522 



The Review of Reviews. 



Kovtmber 1, 1906. 



shone her third great qua'ity, her manifest confi- 

 dence in the respectful subordination of the world. 



She was pale and a little out of breath that day, 

 but without any loss of her ultimate confidence. It 

 was clear to me that she had come to interview 

 Stuart upon the outbreak of passion that had bridged 

 the gulf between their families. 



And here, again, I find myself writing in an un- 

 known language, so far as my younger readers are 

 concerned. You who know only the world that 

 followed the Great Change will find much that I am 

 telling inconceivable. Upon these points I cannot 

 appeal, as I have appealed for other confirmations, 

 to the o'd newspapers ; these were the things that 

 no one wrote about because evervone understood 

 and everyone had taken up an attitude. 



There were in England and America, and indeed 

 throughout the world, two great informal divisions 

 of human beings — the Secure and the Insecure. 

 There was not, and never had been, in either 

 country a nobility — it was, and remains, a common 

 error that the British peers were noble. Neither in 

 law nor custom were there noble families : and we 

 altogether lacked the edification one found in 

 Russia, for example, of a poor nobility. A peerage 

 was an hereditary possession that, like the family 

 land, concerned only the eldest son of a house: It 

 radiated no lustre of rwblessc oblige. The rest of 

 the world were in law and practice common — and 

 all America was common. But through the private 

 ownership of land that had resulted from the neg- 

 lect of feudal obligations in Britain, and the utter 

 want of political foresight in the Americas, large 

 masses of property had become artificiallv stable in 

 the hands of a small minority, to whom it was neces- 

 sary to mortgage all new public and private enter- 

 prises, and who were held together, not by any 

 tradition of service and nobilitv, but the natural 

 sympathy of common interests and a common large 

 scale of living. 



It was a class without any very definite boun- 

 daries. Vigorous individualities, by methods, for 

 the most part, violent and questionable, were con- 

 stantly thrusting themselves from insecurity to se- 

 curity, and the sons and daughters of secure people, 

 by marrying insecurity or by wild extravagance or 

 flagrant vice, would sink into the life of anxietv 

 and insufficiency which was the ordinary life of 

 man. The rest of the population was landless, and, 

 except by working directly or indirectly for the 

 Secure, had no legal right to exist. And such was 

 the shallowness and insufficiency of our thought. 

 such the stifled egotism of all our feelings before 

 the La.st Days, that very few, indeed, of the Secure 

 could be found to doubt that this was the natural 

 and only conceivable order of the world. 



It is the life of the Insecure under the' old order 

 that I am displaying, and I hope that I am convey- 

 ing something of its hopeless bitterness to you, but 

 vou must not imagine that the Secure lived lives of 



paradisaical happiness. The pit of insecurity below 

 them made itself felt, even though it was not com- 

 prehended. Life about them was ugly ; the sight 

 of ugly and mean houses, of ill-dressed people, the 

 vulgar appeals of the dealers in popular commodi- 

 tites, were not to be escaped. There was below the 

 threshold of their minds an uneasiness ; they not 

 only did not think clearly about social economy, 

 but they displayed an instinctive disinclination to 

 think. Their security was not so perfect that they 

 had not a dread of falling toward the pit. They 

 were always lashing themselves by new ropes ; their 

 cultivation of " connections," of interests, their desire 

 to conform and improve their positions, was a con- 

 stant ignoble preoccupation. You must read 

 Thackeray to get the full flavour of their lives. 



Then the bacterium was apt to disregard class 

 distinctions, and they were never reallv happy in 

 their servants. Read their surviving books.' Each 

 generation bewails the decay of that " fidelity " of 

 servants no generation ever saw. A world that is 

 squalid in one comer is squalid altogether, but 

 that they never understood. They believed there 

 was not enough of anything to go round, they be- 

 lieved that this was the intention of God and an 

 incurable condition of life, and thev held pas- 

 sionately and with a sense of right to their dispro- 

 portionate share. They maintained a common in- 

 tercourse as " Society " of all who were practically 

 secure, and their choice of that word is exhaustively 

 eloquent of the quality of their philosophy. 



But. if you can master these alien ideas upon 

 which the old system rested, just in the same mea- 

 sure ^vill you understand the horror these people 

 had for marriages with the Insecure. In the case 

 of their girls and women it was extraordinarily rare, 

 and in the case of either sex it was regarded as a 

 disastrous social crime. Anything was better than 

 that. 



You are probably aware of the hideous fate that 

 was only too probably the lot, during those last dark 

 days, of everv girl of the insecure classes who loved 

 and gave wav to the impulse of self-abandonment 

 without marriage, and so you will understand the 

 peculiar situation of Nettie with voung Verrall. One 

 or the other had to suffer. And as they were both 

 in a state of great emotional exaltation and capable 

 of strange generosities toward each other, it was an 

 open question, and naturally a source of great 

 anxiety to a mother in Mrs. Verrall's position, 

 whether the sufferer might not be her son — whether 

 as the outcome of that glowing, irresponsible com- 

 merce, Nettie mig'ht not return prospective mistress 

 of Checkshill Towers. The chances were greatly 

 against that conclusion, but such things did occur. 



These laws and customs sound, I know, like a 

 record of some nasty-minded lunatic's inventions. 

 They were invincible facts in that vanished world 

 into which, hv some accident, I had been born, and 

 it was the dream of any better state of things that 



