full of egg-shells, cinders, and such-like refuse. Now that one

may go about this region in comparitive security--for the London
radiations have dwindled to inconsiderable proportions--it is

possible to trace in nearly every one of these gardens some
effort to make. Here it is a poor little plank summer-house,

here it is a 'fountain' of bricks and oyster-shells, here a
'rockery,' here a 'workshop.' And in the houses everywhere there

are pitiful little decorations, clumsy models, feeble drawings.
These efforts are almost incredibly inept, like the drawings of

blindfolded men, they are only one shade less harrowing to a
sympathetic observer than the scratchings one finds upon the

walls of the old prisons, but there they are, witnessing to the
poor buried instincts that struggled up towards the light. That

god of joyous expression our poor fathers ignorantly sought, our
freedom has declared to us....

In the old days the common ambition of every simple soul was to
possess a little property, a patch of land, a house uncontrolled

by others, an 'independence' as the English used to put it. And
what made this desire for freedom and prosperity so strong, was

very evidently the dream of self-expression, of doing something
with it, of playing with it, of making a personal delightfulness,

a distinctiveness. Property was never more than a means to an
end, nor avarice more than a perversion. Men owned in order to

do freely. Now that every one has his own apartments and his own
privacy secure, this disposition to own has found its release in

a new direction. Men study and save and strive that they may
leave behind them a series of panels in some public arcade, a row

of carven figures along a terrace, a grove, a pavilion. Or they
give themselves to the penetration of some still opaque riddle in

phenomena as once men gave themselves to the accumulation of
riches. The work that was once the whole substance of social

existence--for most men spent all their lives in earning a
living--is now no more than was the burden upon one of those old

climbers who carried knapsacks of provisions on their backs in
order that they might ascend mountains. It matters little to the

easy charities of our emancipated time that most people who have
made their labour contribution produce neither new beauty nor new

wisdom, but are simply busy about those pleasant activities and
enjoyments that reassure them that they are alive. They help, it

may be, by reception and reverberation, and they hinder nothing.
...

Section 11
Now all this phase of gigantic change in the contours and

appearances of human life which is going on about us, a change as
rapid and as wonderful as the swift ripening of adolescence to

manhood after the barbaric boyish years, is correlated with moral
and mental changes at least as unprecedented. It is not as if old

things were going out of life and new things coming in, it is
rather that the altered circumstances of men are making an appeal

to elements in his nature that have hitherto been suppressed, and
checking tendencies that have hitherto been over-stimulated and

over-developed. He has not so much grown and altered his
essential being as turned new aspects to the light. Such turnings

round into a new attitude the world has seen on a less extensive
scale before. The Highlanders of the seventeenth century, for

example, were cruel and bloodthirsty robbers, in the nineteenth
their descendants were conspicuously trusty and honourable men.

There was not a people in Western Europe in the early twentieth
century that seemed capable of hideous massacres, and none that

had not been guilty of them within the previous two centuries.
The free, frank, kindly, gentle life of the prosperous classes in

any European country before the years of the last wars was in a
different world of thought and feeling from that of the dingy,

suspicious, secretive, and uncharitable existence of the
respectable poor, or the constant personal violence, the squalor

and naive passions of the lowest stratum. Yet there were no real
differences of blood and inherent quality between these worlds;

their differences were all in circumstances, suggestion, and
habits of mind. And turning to more individual instances the

constantly observed difference between one portion of a life and
another consequent upon a religious conversion, were a standing

example of the versatile possibilities of human nature.
The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities

and businesses and economic relations shook them also out of
their old established habits of thought, and out of the lightly

held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.
To borrow a word from the old-fashioned chemists, men were made

nascent; they were released from old ties; for good or evil they
were ready for new associations. The council carried them

forward for good; perhaps if his bombs had reached their
destination King Ferdinand Charles might have carried them back

to an endless chain of evils. But his task would have been a
harder one than the council's. The moral shock of the atomic

bombs had been a profound one, and for a while the cunning side
of the human animal was overpowered by its sincere realisation of

the vital necessity for reconstruction. The litigious and trading
spirits cowered together, scared at their own consequences; men

thought twice before they sought mean advantages in the face of
the unusualeagerness to realise new aspirations, and when at

last the weeds revived again and 'claims' began to sprout, they
sprouted upon the stony soil of law-courts reformed, of laws that

pointed to the future instead of the past, and under the blazing
sunshine of a transforming world. A new literature, a new

interpretation of history were springing into existence, a new
teaching was already in the schools, a new faith in the young.

The worthy man who forestalled the building of a research city
for the English upon the Sussex downs by buying up a series of

estates, was dispossessed and laughed out of court when he made
his demand for some preposterouscompensation; the owner of the

discredited Dass patents makes his last appearance upon the
scroll of history as the insolvent proprietor of a paper called

The Cry for Justice, in which he duns the world for a hundred
million pounds. That was the ingenuous Dass's idea of justice,

that he ought to be paid about five million pounds annually
because he had annexed the selvage of one of Holsten's

discoveries. Dass came at last to believe quite firmly in his
right, and he died a victim of conspiracy mania in a private

hospital at Nice. Both of these men would probably have ended
their days enormously" target="_blank" title="ad.巨大的，庞大的">enormouslywealthy, and of course ennobled in the

England of the opening twentieth century, and it is just this
novelty of their fates that marks the quality of the new age.

The new government early discovered the need of a universal
education to fit men to the great conceptions of its universal

rule. It made no wrangling attacks on the local, racial, and
sectarian forms of religious profession that at that time divided

the earth into a patchwork of hatreds and distrusts; it left
these organisations to make their peace with God in their own

time; but it proclaimed as if it were a mere secular truth that
sacrifice was expected from all, that respect had to be shown to

all; it revived schools or set them up afresh all around the
world, and everywhere these schools taught the history of war and

the consequences and moral of the Last War; everywhere it was
taught not as a sentiment but as a matter of fact that the

salvation of the world from waste and contention was the common
duty and occupation of all men and women. These things which are

now the elementary commonplaces of human intercourse seemed to
the councillors of Brissago, when first they dared to proclaim

them, marvellously daring discoveries, not untouched by doubt,
that flushed the cheek and fired the eye.

The council placed all this educationalreconstruction in the
hands of a committee of men and women, which did its work during

the next few decades with remarkablebreadth and effectiveness.
This educational committee was, and is, the correlative upon the

mental and spiritual side of the redistribution committee. And
prominent upon it, and indeed for a time quite dominating it, was

a Russian named Karenin, who was singular in being a congenital
cripple. His body was bent so that he walked with difficulty,

suffered much pain as he grew older, and had at last to undergo
two operations. The second killed him. Already malformation,

which was to be seen in every crowd during the middle ages so
that the crippled beggar was, as it were, an essential feature of

the human spectacle, was becoming a strange thing in the world.
It had a curious effect upon Karenin's colleagues; their feeling