The Thames alone saves us from starvation.
It's no longer a question of having a bank balance,
but the more definite and fundamental one of finding something
to buy. By the by Balfour closes the debate at
ten tonight. You have admission to the Gallery of the Commons.

(01:06):
Let us go down. It promises to be a fine effort.
I only hope it's not going to be a funeral oration.
Leocraft pulled out his watch and found the time a
half hour after nine. Yes, he would go. In fact,
he had already engaged a boatman at Blackfriar's Bridge to
be in waiting for him. At almost that very moment,

(01:28):
Jim stepped to the window and looked out. The night
was pure and clear. Huge hummocks of snow encumbered the
streets below, and the moon blazed in the keen sky
like some target of disaster. We'l, mister Laycraft. You won't
want me along, And somehow I'd rather sit here and
think over your own words. Little as I believe, it

(01:51):
will all come oot so good. Like no, Jim, keep
the fire on and watch out for us, and you
might remember to brew as a stiff snack after your
own heart. It won't come amiss. Jim assented with alacrity,
and lay a Craft and mister Thompson muffled up to
their ears and almost hermetically enclosed in fur ulsters, left

(02:15):
the room, descended the stairs, and appeared at the doorway
on the street. A tolerable path led through a part
of cheapside, but it was not their intention to follow
that thoroughfare. They turned towards the church and clambered along
a devious footway that imitated the sinuous and irregular wanderings

(02:36):
of a mountain trail. It led them to Ludgate Hill,
where they encountered a few other travelers like themselves, making
their way to the bridge for the same purpose. Bridge
Street was just passable, and soon the ice laden waters
of the river were seen blazoned like some spectacle of
enchantment in the deluge of argent light. They found the

(03:00):
boatmen in the basement of the Hotel Royal, which was
dead to the last stories of his ornamented facade, silent
and dark. He was a part of the indications that
London already had lost its visitors. The barge men stole
out of their retreat, and lay Craft and Thompson followed them,

(03:20):
the shadows of the party printed in ink on the
winnowed snow. Two men accompanied the boat, one road and
the other stood at the prow, pushing off the cakes
of ice and correcting the passage of the boat through
the lanes of water, flowing like limpid threads of molt
and silver between the crunching and veering floes. Lay Craft

(03:44):
and Thompson watched with fascinated eyes the broad terrace of
the Victoria Embankment, illuminated with the moons of fulgence, whose
unchecked glory met a feeble rivalry in a few sickly gats, mantles,
and a solitary electric lamp. The noble houses of legislation,

(04:05):
and to the eyes of lay craft, they never seemed
more imbued with the supremely delicate and elevating beauty rose
from the water's edge, like some creation of an inspired dreamer.
Woven of splintered rays of light with penciled lines of ebony,
filched from the darkest night, It embodied a loveliness passed

(04:27):
even the powers of sought to measure or describe. The
houses flamed with light, and the strong light on the
clock tower announcing the sitting of Parliament sent back to
the moon a terrestrial radiance that resembled the pulsations of
a fallen star. As they passed the Westminster Bridge, their
eyes caught the distant lights of Lambeth Palace. Both knew

(04:51):
that to night the King dined with the Archbishop. Slowly,
their boat drew near the landing, and the two men
who guided it most to its occupants to get ready
to disembark as the landing was deprived of its usual
outfit owing to the clogging cakes of ice which clung
to the wall. The heavy nose of the boat was

(05:12):
pushed into the wall, and la Craft and Thompson scrambled
up the steps and gained the walk which led to
the Victoria Arch at the entrance of the Parliament House.
Here a jam was encountered, and the news was soon
learned that Balfour had begun his speech an hour before
the announced time and was now engaged in the closing

(05:33):
appeal on the motion before the House? And what was
this motion? To explain, it is necessary to rehearse some
of the preceding events which had finally eventuated in this
most marvelous situation, a debate in the House at Parliament
as to whether the English people should evacuate England. This

(05:54):
momentous and world moving spectacle was now actually contemplated by
the fixed attention of every nation on the earth. Its
awful solemnity, the convulsing pathos of it, the immense commercial
dislocation it involved, its social agony, the calamitous doubts it
summoned as to the stability of Europe itself, and the

(06:17):
fiercer sudden question of the meaning of human existence on
this planet. It aroused, made the debate of the English
Parliament then pending, the most extraordinary discussion ever known in
human annals. The occasion for it had practically been forced
or precipitated by the coercive power of scientific opinion. And

(06:39):
the curious thing about this same scientific opinion was that
at first resisted the overwhelming proof of the subsidence of
the isthmus and the elevation of the Caribbean Wall of transgression,
and then fervently accepted it with not one sentillomore of demonstration,
And in accepting it, proposed for itself the unwelcome task

(07:02):
of convincing the English people that they should evacuate their country.
It would be hard to conceive of anything to the
English mind less conceivable than such a desertion. Its mere
mention raised the most violent denunciation and poured a torrent
of abuse upon the unfortunate advisers. The thought of it

(07:22):
sapped the very foundations of the English sense of existence.
It seemed the vertigo of madness. It deranged the most
obvious assertions of common sense. It was an impeachment of
the English reality, to think of it was a betrayal
of trust, a breach of faith, a succinct defiance of

(07:43):
the Almighty, a blasphemous rejection of the lessons of history,
a timorous surrender to the threats of the weather. But later,
when the Scottish population began to throw its inundating tides
of people into England, and the Englishman read at his
breadth table of the floes of ice in the Clyde

(08:03):
and the buried Grampians, the insurmountable drifts about Sterling, and
the incipient nev masses on skyrnaw Glen and Sky. The
reluctant embarkation of the merchants of Aberdeen, the closing of
its great university, the shrinkage of business in Glasgow, when
they realized that in truth, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans

(08:26):
had become united by a broad gateway, through which the
Gulf Stream, which erstwhile transported the heat of the Equator
to Europe, now emptied its turred waters, bathing the western
coasts of North America as far north as Alaska, and
bringing to that Arctic country almost the same blessing of

(08:47):
fruit deifying warmth with which it had before endowed England.
When still further they began to hear and to realize
by private letters, the affectionate summons and offers of the colonies,
the overwhelming loyalty of the brothers across the sea, their
frenzied eagerness to place their lens almost gratuitously in the

(09:08):
hands of the mother people and assume towards them the
role of honored beneficiaries. Then a strange, unwonted wondering began
as to whether it might not be best to look
into the matter, and then intelligence aroused. With continued inspection,
the impression grew that, indeed the prospects were alarming. The

(09:32):
English mind, once startled in a certain direction, soon takes
on an impetus proportionate to the inertia of its first movements,
and therefore, by a natural law of psychology and mechanics,
gains an accelerated velocity with each succeeding moment. So it
was now the industry of the scientific propaganda. Its inventive

(09:57):
persistency was followed by the conversion of the large financial
and commercial interests, and then a panic seized the great
masses of the nation. Parliament took it up the papers
bulged and teemed with information, discussion, advice and reports. A
determining influence with the large trading classes was a decline

(10:22):
in some instances the positive disappearance of business, while to
others not chained in insular possessions, a new world of
adventure and chance seemed not altogether undesirable. The pressure of
popular approval hastened in the parliament the formation of a
plan for the slow and careful removal of the population.

(10:46):
The Law of Exodus, as it was termed, was a
thoroughly English legislative work, and that meant a wise adequate
and deliberate evacuation. It involved a retabulation, so to speak,
of the wealth and occupations of the individuals of the country,
and so adjusted their departure, their association, their duties, their

(11:09):
facilities and trades, that the least competition would arise in
the new quarters. And then they were also so distributed
in the colonies that they met the requirements of these
As it was ascertained from the authorities the latter demanded.
Thousands upon thousands had already sailed away, forming for themselves

(11:30):
combinations as their acquaintances and connections permitted. And still other
thousands with property invested abroad made a home in the
land in which their support lay. A singular consequence of
the situation was the speculative gale it produced in America,
where large amounts of unemployed or released capital took flight.

(11:55):
It settled tumultuously in Wall Street, voraciously attacking every veraiety
of security and driving stock values out of sight in
a tremendous boom that disconcerted the tried veterans of the
famous mart All the time, the Londoner was himself gaining
some convincing insight into the dread nature of the climatic

(12:16):
change about him. The snows covered the greater part of
the streets of London. The parks became desolate tracts, deserted, uncleared, unused,
swept over by the freezing winds, and chased from end
to end with buffeted wreaths of snow, whose ghostly swirling
columns ran over the wintry exposures, like a race of

(12:40):
Titanic spirits, crossing each other in cyclonic confusion, or meeting
in shivering collisions, dissolving in cloud bursts of microscopic and
penetrating needles of ice. The Thames was almost closed, the
shipping stayed idle at the wharfs, almost unmitigated sufferings spread
among the poor for miles. The streets were only traversed

(13:03):
by footpaths worn by their occupants, and the strangest sights
occurred in the smaller reservations like lincoln In Fields, Saint
Paul's Churchyard, the temple gardens, the artillery grounds, finsby Circus
and other confined spaces. By a freak of circumstances and
the curious and entirely unexpected vagary of the winds, the

(13:26):
snow piled up and up in these quarters because of
a peculiar in rush of wind from the converging streets around,
and this sweeping effect continued until the mound of snow
circumvallating the buildings, reached to their windows or overtopped them.
While in enclosures not preempted by buildings, as Highbury Fields

(13:48):
and the various cemeteries, the hills of snow formed colossal
billows which seemed like a phalanx of rigid waves tortured
into fantastic pinnacles by the storms of winds, and such
spectacles turned back the lifeblood of the bravest and converted
the most recalcitrant objectors to the new view of the

(14:08):
necessity of leaving the immemorial splendors of England's capital. It
was a demoralizing and distressing picture of change to visit
the great docks on the Thames, the London Docks, the
commercial in the West India Docks, and in the place
of the varied throngs, the miscellaneous rabble of laborers, in

(14:29):
which the forms, faces, and even the dresses of the
people of the world made a composite aggregate which was
a suggested reflex of the myriad handed toil and industry
of London, a significant hint of the immense wealth and
opulent indulgence of the great metropolis. In place of all this,

(14:50):
the harsh winds whistled over deserted yards, shrieked through the
rigging of idle ships, or blue tempestuous volleys of rhyme
and sleet across the river between Wapping and rother Height.
Before this awful change, English fortitude and confidence quailed or
wrapping itself in the reserve of bitterness and distrust, turned

(15:13):
silently away for an instant at least driven to confess
that the time honored legend of English destiny had become
a perverted and silly schibaleth February twelfth, which has in meteorology,
along with the twelfth of November, May and August, been
isolated as the period of the Ice Saints viz. Four

(15:36):
periods characterized in an unaccountable manner by a fallen temperature.
This twelfth of February nineteen ten had been determined by
the Parliament for the closing of the Great Debate on
the Motion of Evacuation. It was this night that Leocraft
and Thompson found so clear and cold, a keen and

(15:56):
perilous intensity of cold probably never before were experienced in
the English Islands, unless one and his inenviable task of
comparison could have found an equivalent in the Ice Age itself.
When Leocraft and his companion attained the Victoria Tower, already
the debate on the motion, which in an enlarged way

(16:18):
had been before the English nation for more than a month,
had reached its final stage. Balfour had been chosen to
close in a long peroration the tremendous forensic display, which
had been limited to the walls of the houses of Parliament.
But it was only an episodic and distinguished incident in

(16:39):
an argument which had convulsed every household in England, which
had sent its clamorous assertions and appeals to the whole
English speaking people throughout the world, and which would, by
all rational expectations, remain to the end of historic time,
the most startling venture in language, the most dramatic performance

(17:00):
in oratory ever known. The two men hurried in passed
the flaming chandeliers of the beautiful archway, upon Layocraft, showing
his particular cards of admission. An attendant escorted them through
the Royal Gallery, the House of Peers, the Peers Lobby,
all of which were deserted. They chased in most indecorous

(17:23):
fashion through the marvelous rooms, only intent upon catching the
last words of the great speech, whose purport and end
was to empty those glorious apartments of their human interest
and bring expatriation upon all the memories they harbored. They
passed through the Central Hall, the Commons Lobby, the Division Lobby,

(17:44):
and were expeditiously inserted in the Reporter's Gallery, where, backed
up against the topmost wall, they surveyed the thronged mass
beneath them, every inch of space, every point of observation,
was packed, and the scene on which a softened flood
of light fell, with an enhancing effect of wonder, was

(18:05):
eloquent in picturesque power and interest, lords and ladies. Tonight,
no interfering screen concealed the women, earls, dukes, baronets, the clergy,
even bishops in their robes, merchants, men of science, bankers,
and the whole house of peers standing at the bar

(18:27):
of the House of Commons were arrayed in a vast
and irrelevant assemblage, pierced by one thought, the anguish of
a supreme decision, and Balfour, upon an erect and stalwart figure,
moved by an instinct of regnancy, at this sublime instant,

(18:48):
to stand free of his compeers, in the broad way
between the benches of the government and those of the opposition,
and facing the speaker, all the eyes of that assemblage
were riveted. The classics sentences of Macaulay, in describing the
trial of Warren Hastings, hackneyed as they are by innumerable repetitions,

(19:11):
might well apply to this unwonted and intense spectacle. The
long galleries were crowded by an audience such as has
rarely excited the fears or the emulations of an orator.
They were gathered together from all parts of a great, free, enlightened,
and prosperous empire. Grace and female loveliness and learning, the

(19:34):
representatives of every science and every art, and the comparison
can be illuminatively emphasized at the trial of the illustrious proconsul,
curiosity in a man, sympathy with a race, admiration for
the local splendor of a gorgeous scene summoned to the
hall of William Rufus, the resplendent galaxy. But the motives

(19:59):
were objected in the present case, thought Loocraft, how pathetic,
how tragic their subjective force. It was as if the
children of a home about to disappear in some horrible engulfment,
calmly prepared to leave its threshold. But it was that
sorrow multiplied by all the individuals of a nation, and

(20:21):
magnified by the moral surrender of the associations of two
thousand years, a nervous tension that was expressed in the
almost petrified stare of some faces, the startling pallor of others.
The half opened lips, the strained attitudes, the involuntary shudders,
the curious, grieved looks of inattention overmastered the assembly. Its

(20:47):
contagious thrill seized Loocraft, and brought his mental receptivity up
to a quickened pitch of almost deranged alertness, while every
sense seemed preternaturally awake. He heard a woman's sob somewhere
in front of him, and far down the left gallery,
in the glare and glitter, he saw a noble head,

(21:08):
white haired but still wearing the flush of manhood's prime
upon his cheeks, leaning on a hand, and turned towards him,
with unchecked tears coursing silently from its upraised eyes. He
saw a little girl clasping the neck of her mother
and father as she sat half on the laps of each,

(21:29):
and heard the soft lisp of her kisses on their brows.
He saw the almost saturnine face of a dowager, stonily
gazing at the speaker, and most strangely, he detected on
her finger a topez ring cut in relievo with the
head of Queen Victoria. And yet while his senses reported

(21:51):
these trifles with startling keenness. They were also all enlisted
in catching every gesture, every movement, every action of the man,
whose plastic power of eloquence was there engaged in pleading
for English abdication. How the words rang in his ears,
how persuasively the voice sank and rose, And with what

(22:15):
a soaring melody some of the cadences seemed to linger
in the scented air. Let us, it said, bow before
the revelation of our own destiny. The ordination of nature
is the express reflection, Nay, it is the objective expression
of divine Will accept it with submission, with the subserviency

(22:39):
of faith, and act on that condition, with the abundance
of that native resolution that from the time of Alfred
has made our path upward, outward, onward. I do not, sir,
underestimate the tremendous ordeal. I cannot be blind to the
colossal undertaking. It resumes, in one herculean exertion, all the

(23:04):
efforts of our race through two thousand years. It is
without precedent, or else it shall only be reverently compared
to the exodus of the children of God from Egypt.
And in that light, Sir, without subterfuge or apology, without
extenuation of rhetoric, without rivalry or vanity, I do regard it.

(23:27):
We are solemnized by some vast scheme in the order
of things, to carry with us the genius of our
civilization to another home, where its power and beauty shall
both benefit others and become themselves more powerful and more beautiful.
We have lived through a stadium of progress and achievement.

(23:49):
We certainly advance to the opening of another. Let the
gathered multitudes of our race hear at its ancestral hearth,
gird up their loins, and accept the August's command to
go forth from the Whittan of the Angles and the Saxons,
through a feudal hierarchy to Magna carta, through the provisions

(24:10):
of Oxford, the model Parliament of Edward I, by the
rise in political privileges by the towns, by merchant guild
and craft guild, by the Good Parliament of thirteen seventy six,
by the relentless rebukes of Richard in the merciless Parliament,
by reason of popular censure and the eloquence of common men,

(24:32):
as with John Ball and the revolts of thirteen eighty
in the Insurrection of wat Tyler, followed as it was
by shameless mad ventures through Wickliffe, by the glories of
the Tutors, the overthrow of the Stuarts, by pym Hampton Crumwell,
by William of Orange, by parliamentary reform and legislative extension.

(24:56):
From the first glimmerings of civic life to the w
light of the modern day, this nation has grown in strength,
in reason, in the deliberate purpose of holding even the
scales of justice. But Sir, with new positions, new prospects,
new opportunities, in illimitable areas of expansion, we enter upon

(25:18):
undreamed of material enlargements. A greater London will, in the
coming centuries appear, in which, through the phase of exultation
we shall assume, will be seen the miracle of time
in which we all have learned the highest technical skill,
our loftiest constructive, creative mind will be realized, the social power,

(25:42):
the redemptive agencies, the final product of his thought aspirations,
skill will be incorporated in this city of Man for men,
the city of the future, and it will be ours
all hours. London red'vova, London Reducts, London Sempier turna anapleus ultra,

(26:05):
A greater England shall be gathered within its walls. It
will hold our sanctified patriotism, our emancipated reason, our ennobled,
disciplined applied science, the embodiment of our imagination, And to
its doors the world will gather too, in fealty, in trust,

(26:27):
in homage, oh at presidium, at dulce decus nam. The
voice ceased. The speaker dropped dumbly into his seat, and
for an instant held his hands over features, convulsed with feeling.
The surprising thing, then, was the awful silence, the deadness

(26:48):
of that living, throbbing, almost frantic audience, who, looking out
upon a blackness of uncertainty, felt the happy past, radiant
with ease and fame, ceremonial and cultured life, luxury slipping
out of their possession forever, and uttered no sound. The
speaker of the house rose. There was a shifting of heads,

(27:10):
the rustle of turning bodies, a simultaneous orientation, but no
other sound, and Liocraft scanned the multitude more again the
portentous silence. The speaker, with quite unusual ardor, alluded to
the imposing power and beauty of the speech and put
the motion. And then another thing more astonishing happened. That

(27:32):
House of Commons leaped to its feet and shouted in
one long, vibrant roar, I I I. The eager agony
of the assemblage then split and tore the proud repression
that had almost strangled it. Cry upon cry started from

(27:52):
various points, and the clamor grew. The agitation took on
the aspect of disorder and panic, and then resolved itself
into thundering cheers for the king. And then, with electrifying unanimity,
the multitude sang the national anthem. It was over. The

(28:13):
House of Commons had ordered the evacuation of England. The
House of Peers would follow their lead. And while that
evacuation would take place slowly, covering a long space of time,
and permit the recrant forces of nature to reform, if
they would. The face of the world as it had been,
while it had consideration for all the conflicting interests involved,

(28:35):
and was so skillfully framed as to cause the least
shock of derangement to the immense business agencies. Still it
was a surrender of the proudest people on the face
of the earth to the blind powers of nature, and
it meant for Englishmen a new heaven and a new earth.

(28:55):
Leacraft and Thompson returned that night to their lodgings at
the Bothwell Club, through Pall Mall, where but a few
of the clubs were still in action. And as they
moved painfully along over the debris and dirt, the disturbed
and shapeless heaps of snow, the abandoned articles of furniture
in front of some houses, and saw the darkened fronts

(29:17):
of others with broken windows and broached and falling doors,
noted the signs of interior commotion in the Treasury, the Admiralty,
the Foreign and Indian Offices, the War Office, and the
horse Guards. They felt that Parliament had already been forestalled,
and that the evacuation of London, and with it all England,

(29:39):
had already begun. End of Chapter seven, Part two,