Delphi complete works of.., p.304
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 304
The sheer lightness and brightness of things set everybody on the move. All the people in town rushed to the seaside. All the people who lived by the sea flocked to the town. Tourists filled all the hotels and the hotel men went on all the tours. The continent was full of Americans and Americans were full of the continent.
It began to get so big and so bright there really wasn’t any night. Night was extinguished in a glare of light and a babel of sound. All round the bright world Jazz called to Jazz and radio squawked to radio. People in London listened at midnight to an anthem sung by priests in Tibet to-morrow morning: New York watched the pictures of the Oxford and Cambridge boat race, hours before it happened.
And everywhere was money — money, money, lots of it. “Take it, my dear fellow, I don’t need it. How much did you say? — ten pounds? Better have twenty, you might need it.” Jones lent to Smith, Smith lent to Brown and Brown lent to Jones. Tokio floated a loan in New York and New York floated it back to South America. Money floated like scum all over the ocean.
Also investment. People without a penny invested thousands. Shopkeepers bought up mines and mines bought chain stores: bankers bought farms and farmers bought banks.
Things certainly moved! Of course, the gaols were full, but a new cry had gone out for “sunlight in every cell,” and so the gaols were big and bright with jazz music pouring out of every window, and with burglars telling the warden when to buy copper and when to drop nickel.
Buy! Soon you didn’t need to buy! You just picked things up! One man — I knew him — picked up a quarter of a mine in Northern British Columbia for a song — and he couldn’t sing, either. Another picked up twenty shares in a pearl fishery in Switzerland; another man got for practically nothing, or less, forty thirty-fifths of an ice plant in Greenland. There was something coming to everybody, and everybody got what was coming to him.
All this made a great intellectual brightening. Talk became so interesting! Everybody else’s mind seemed so bright — what with nickel and copper and Kansas hogs on the hoof, and Rhodesian cotton by the bale — and all going up! Every dinner party was a rattle of brilliant repartee made up of equal parts of arithmetic, geography, hogoaraphy and market biography; or of softer undertones, in whispered asides, such as “Hogs are up in Kansas, darling, by a cent and a half!” “Oh, Fred, isn’t that lovely?” “Yes, sweetheart, and Selected High Quarters are up higher still. They touched 25 cents.” “Oh, Fred, what a lot it will mean to mother!”
Of course, what was really happening was simply “inflation.” We were all just being “inflated” and we didn’t know it. The merry banker who shoved a hundred sovereigns across the counter, in that pleasant way he had, why, he was just inflated; that was all. The kindly broker who gave us — practically gave us — the shares in the Andalusian Asbestos Abattoir — he was just inflated. The merry waiter who squirted the champagne all over our shirt-front and wouldn’t charge for it — inflated. The jolly clergyman who ran the Mothers’ and Children’s lottery on the Abyssinia Sweepstake and cleaned up — you remember, cleaned up enough to send all the Home for Incurables to the seaside, and they never came back, drowned or something, but it didn’t matter —— Well, of course, the whole thing was just inflation.
The Government, too. There was that terribly funny speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer — nineteen-twenty-something, wasn’t it? — in which he said that he was afraid there was going to be a surplus, and the house roared!
All the world in those big and bright days seemed infected with something. Scientists tell us that there is a gas that could do it, a thing called by the technical name of protoxide of nitrogen, but also known as “laughing gas.” It was just as if we had each had a whiff of protoxide every hour or so and were inflated with it. It is just possible, so the geologists say, that this gas lurks in the depths and crevices of the earth under our feet and at times filters through and infects us. So that was what was wrong. We were all full of gas. When the Prime Minister — I forget which one — made that splendid, buoyant, hopeful speech, ending with the words, “England! England!” and then fell over backwards while the house rocked and cheered — well — he was just full of gas. The merry fellows on the golf-links losing three-shilling balls on every other drive — the hilarious meetings of the shareholders, the gaiety of the Federated-Charities Tag-Day — all of it, just gas, merely inflation.
Too bad.
That was it. All the brightness: all the laughter and the merriment of the present: the fond hopes for the future, the fortunes that seemed assured, the old age so comfortably provided for — so that was all it was, just inflation! The bright new world iridescent with the sunlit colours of the soap bubble! To think that it had to go! ——
Of course, it had to go. It couldn’t last. Sooner or later there was bound to come a wave of depression. That is always the fate of our humanity. It no sooner gets set in any one direction than a wave of something knocks it into another. It is like a tired swimmer staggering ashore in front of a rising tide.
So depression came, first here and then there and in little bits. Somebody staggered home from a lobster lunch and lay down flat and murmured, “I’m depressed.” People on tiptoe moved about him. “He’s depressed,” they whispered. Then more people and more; and so it spread. Depressed people won’t travel: so it was soon found that a wave of depression had hit the tourist business. Then another wave of it smothered the hotel business. So it kept spreading: the papers reported that copper was depressed, that rubber was sinking, that Kansas hogs on the hoof were feeling terrible. It reached economic social life: it appeared in little signs and notices: “Owing to the depression the miners will only mine just a little now and then,” or, “Owing to the depression the anniversary of Christopher Columbus will not be observed.”
For all of which there is of course only one remedy, Deflation. We have got to deflate. In fact that is what we are doing now; we are being deflated. People look about them in this saddening world and wonder what is happening. What is this queer strange feeling that is reaching all of us? — this vague sense of discomfort and apprehension that never leaves us? Why has our bright world grown so dull, — all the things that were bigger and brighter and that are growing smaller and dingier?
How changed the people are! Where is that merry banker who shovelled me over the sovereigns — not this disobliging, discourteous dummy who tells me that my cheque is no good merely because there is no money in my account. Where is that merry fellow who used to drive the three-shilling golf ball into the water hazard and laugh at it? Where? There he is, on all fours, upside down in the rushes beside the pond looking for the sixpenny ball that some one lost there last week.
All the world is getting like that; Michaelmas Jones who rode in his thousand-guinea car and weighed 250 pounds without his cuff-links is now walking and weighs only 150 pounds. He’s deflating. But of course what he weighs now is troy weight — the fellow is a real Trojan.
Trojans all, but how dull they are. All they can talk of at dinner now is of the fall in copper, and the crash in rubber and the smash in wheat. Bright eyes grow dim with tears about the whispered rumour that bullock hides have fallen again. Old people sit with clasped hands, silent all evening because they know now that Siamese pig-iron is unsaleable. They are sitting silent, deflating. Their married daughter who was going to take a trip to the continent is not going: she will stay at home and deflate in Devonshire. The American tourists who were going to make a tour in Devonshire will stay at home and deflate in Kansas City. . . .
How changed, this bigger and brighter world!
But listen! If this process of deflation has got to go on, let’s get at it and deflate in earnest and with good-will. I’ll confess, if you will, that I wasn’t brought up to ride in a taxi: I’ll confess, if you will, that till three years ago I never owned a single gold-mine: I’ll admit that it is not so long ago that I used to be afraid of a waiter, and could eat without a finger-bowl: that I used to do such ridiculous things as turn off an electric bulb when I went out just to save light: that I only ate three meals a day and thought that Pâté de Foie Gras was the name of a French general.
We must all deflate. And the young people most of all. How ridiculous — in the inflated days — to call for a girl in a hired car to take her to a dance only three or four miles away! Let her walk. How insane to bring her a great bunch of hothouse roses! Let her twine a wild rose in her hair, the way our grandmother did: or go out with her to the meadows or the pasture and find an early cowslip. We must have deflated courtship, and deflated weddings, with a mournful best man, gloomy little deflated bridesmaids, and a clergyman with all the gas gone out of him.
We must get down to it.
After all, it won’t last for ever. Things never do. Not for nothing did nature frame this universe in spinning circular orbits. Things come around again. Something is bound to happen. Perhaps some one will get up a war, a really destructive war, the only thing humanity seems to understand, one big enough to restore prosperity. Not right here, of course. But perhaps we could get Brazil — it’s an ambitious country — to invade Mongolia. Then the sharp rise in coffee will start an upward movement in leather and a boom in copper and a gold-rush to Patagonia and there we are — spinning again and with the gas turned on full.
But, till then, let us take our deflation like men, — shrinking, contracting, subtracting, condensing, getting smaller and denser and duller — but at least — men.
L’ENVOI: WHAT NEXT?. A GLIMPSE INTO OUR ULTIMATE FUTURE
THERE ARE CERTAIN people, of whom I am one, who have the peculiar gift of looking into the future. I believe it is often called “peering” into the future. But I don’t need to “peer.” I just look; and the farther I look the better I see.
This peculiar gift, which is technically called “prophetic vision,” is one of the most unchallenged assets that anyone can possess. Provided it is kept well ahead of the present, say a hundred years in advance, it involves nothing of what we call, on my side of the Atlantic, a “come back.”
I propose to exercise this gift now on behalf of the readers of this book and to show to them the kind of world in which will be living, a few centuries on, the future readers of my works, then swollen, of course, to an immeasurable multitude.
The judgments involved and the arguments pursued are so simple and so inevitable that no one can dissent from them.
To begin. We now live in a world in which talk and speech, pictures and sounds, flow easily to every corner of the globe. The Prince of Wales makes a broadcast address from London to Montreal; the Chinese sit and blink at the pictures of the Belgian coronation; and the pygmies of Equatorial Africa follow eagerly the fortunes of the American World Baseball Series. In other words, we are now all talking to one another. For the first time in history there is a world inhabited by a human race.
In such circumstances all the world gets the same general idea at the same time. All the world thinks intensely about the same thing in the same way. The pygmies are just as worried over the collapse of the Stock Exchange as we are: they lost a year’s corn-cobs in it.
Now just at present all the world is worried and preoccupied over two questions — the same two everywhere. These are the peace-and-war question and the unemployment question. As to war, all the world has, quite suddenly, come to realize that there is “nothing to it.” A wave of anti-war feeling, in thought, in literature, plays, books and pictures, is submerging the whole world. War has got to go. The pygmies feel that as long as they stood up pygmy to pygmy, with a big club, it was real stuff. But now when a canful of gas lays out a whole row of pygmies, toes up, in the long grass under the cactus, without a chance even to know who threw it, the whole business is bankrupt.
When the world, all the world, tackles a problem in that spirit it is bound to solve it. It is not that war is any “muddier and bloodier” than it used to be. It was always that. The first crusaders were cannibals and the soldiers of the Religious Wars regarded “atrocities” much as we regard football. But machinery has killed war. It has made war as complex and tiresome as the packing industry in the Middle Western States. Any man working at it feels the need for a vacation, and longs for a round of golf. War is dead. Machinery killed it.
Not so homicide. That is different. Homicide corresponds to general instinct in our nature and is bound to stay. The desire to kill people is quite natural. If I see a fiend in green goggles roar past me on a motor-cycle at a speed of fifty miles an hour, tearing my ears with noise, I want to kill him. Rightly so. It may be inexpedient to do it, but it would be the thing to do. I may want to kill an umpire, or a comedian or an after-dinner speaker — but to want to kill a whole nation, to poison and drown and destroy by machinery thousands of innocent beings, to pretend that little children are “enemies,” and to want to starve them to death — ah! no, I won’t do it. Don’t ask me. War, in other words, has got on the wrong side of our parental feelings, and it’s got to go.
It won’t take long. Come on, pygmies, let’s get rid of it! We don’t need any covenant, any agreement. That’s been the queer mistake up till now — the idea that you end war by a document. You end it by stopping it, and it’s over now. Ask the first pygmy you see — in a tram, on the street, anywhere. He’ll tell you. He’s done with it.
So that’s one problem done. Now as to the other — this unemployment and depression business. So long as unemployment was local and poverty personal, nobody — that is, no other person — worried over it. But now the cause of unemployment (whatever it is, nobody has ever found out) has become so universal that it affects all the world at the same time. It now becomes possible to find out what the cause is, by a process of elimination like an equation in algebra. It can’t be drink, because there is unemployment in the United States where nobody drinks. It can’t be the gold standard, because it exists in China, where they have no gold. It can’t be extravagance, because it exists in Scotland. And so on, all down the line. Which, of course, means that the solution of this economic riddle of the Sphinx is at least in sight.
The more so as there now exists a real motive for solving it. Hitherto unemployment only affected the poor. Now the accursed thing affects the rich. An unforeseen consequence of corporate organization is that the rich may at any time lose their money, without effort or fault of their own. This, in the old days of landed proprietorship, was not possible. Fortunes could not be lost without fault or folly: it needed at least a pack of cards. Hence by a queer twist of human destiny the very rich and the very poor are in the same boat. Such a situation is intolerable. This means economic salvation, or at least salvage, for both.
The exact solution of the problem doesn’t matter here. It may take another fifty years to reach it; but it’s bound to come. All in all, as compared with the great human triumphs of the past — the invention of the alphabet, the use of Arabic notation, the discovery of distilling spirits — the thing is nothing. Another half-century, then, one lifetime as it were, will have seen the clouds of war and the fogs of poverty move away from the sunlit landscape of our little world. And all the scene will change and begin to look quite different from what is now before our eyes.
The changes as a matter of fact are happening even now. The surface beneath our feet is altering. But in our present bewildered outlook we do not see the ground beneath us. Presently, however, as war dies, and poverty vanishes, humanity will begin to be aware that a queer sort of uniformity, something like a great stillness, is coming over the world.
This is beginning now. The great “sameness” which is to envelop and stifle mankind has already begun. Universal communication rapidly begets universal similarity. The word “standardization” has already come uppermost in the industrial world. Standardized machines turn out products of incomparable uniformity. Divergencies and differences drop out. They cost too much. Hence, as the age of the great sameness draws on, all men will more and more be found to be more and more alike, and they will wear the same clothes buttoned in the same way, fashioned probably in a rather infantile style. It is clear already, from the amazing spread of Miniature Golf, Tom Thumb Tennis, and Dicky Bird Football, that grown-up people revert easily to the costume of the child.
But the greatest changes and the greatest sameness will be those in the things of intellect and education. Already all our schools are being framed on the same model, with the same text-books, the same “readers,” the same recitations, the same standardized literature and adjustable patriotism. There is already no way to tell one teacher from another except by their finger-prints. Even those will soon look alike. This uniformity of the schools and school-teaching will spread all over the world. It is America’s revenge on the people who discovered it. The infinite variety of the Old World will be replaced by the prosaic uniformity of the New.
With the school, of course, goes the college. Students and studies are already being ironed out as flat as rolled steel in a Pittsburg mill. In the time to come, all the colleges will be utterly and absolutely alike. The rich variations of senility and imbecility which marked the professoriate of old days will all be gone. Each professor will be as neat as a tailor’s dummy. At the first sign of aberration he will be pensioned off to where he can do no harm.
Outside the schools and colleges will be the great mass of what was once the reading and thinking public — rapidly sifting into something like the accumulated grain in a ten-million-bushel elevator. They will still read the newspaper, the one newspaper — the best, so why have any others? — the World Gazette published from Patagonia to Peking via New York and London. It will contain the personal news of the important people in the world — there will be, say, about six of them; great world sporting events like the Tom Thumb Golf in the Sahara between the Bolsheviks of Moscow and the Y.M.C.A. of Iowa; great world disasters, such as the upsetting of a train in Patagonia (still not completely organized) with the breaking of the conductor’s leg; all of this together with one daily poem — the best in the world, so why print the others? — and one daily joke by the greatest humorist in the world, beside which the others are not worth laughing at.
