north-west, they say; and most of the bridges and large areas of
dock. Westminster, which held most of the government offices,

suffered badly from the small bomb that destroyed the Parliament,
there are very few traces of the old thoroughfare of Whitehall or

the Government region thereabout, but there are plentiful
drawings to scale of its buildings, and the great hole in the

east of London scarcely matters. That was a poor district and
very like the north and the south. . . . It will be possible to

reconstruct most of it. . . . It is wanted. Already it becomes
difficult to recall the old time--even for us who saw it.'

'It seems very distant to me,' said the girl.
'It was an unwholesome world,' reflected Karenin. 'I seem to

remember everybody about my childhood as if they were ill. They
were ill. They were sick with confusion. Everybody was anxious

about money and everybody was doing uncongenial things. They ate
a queer mixture of foods, either too much or too little, and at

odd hours. One sees how ill they were by their advertisements.
All this new region of London they are opening up now is

plastered with advertisements of pills. Everybody must have been
taking pills. In one of the hotel rooms in the Strand they have

found the luggage of a lady covered up by falling rubble and
unburnt, and she was equipped with nine different sorts of pill

and tabloid. The pill-carrying age followed the weapon-carrying
age. They are equally strange to us. People's skins must have

been in a vile state. Very few people were properly washed; they
carried the filth of months on their clothes. All the clothes

they wore were old clothes; our way of pulping our clothes again
after a week or so of wear would have seemed fantastic to them.

Their clothing hardly bears thinking about. And the congestion
of them! Everybody was jostling against everybody in those awful

towns. In an uproar. People were run over and crushed by the
hundred; every year in London the cars and omnibuses alone killed

or disabled twenty thousand people, in Paris it was worse; people
used to fall dead for want of air in the crowded ways. The

irritation of London, internal and external, must have been
maddening. It was a maddened world. It is like thinking of a

sick child. One has the same effect of feverish urgencies and
acute irrational disappointments.

'All history,' he said, 'is a record of a childhood....
'And yet not exactly a childhood. There is something clean and

keen about even a sick child--and something touching. But so much
of the old times makes one angry. So much they did seems grossly

stupid, obstinately, outrageously stupid, which is the very
opposite to being fresh and young.

'I was reading only the other day about Bismarck, that hero of
nineteenth-century politics, that sequel to Napoleon, that god of

blood and iron. And he was just a beery, obstinate, dull man.
Indeed, that is what he was, the commonest, coarsest man, who

ever became great. I looked at his portraits, a heavy, almost
froggish face, with projecting eyes and a thick moustache to hide

a poor mouth. He aimed at nothing but Germany, Germany
emphasised, indurated, enlarged; Germany and his class in

Germany; beyond that he had no ideas, he was inaccessible to
ideas; his mind never rose for a recorded instant above a

bumpkin's elaboratecunning. And he was the most influential man
in the world, in the whole world, no man ever left so deep a mark

on it, because everywhere there were gross men to resonate to the
heavy notes he emitted. He trampled on ten thousand lovely

things, and a kind of malice in these louts made it pleasant to
them to see him trample. No--he was no child; the dull, national

aggressiveness he stood for, no childishness. Childhood is
promise. He was survival.

'All Europe offered its children to him, it sacrificed education,
art, happiness and all its hopes of future welfare to follow the

clatter of his sabre. The monstrousworship of that old fool's
"blood and iron" passed all round the earth. Until the atomic

bombs burnt our way to freedom again. . . .'
'One thinks of him now as one thinks of the megatherium,' said

one of the young men.
'From first to last mankind made three million big guns and a

hundred thousand complicated great ships for no other purpose but
war.'

'Were there no sane men in those days,' asked the young man, 'to
stand against that idolatry?'

'In a state of despair,' said Edith Haydon.
'He is so far off--and there are men alive still who were alive

when Bismarck died!' . . . said the young man....
Section 5

'And yet it may be I am unjust to Bismarck,' said Karenin,
following his own thoughts. 'You see, men belong to their own

age; we stand upon a common stock of thought and we fancy we
stand upon the ground. I met a pleasant man the other day, a

Maori, whose great-grandfather was a cannibal. It chanced he had
a daguerreotype of the old sinner, and the two were marvellously

alike. One felt that a little juggling with time and either
might have been the other. People are cruel and stupid in a

stupid age who might be gentle and splendid in a gracious one.
The world also has its moods. Think of the mental food of

Bismarck's childhood; the humiliations of Napoleon's victories,
the crowded, crowning victory of the Battle of the Nations....

Everybody in those days, wise or foolish, believed that the
division of the world under a multitude of governments was

inevitable, and that it was going on for thousands of years more.
It WAS inevitable until it was impossible. Any one who had denied

that inevitability publicly would have been counted--oh! a SILLY
fellow. Old Bismarck was only just a little--forcible, on the

lines of the accepted ideas. That is all. He thought that since
there had to be national governments he would make one that was

strong at home and invincible abroad. Because he had fed with a
kind of rough appetite upon what we can see now were very stupid

ideas, that does not make him a stupid man. We've had advantages;
we've had unity and collectivism blasted into our brains. Where

should we be now but for the grace of science? I should have been
an embittered, spiteful, downtrodden member of the Russian

Intelligenza, a conspirator, a prisoner, or an assassin. You, my
dear, would have been breaking dingy windows as a suffragette.'

'NEVER,' said Edith stoutly....
For a time the talk broke into humorous personalities, and the

young people gibed at each other across the smiling old
administrator, and then presently one of the young scientific men

gave things a new turn. He spoke like one who was full to the
brim.

'You know, sir, I've a fancy--it is hard to prove such
things--that civilisation was very near disaster when the atomic

bombs came banging into it, that if there had been no Holsten and
no induced radio-activity, the world would have--smashed--much as

it did. Only instead of its being a smash that opened a way to
better things, it might have been a smash without a recovery. It

is part of my business to understand economics, and from that
point of view the century before Holsten was just a hundred

years' crescendo of waste. Only the extreme individualism of that
period, only its utter want of any collective understanding or

purpose can explain that waste. Mankind used up
material--insanely. They had got through three-quarters of all

the coal in the planet, they had used up most of the oil, they
had swept away their forests, and they were running short of tin

and copper. Their wheat areas were getting weary and populous,
and many of the big towns had so lowered the water level of their

available hills that they suffered a drought every summer. The
whole system was rushing towards bankruptcy. And they were