Part 25 (2/2)

Prosperity never before iined, power never yet wielded bybut a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid All New York was de new men, and all the new forces, condensed into corporations, were de a new type of y, will and mind of the old type--for whoht As one jolted over the pavements or read the last week's newspapers, the new man seemed close at hand, for the old one had plainly reached the end of his strength, and his failure had become catastrophic Every one saw it, and every hways of history looked out of the clubon the turmoil of Fifth Avenue, and felt hi the anarchy, conscious of the coer for the solution, but unable to conceive whence the next impulse was to come or hoas to act The two-thousand-years failure of Christianity roared upward froht

Having nothing else to do, the traveller went on to Washi+ngton to wait the end There Roosevelt was training Constantines and battling Trusts With the Battle of Trusts, a student of mechanics felt entire sympathy, not merely as a matter of politics or society, but also as a measure of er part of the neer that had been created since 1840, and were obnoxious because of their vigorous and unscrupulous energy They were revolutionary, troubling all the old conventions and values, as the screws of ocean stea They tore society to pieces and trampled it under foot As one of their earliest victims, a citizen of Quincy, born in 1838, had learned submission and silence, for he knew that, under the laws of e of the forces, must make his situation only worse; but he was beyond measure curious to see whether the conflict of forces would produce the new ies seemed left on earth to breed The new man could be only a child born of contact between the new and the old energies

Both had been familiar since childhood, as the story has shown, and neither had warped the ue had reason to be impartial, it was he The sole object of his interest and syer one watched, the less could be seen of hi; they owned a co, wealth and purpose; but of the forces behind Roosevelt one knew little; their cohesion was slight; their training irregular; their objects vague The public had no idea what practical systee it The single problem before it was not so much to control the Trusts as to create the society that could e the Trusts The new American must be either the child of the new forces or a chance sport of nature The attraction of mechanical power had already wrenched the Americanheroic efforts to restore to even action, and he had every right to active support and sympathy from all the world, especially from the Trusts themselves so far as they were human; but the doubt persisted whether the force that educated was really man or nature--mind or motion The mechanical theory, mostly accepted by science, seemed to require that the law of ress would continue as before

In that, or any other case, a nineteenth-century education was as useless or hteenth-century education had been to the child of 1838; but Adaue For his dynamic theory of history he cared no as; but, if it were an approach to measurement of motion, it would verify or disprove itself within thirty years At the calculated acceleration, the head of the meteor-stream must very soon pass perihelion Therefore, dispute was idle, discussion was futile, and silence, next to good-temper, was the mark of sense If the acceleration, measured by the development and economy of forces, were to continue at its rate since 1800, the mathematician of 1950 should be able to plot the past and future orbit of the human race as accurately as that of the November meteoroids

Naturally such an attitude annoyed the players in the game, as the attitude of the umpire is apt to infuriate the spectators Above all, it was profoundly une effort On the other hand, it tended to encourage foresight and to economize waste of mind If it was not itself education, it pointed out the economies necessary for the education of the new American There, the duty stopped

There, too, life stopped Nature has educated herself to a singular sylacier, nearly five thousand feet above sea-level, Captain Scott found carcasses of seals, where the animals had laboriously flopped up, to die in peace ”Unless we had actually found these re seal could have transported itself over fifty lacier-surface,” but ”the seal seems often to crawl to the shore or the ice to die, probably from its instinctive dread of its marine enemies” In India, Purun Dass, at the end of states the deer and monkeys, rather than remain with man Even in America, the Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone--but never hustled For that reason, one's own passive obscurity seemed sometimes nearer nature than John Hay's exposure To the normal animal the instinct of sport is innate, and historians the their bears; but in its turn even the seal dislikes to be worried to death in age by creatures that have not the strength or the teeth to kill hiton, Novelance that Hay must have rest Already Mrs Hay had bade hi her husband to Europe as soon as the Session should be over, and although Hay protested that the idea could not even be discussed, his strength failed so rapidly that he could not effectually discuss it, and ended by yielding without struggle He would equally have resigned office and retired, like Purun Dass, had not the President and the press protested; but he often debated the subject, and his friends could throw no light on it Ada Hay close his career by e that vanity for vanity, the crown of peacemaker orth the cross of ht, while the croas still uncertain Adaly correct He thought that Russia should have negotiated instantly on the fall of Port Arthur, January 1, 1905; he found that she had not the energy, but meant to wait till her navy should be destroyed The delay measured precisely the time that Hay had to spare

The close of the Session on March 4 left hith to crawl on board shi+p, March 18, and before his steaay as when he first lighted on the Markoe house in I Street forty-four years earlier The clouds that gather round the setting sun do not always take a sober coloring from eyes that have kept watch on mortality; or, at least, the sobriety is sometimes scarcely sad One walks with one's friends squarely up to the portal of life, and bids good-bye with a smile One has done it so often! Hay could scarcely pace the deck; he nourished no illusions; he was convinced that he should never return to his work, and he talked lightly of the death sentence that heof office and ether, and the malaria of power left its only trace in the sense of tasks inco frankly at his dozen treaties hung up in the Senate Committee-room like lambs in a butcher's shop, one could still reht years of office he had solved nearly every old problem of A to annoy his successor He had brought the great Atlantic powers into a working systeed into a coent allotment of activities For the first tiht, and would, if it succeeded, owe its virtues to hi peace in Manchuria, he could do no ainst continent in arms--the only apparent alternative to his sche the catastrophe

This rosy view served to soothe disgusts which every parting stateset out one's notebook in order to jot down the exact figures on either side

Why add up the elements of resistance and anarchy? The Kaiser supplied hiures, just as the Cretic approached Morocco Every one was doing it, and see

Arrived at Genoa, the party hid itself for a fortnight at Nervi, and he gained strength rapidly as long as he made no effort and heard no call for action Then they all went on to Nanheim without relapse There, after a few days, Adaular treatment, and came up to Paris The medical reports proht-handed as ever To the last he wrote cheerfully of his progress, and aht scepticism, of his various doctors; but when the treatment ended, three weeks later, and he calance, that he had lost strength, and the return to affairs and intervieore him rapidly out He was conscious of it, and in his last talk before starting for London and Liverpool he took the end of his activity for granted ”You otiations,”

was the remonstrance ”I've not time!” he replied ”You'll need little time!” was the rejoinder Each was correct

There it ended! Shakespeare himself could use no more than the commonplace to express what is incapable of expression ”The rest is silence!” The few fa an idea trite beyond rivalry, served Shakespeare, and, as yet, no one has saidin early July, as Ada down to dine under the trees at Armenonville, he learned that Hay was dead He expected it; on Hay's account, he was even satisfied to have his friend die, as ould all die if we could, in full fa his power to the last One had seen scores of emperors and heroes fade into cheap obscurity even when alive; and now, at least, one had not that to fear for one's friend It was not even the suddenness of the shock, or the sense of void, that threw Adams into the depths of Hamlet's Shakespearean silence in the full flare of Paris frivolity in its favorite haunt where worldly vanity reached its most futile climax in human history; it was only the quiet suo The three friends had begun life together; and the last of the three had no one Education had ended for all three, and only beyond some remoter horizon could its values be fixed or renewed Perhaps soht be allowed to return together for a holiday, to see the ht of the mistakes of their successors; and perhaps then, for the first ti the carnivores, they would find a world that sensitive and tiard without a shudder

THE END