September 24, 2025 • 19 mins
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)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Chapter nine, Part two of the Evacuation of England by L. B. Gretecaf.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. But here
came Egypt, bearing her witness of the universality of that
power which with her at least had seemed to play
the part of a benevolent trustee and guide no longer.
(00:24):
The impetuous crowds crushed the line of march behind the
blaring band that now approached Rode. Lord Kitchener, Sirdar of
the Egyptian Army, who had resumed his ancient post, and
from an overwrought sentiment for exoneration, announced his desire to
remain there, and thus effaced the irreconcilable differences which had
(00:48):
caused lurs Kurzon's retirement from India. It was a magnanimous
action and had deeply ingratiated this popular hero in the
favor of the nation. Lord Kitchener, with d his staff,
proceeded in military stateliness and with smart precision. Five regiments
or groups of Egyptian soldiers. These were combined or selected
(01:11):
so as to make a bouquet of colors, but essentially businesslike.
Also in their serious regularity, a demeanor fortified to the
point of affectation by the plaudits and unconcealed admiration of
the hosts of people on the streets, and protruding from
every point above them, there were Arab lancers in light
(01:34):
blue uniforms, almost too delicate in tone for daily travel,
the bodies of the Camelkore, with the blackest type of
men in the Sudanese infantry regiments assimilating to the soil
of the desert in the color of their khaki costume,
and then other details of the military organization gleaming in
(01:55):
immaculate white trousers and coats. It was unmistake makably effective,
and it imparted a moral strength to this illimitable advertisement
of physical power. It recalled the campaigns of Khartum and Omdurman,
and memorialized that time worn boast of the English rehabilitation
(02:17):
of Egypt, a fact, certainly, but not to be distinguished
as a very incredible achievement. The spectacle closed with zulus
and Hottentots, the bushmen of Australia, some dejected New Zealanders,
and a picturesque assortment of Jamaican negroes who tramped along
with amusement in their staring eyes and a raggedness of
(02:40):
deportment reflecting the wasteful and careless way of the tropics.
Nor were there wanting Greeks from Cyprus. And at the last,
the loyalty of the colonies was splendidly emphasized. Canada, Australia,
South Africa, New Zealand, Netale, Bermuda, the Bahamas contributed a
(03:01):
final burst of patriotic zeal And seemed to open the
wide earth to their kindred in the English Island for
homemaking and re establishment. Nor was the show of devotion
fortuitous or hollow. It was sincere it represented a sudden reprochement,
an instantaneous and valid impulse of sympathy and support. Nothing
(03:26):
had ever happened in the history of the English people
which had had so vital an influence in stimulating unity
among the English themselves, which so peremptorily flung them into
each other's arms, and in a great peril, summoned to
the surface the inextinguishable claims of blood, ancestry, tradition, instincts,
(03:48):
and pride, advancing them to a solidarity never before realized.
Its effects were very apparent. The pictures of hope, lit
up by the imaginative flamings of ambition, almost at times
at this dread moment gave to the future in the
new habitations, awaiting them an unexpected salubrity and beauty. The
(04:12):
English leaders dreamed of new achievements, a new literature, a
greatness vastly exceeding all their historic records. Three days after
the parade, which Landcraft saw so magniloquently evolved in the
streets of London at Tilbury, the King left English soil
to transplant the symbols and the functions of the English
(04:34):
government to Australia, and to begin the new experiment. The hills,
the fields, the shores were all too contracted to hold.
The army, and the people gathered in one's sublime throb
of loyalty and affection to witness the inexpressible event. The King,
wearing the uniform of a field marshal, issued from a
(04:57):
royal tent and with uncovered head, moved towards the shore
where his barge was moored. The moment was statuesque. The
immeasurable multitude, with a wave of heart breaking emotion, uncovered
the national hymn, played by a string and wind orchestra
of four hundred pieces pierced the air with its magnificent
(05:19):
undulation of melody, and a selected chorus led the engulfing
tide of song amid the surges of vocal outpouring. The
parks of artillery belched their resounding salutes. The lines of
war vessels, with their crews at attention, returned the iron
throated call, and the king, standing below the sweeping oars,
(05:41):
turned for an instant towards the shore, and then regained
his first posture of immovable fixture upon the pregnable sides
of the Dreadnought, whither each stroke of those fateful oarsmen
was swiftly sending him. The suspense was insupportable. The poignant,
crushing terror of it all, the incredible predicament of a
(06:04):
nation bodily leaving its birthplace, stunned the crowds, and in silence,
with a thousand varying episodes throughout its interminable acres, the
populace stood dumb as the unresponsive rock, apparently as apathetic
as the herding cows. Then, at SunFall, the Dreadnought, followed
(06:25):
by an escort of cruisers, heavily churned the waters and
passed down the Thames from its mouth into the channel,
and so on to the open sea. And with it
went the concentrated expression of the idea of the English Empire,
the king. How strangely immobile is nature. A race which
(06:47):
had covered its literary vestures with the garlands of poetry
brought from the imagery in Nature's picture book, which had
spent its brain and industry in winning for Nature new
devotees and new sacrifices of praises and idolatry, which had
enthroned among its chiefest charms, it surrendered to the control
(07:08):
of Nature. In this hour of torturing, doubt, disenthronement, and
eviction won no sign of recognition. The day closed brightly,
the sun went down in a sky of unchecked splendor,
and the moon illuminated night bathed the ancient bastions of
Tilbury with an argent sheen. The terrible event found no
(07:31):
reflection in the auguste calmness and serenity of nature. Its
withers were unwrung, enveloped in the processes of decay and change.
The lapse of a kingdom was but a paltry contribution
to the chronicle of destroyed continents and shattered worlds. There
was no contact between its mechanism and the obliteration of
(07:53):
a sentiment or an idea or moral regime. Nothing short
of a change in atmosphere pressure would bring tears to
its face or agony in its deportment. And what in
any case was this desertion of a land, the removal
of a people. It was subordinated to fluctuations of an
(08:14):
oceanic river, to the up and down shiverings of the
crust of the earth. It was a part of the
huge drama, part of the inlaid order of things as
determined at creation, when the ways and means of shaping
the world and all things in it were inaugurated. Why
(08:34):
should the disappearance of a condition shock a system of
disappearances and appearances which is another name for the unceasing
orbit of revolutions in the face of the earth, and
which is nature. An individual counts for nothing in the
lapse of twenty four hours gone or come. Why in
(08:54):
the eons gone and the eons yet to come, should
the migration of a people, or the emptying of a
vestige of the Earth's surface merit notice? And so the
elements did not hasten to weep or storm or furiously
proclaim their commiseration, and the whispering calls of the half
revived summer from pond and wood and meadow retained their
(09:19):
old time sweetness. Thus it happened, but from the mouth
of men and women, and prompted deeply in their yearning
soul rose clouds of prayers that night for the safety
of the King and ever and Anon. As troops marched
over the roads in the cold summer night, the hymn
(09:40):
Lord of the Wave and Deep, save those at sea
their path upon the ocean, Keep and let them see
Thy hand. Each passing day thy ministry of peace was
played with bewitching plaintiveness. Men and women stopped and sang
it allowed as the regiments went by, and sometimes a
(10:03):
company of troopers added, with resounding vigor their sonorous refrain.
The Prime Minister and mister Burrell and mister Asquith, who
had been associated in nineteen o six in the famous
deadlock between the Commons and the House of Lords over
the educational bill prepared on the departure of the King,
a statement which really was a program of evacuation. It
(10:27):
contemplated a progressive transference of the people from England, a
slowly consummated shrinkage of the business facilities, and the moderated
outflow of capital to the new centers of English activity.
In this way, some check would ensue to the frightful
fall in the land values and rentals. Apart from the
practical consideration of the physical impossibility of at once removing
(10:50):
forty millions of people, the government had usurped unusual powers
in the creation of a Committee of Direction, which, by
a house to house canvas an exhaustive survey of all
titles and a comparative estimate of the hardship imposed by
emigration to different families, with immense labor, had prepared an
itemized list of departure of the families of London. This
(11:15):
plan had been copied in the large cities of the Kingdom,
and a cooperative scheme framed which comprised a detailed prescription
of the time of sailing and the places of settlement
for all persons listed. These lists were commonly referred to
as the Doomsday rolls. The scope of the committee's power
was comprehensive. It prohibited to individuals and to societies, federations
(11:40):
and unions independent action without explicit conference with the Committee.
It proved to be a most helpful device and lessened
to the lowest possible percentage of hardship the suffering of
the people. Lacraft and his new friends freed themselves from
the jurisdiction of the Committee by announcing their intention to
(12:02):
go to America, and upon ample evidence of their ability
to do so and their independent financial standing. It was
fully understood that the evacuation was to be a sustained,
gradual movement, with, however, an irreversible determination to make it
finally complete. It was not believed that England had become
(12:24):
utterably uninhabitable, or that some vestiges of its former occupation
might not still be maintained. A part of the plan
of evacuation involved an affectionate care of its greater monuments
of architecture, if possible, though the fierceness of the winter
winds augured unhappily. For the success of this design, a
(12:46):
regency of love at any rate was to be established,
and as many links as possible of connection, sentimental and
real were to be left unbroken. And Edinburgh Thompson had
woefully noted every day the scanty paragraphs which entered the papers,
and which gave brief intimations of the devastating and continuous
(13:08):
storms which through the winter swept over Scotland, as if
in order that the impending changes might be most forcibly
realized and the loss of time averted from too leniently
interpreting the enormous seasonal metamorphosis going on. Nature had exhausted
her power in developing disaster. Terrific gales had lashed the
(13:33):
rocky coasts, Fierce insatiable blizzards had devouringly raged in the interior,
and the pitiless and untired skies had emptied avalanches of
snow upon the southern counties of Scotland. Edinburgh became a
storm center. With whirling and constancy. The storms beat upon
(13:53):
the doomed city from the east and west. Buildings were
almost buried in the banked up and superimposed drifts. Crested
ranges were in the streets, and palisades of snow tortured
into fantastic shapes towered over the outer eminences, fed from
the blinding torrents of flakes driven off from the Pentland
(14:13):
Hills and the Salisbury Crags. These summits alone in the
whitened waste lifted their scraped crowns to the thickened skies.
Edinburgh had become a city of the frost King and
his slumbering regions bivouacked on and around it, except when
aroused to ride his commotions by the sudden descent of
(14:35):
the whistling armies of the wind. These details were rather
incoherently reported as the spring advanced and an occasional survivor
from the north made his way out of the beleaguered capital.
When the spring had fairly ripened into summer, an energetic
effort was made to reach Edinburgh, and it succeeded. Scotland
(14:59):
at that time became inundated, and though the enormous accumulations
of snow refused at once to surrender their blockade, they
were so deeply broached and undermined that the North British
Line pushed a train forward to the edge of the city,
though unable to reach its depot in the heart of
the city by reason of the hammered wedge of snow
(15:21):
which it encountered under the castle's cliffs. After cutting their
way out to the Lothian Road, the explorers began investigations
and were horror stricken to find that immense conflagration had
broken out, destroying great sections of the city, which owed
its partial survival to the masses of invading snow. These
(15:44):
fires had started in the houses occupied by the domestic bandits,
who had seized the finest residences, provisioned them from the stores,
and surrendered themselves to an orgy of rapine and indulgence
by which their their own fears were stifled. Through the
excesses of their drunken dissipation. Hundreds of these unfortunates had
(16:07):
perished in the flames their recklessness had invoked. The picture
of the noble and beautiful city was shocking. The fires
had made inroads upon the attractive Prince's Street, and in
the portions west of the Caledonian Station towards the Donaldson Hospital.
Gaping openings and swept acres revealed the unchecked fury of
(16:30):
the flames. While it was probable that the city might,
with a return of auspicious conditions, resume some of its
old beauty, it was also too plain that the veto
of nature had been indelibly written across all such plans.
Glaciers had already begun their formation in the highlands, and
(16:52):
the incipient development of an ice age was forcibly proclaimed
on every hand. The logic of events was unama answerable.
The United Kingdom, throughout all its parts, must participate again
in the benighted life of Labrador and Siberia, and Europe
throughout its borders, felt the poignant exasperation of the Arctic gold.
(17:16):
It trembled with a new apprehension. The touch of those
icy fingers stretched out in myriad lines of approach, swarming
like wavering steel points in thick onslaught from the crowded skies,
made it suddenly anxious. It corrected its habits. It took
council at piety and played with beseeching care its pretty
(17:38):
role of devotee its ridiculous and wicked society. With futile haste,
filled the churches and tried to forget its inherited cruelty,
and even turned, with an unexpected solicitude, to the consideration
of improving in some sure way the state of the
untitled majority. Its scientific men rushed into congresses and explored
(18:00):
their text books, and read and re read hopeless papers
on the why and how of it, but being unable
to invent another gulf stream retired into dismal prognostications of
a returning ice age, in fact, deluded, as scientific men
often are by language. They embraced the thought of a
(18:22):
returning ice cap which would successfully force its way from
the Baltic to the Mediterranean. They nervously began measurements of
the Alpine glaciers, took temperatures, wandered up in the higher
regions of the atmosphere in balloons, sounded the floor of
the ocean, established meteorological stations everywhere, and became so excited
(18:45):
and convinced that they were happily on hand at a
critical geological juncture that they succeeded in supplying a technical
ground for panic. The statesmen and economists were more useful.
They estimated the results of any continued lowering of their temperatures,
the effects of climatic alterations on life and production, especially
(19:08):
in grain, and found that the southern countries of Europe
were in some danger, and the northern countries very really
threatened with a commercial overthrow, as England had been. They too,
turned to the colonies of their respective countries for refuge.
It looked as if the bursting receptacles of European culture
(19:29):
were about to explode and scatter over the ends of
the world, the germinal seeds of its civilization. End of
Chapter nine
Chapter nine, Part two of the Evacuation of England by L. B. Gretecaf.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. But here
came Egypt, bearing her witness of the universality of that
power which with her at least had seemed to play
the part of a benevolent trustee and guide no longer.
(00:24):
The impetuous crowds crushed the line of march behind the
blaring band that now approached Rode. Lord Kitchener, Sirdar of
the Egyptian Army, who had resumed his ancient post, and
from an overwrought sentiment for exoneration, announced his desire to
remain there, and thus effaced the irreconcilable differences which had
(00:48):
caused lurs Kurzon's retirement from India. It was a magnanimous
action and had deeply ingratiated this popular hero in the
favor of the nation. Lord Kitchener, with d his staff,
proceeded in military stateliness and with smart precision. Five regiments
or groups of Egyptian soldiers. These were combined or selected
(01:11):
so as to make a bouquet of colors, but essentially businesslike.
Also in their serious regularity, a demeanor fortified to the
point of affectation by the plaudits and unconcealed admiration of
the hosts of people on the streets, and protruding from
every point above them, there were Arab lancers in light
(01:34):
blue uniforms, almost too delicate in tone for daily travel,
the bodies of the Camelkore, with the blackest type of
men in the Sudanese infantry regiments assimilating to the soil
of the desert in the color of their khaki costume,
and then other details of the military organization gleaming in
(01:55):
immaculate white trousers and coats. It was unmistake makably effective,
and it imparted a moral strength to this illimitable advertisement
of physical power. It recalled the campaigns of Khartum and Omdurman,
and memorialized that time worn boast of the English rehabilitation
(02:17):
of Egypt, a fact, certainly, but not to be distinguished
as a very incredible achievement. The spectacle closed with zulus
and Hottentots, the bushmen of Australia, some dejected New Zealanders,
and a picturesque assortment of Jamaican negroes who tramped along
with amusement in their staring eyes and a raggedness of
(02:40):
deportment reflecting the wasteful and careless way of the tropics.
Nor were there wanting Greeks from Cyprus. And at the last,
the loyalty of the colonies was splendidly emphasized. Canada, Australia,
South Africa, New Zealand, Netale, Bermuda, the Bahamas contributed a
(03:01):
final burst of patriotic zeal And seemed to open the
wide earth to their kindred in the English Island for
homemaking and re establishment. Nor was the show of devotion
fortuitous or hollow. It was sincere it represented a sudden reprochement,
an instantaneous and valid impulse of sympathy and support. Nothing
(03:26):
had ever happened in the history of the English people
which had had so vital an influence in stimulating unity
among the English themselves, which so peremptorily flung them into
each other's arms, and in a great peril, summoned to
the surface the inextinguishable claims of blood, ancestry, tradition, instincts,
(03:48):
and pride, advancing them to a solidarity never before realized.
Its effects were very apparent. The pictures of hope, lit
up by the imaginative flamings of ambition, almost at times
at this dread moment gave to the future in the
new habitations, awaiting them an unexpected salubrity and beauty. The
(04:12):
English leaders dreamed of new achievements, a new literature, a
greatness vastly exceeding all their historic records. Three days after
the parade, which Landcraft saw so magniloquently evolved in the
streets of London at Tilbury, the King left English soil
to transplant the symbols and the functions of the English
(04:34):
government to Australia, and to begin the new experiment. The hills,
the fields, the shores were all too contracted to hold.
The army, and the people gathered in one's sublime throb
of loyalty and affection to witness the inexpressible event. The King,
wearing the uniform of a field marshal, issued from a
(04:57):
royal tent and with uncovered head, moved towards the shore
where his barge was moored. The moment was statuesque. The
immeasurable multitude, with a wave of heart breaking emotion, uncovered
the national hymn, played by a string and wind orchestra
of four hundred pieces pierced the air with its magnificent
(05:19):
undulation of melody, and a selected chorus led the engulfing
tide of song amid the surges of vocal outpouring. The
parks of artillery belched their resounding salutes. The lines of
war vessels, with their crews at attention, returned the iron
throated call, and the king, standing below the sweeping oars,
(05:41):
turned for an instant towards the shore, and then regained
his first posture of immovable fixture upon the pregnable sides
of the Dreadnought, whither each stroke of those fateful oarsmen
was swiftly sending him. The suspense was insupportable. The poignant,
crushing terror of it all, the incredible predicament of a
(06:04):
nation bodily leaving its birthplace, stunned the crowds, and in silence,
with a thousand varying episodes throughout its interminable acres, the
populace stood dumb as the unresponsive rock, apparently as apathetic
as the herding cows. Then, at SunFall, the Dreadnought, followed
(06:25):
by an escort of cruisers, heavily churned the waters and
passed down the Thames from its mouth into the channel,
and so on to the open sea. And with it
went the concentrated expression of the idea of the English Empire,
the king. How strangely immobile is nature. A race which
(06:47):
had covered its literary vestures with the garlands of poetry
brought from the imagery in Nature's picture book, which had
spent its brain and industry in winning for Nature new
devotees and new sacrifices of praises and idolatry, which had
enthroned among its chiefest charms, it surrendered to the control
(07:08):
of Nature. In this hour of torturing, doubt, disenthronement, and
eviction won no sign of recognition. The day closed brightly,
the sun went down in a sky of unchecked splendor,
and the moon illuminated night bathed the ancient bastions of
Tilbury with an argent sheen. The terrible event found no
(07:31):
reflection in the auguste calmness and serenity of nature. Its
withers were unwrung, enveloped in the processes of decay and change.
The lapse of a kingdom was but a paltry contribution
to the chronicle of destroyed continents and shattered worlds. There
was no contact between its mechanism and the obliteration of
(07:53):
a sentiment or an idea or moral regime. Nothing short
of a change in atmosphere pressure would bring tears to
its face or agony in its deportment. And what in
any case was this desertion of a land, the removal
of a people. It was subordinated to fluctuations of an
(08:14):
oceanic river, to the up and down shiverings of the
crust of the earth. It was a part of the
huge drama, part of the inlaid order of things as
determined at creation, when the ways and means of shaping
the world and all things in it were inaugurated. Why
(08:34):
should the disappearance of a condition shock a system of
disappearances and appearances which is another name for the unceasing
orbit of revolutions in the face of the earth, and
which is nature. An individual counts for nothing in the
lapse of twenty four hours gone or come. Why in
(08:54):
the eons gone and the eons yet to come, should
the migration of a people, or the emptying of a
vestige of the Earth's surface merit notice? And so the
elements did not hasten to weep or storm or furiously
proclaim their commiseration, and the whispering calls of the half
revived summer from pond and wood and meadow retained their
(09:19):
old time sweetness. Thus it happened, but from the mouth
of men and women, and prompted deeply in their yearning
soul rose clouds of prayers that night for the safety
of the King and ever and Anon. As troops marched
over the roads in the cold summer night, the hymn
(09:40):
Lord of the Wave and Deep, save those at sea
their path upon the ocean, Keep and let them see
Thy hand. Each passing day thy ministry of peace was
played with bewitching plaintiveness. Men and women stopped and sang
it allowed as the regiments went by, and sometimes a
(10:03):
company of troopers added, with resounding vigor their sonorous refrain.
The Prime Minister and mister Burrell and mister Asquith, who
had been associated in nineteen o six in the famous
deadlock between the Commons and the House of Lords over
the educational bill prepared on the departure of the King,
a statement which really was a program of evacuation. It
(10:27):
contemplated a progressive transference of the people from England, a
slowly consummated shrinkage of the business facilities, and the moderated
outflow of capital to the new centers of English activity.
In this way, some check would ensue to the frightful
fall in the land values and rentals. Apart from the
practical consideration of the physical impossibility of at once removing
(10:50):
forty millions of people, the government had usurped unusual powers
in the creation of a Committee of Direction, which, by
a house to house canvas an exhaustive survey of all
titles and a comparative estimate of the hardship imposed by
emigration to different families, with immense labor, had prepared an
itemized list of departure of the families of London. This
(11:15):
plan had been copied in the large cities of the Kingdom,
and a cooperative scheme framed which comprised a detailed prescription
of the time of sailing and the places of settlement
for all persons listed. These lists were commonly referred to
as the Doomsday rolls. The scope of the committee's power
was comprehensive. It prohibited to individuals and to societies, federations
(11:40):
and unions independent action without explicit conference with the Committee.
It proved to be a most helpful device and lessened
to the lowest possible percentage of hardship the suffering of
the people. Lacraft and his new friends freed themselves from
the jurisdiction of the Committee by announcing their intention to
(12:02):
go to America, and upon ample evidence of their ability
to do so and their independent financial standing. It was
fully understood that the evacuation was to be a sustained,
gradual movement, with, however, an irreversible determination to make it
finally complete. It was not believed that England had become
(12:24):
utterably uninhabitable, or that some vestiges of its former occupation
might not still be maintained. A part of the plan
of evacuation involved an affectionate care of its greater monuments
of architecture, if possible, though the fierceness of the winter
winds augured unhappily. For the success of this design, a
(12:46):
regency of love at any rate was to be established,
and as many links as possible of connection, sentimental and
real were to be left unbroken. And Edinburgh Thompson had
woefully noted every day the scanty paragraphs which entered the papers,
and which gave brief intimations of the devastating and continuous
(13:08):
storms which through the winter swept over Scotland, as if
in order that the impending changes might be most forcibly
realized and the loss of time averted from too leniently
interpreting the enormous seasonal metamorphosis going on. Nature had exhausted
her power in developing disaster. Terrific gales had lashed the
(13:33):
rocky coasts, Fierce insatiable blizzards had devouringly raged in the interior,
and the pitiless and untired skies had emptied avalanches of
snow upon the southern counties of Scotland. Edinburgh became a
storm center. With whirling and constancy. The storms beat upon
(13:53):
the doomed city from the east and west. Buildings were
almost buried in the banked up and superimposed drifts. Crested
ranges were in the streets, and palisades of snow tortured
into fantastic shapes towered over the outer eminences, fed from
the blinding torrents of flakes driven off from the Pentland
(14:13):
Hills and the Salisbury Crags. These summits alone in the
whitened waste lifted their scraped crowns to the thickened skies.
Edinburgh had become a city of the frost King and
his slumbering regions bivouacked on and around it, except when
aroused to ride his commotions by the sudden descent of
(14:35):
the whistling armies of the wind. These details were rather
incoherently reported as the spring advanced and an occasional survivor
from the north made his way out of the beleaguered capital.
When the spring had fairly ripened into summer, an energetic
effort was made to reach Edinburgh, and it succeeded. Scotland
(14:59):
at that time became inundated, and though the enormous accumulations
of snow refused at once to surrender their blockade, they
were so deeply broached and undermined that the North British
Line pushed a train forward to the edge of the city,
though unable to reach its depot in the heart of
the city by reason of the hammered wedge of snow
(15:21):
which it encountered under the castle's cliffs. After cutting their
way out to the Lothian Road, the explorers began investigations
and were horror stricken to find that immense conflagration had
broken out, destroying great sections of the city, which owed
its partial survival to the masses of invading snow. These
(15:44):
fires had started in the houses occupied by the domestic bandits,
who had seized the finest residences, provisioned them from the stores,
and surrendered themselves to an orgy of rapine and indulgence
by which their their own fears were stifled. Through the
excesses of their drunken dissipation. Hundreds of these unfortunates had
(16:07):
perished in the flames their recklessness had invoked. The picture
of the noble and beautiful city was shocking. The fires
had made inroads upon the attractive Prince's Street, and in
the portions west of the Caledonian Station towards the Donaldson Hospital.
Gaping openings and swept acres revealed the unchecked fury of
(16:30):
the flames. While it was probable that the city might,
with a return of auspicious conditions, resume some of its
old beauty, it was also too plain that the veto
of nature had been indelibly written across all such plans.
Glaciers had already begun their formation in the highlands, and
(16:52):
the incipient development of an ice age was forcibly proclaimed
on every hand. The logic of events was unama answerable.
The United Kingdom, throughout all its parts, must participate again
in the benighted life of Labrador and Siberia, and Europe
throughout its borders, felt the poignant exasperation of the Arctic gold.
(17:16):
It trembled with a new apprehension. The touch of those
icy fingers stretched out in myriad lines of approach, swarming
like wavering steel points in thick onslaught from the crowded skies,
made it suddenly anxious. It corrected its habits. It took
council at piety and played with beseeching care its pretty
(17:38):
role of devotee its ridiculous and wicked society. With futile haste,
filled the churches and tried to forget its inherited cruelty,
and even turned, with an unexpected solicitude, to the consideration
of improving in some sure way the state of the
untitled majority. Its scientific men rushed into congresses and explored
(18:00):
their text books, and read and re read hopeless papers
on the why and how of it, but being unable
to invent another gulf stream retired into dismal prognostications of
a returning ice age, in fact, deluded, as scientific men
often are by language. They embraced the thought of a
(18:22):
returning ice cap which would successfully force its way from
the Baltic to the Mediterranean. They nervously began measurements of
the Alpine glaciers, took temperatures, wandered up in the higher
regions of the atmosphere in balloons, sounded the floor of
the ocean, established meteorological stations everywhere, and became so excited
(18:45):
and convinced that they were happily on hand at a
critical geological juncture that they succeeded in supplying a technical
ground for panic. The statesmen and economists were more useful.
They estimated the results of any continued lowering of their temperatures,
the effects of climatic alterations on life and production, especially
(19:08):
in grain, and found that the southern countries of Europe
were in some danger, and the northern countries very really
threatened with a commercial overthrow, as England had been. They too,
turned to the colonies of their respective countries for refuge.
It looked as if the bursting receptacles of European culture
(19:29):
were about to explode and scatter over the ends of
the world, the germinal seeds of its civilization. End of
Chapter nine
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