The World Set Free

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Firmin had. 'Those were the authentic kings. In the end they were cut
up and a bit given to everybody. They sprinkled the nations--with
Kingship.'

Firmin turned himself round and faced his royal master.

'What do you intend to do, sir?' he asked. 'If you will not listen to
me, what do you propose to do this afternoon?'

The king flicked crumbs from his coat.

'Manifestly war has to stop for ever, Firmin. Manifestly this can only
be done by putting all the world under one government. Our crowns and
flags are in the way. Manifestly they must go.'

'Yes, sir,' interrupted Firmin, 'but WHAT government? I don't see what
government you get by a universal abdication!'

'Well,' said the king, with his hands about his knees, 'WE shall be the
government.'

'The conference?' exclaimed Firmin.

'Who else?' asked the king simply.

'It's perfectly simple,' he added to Firmin's tremendous silence.

'But,' cried Firmin, 'you must have sanctions! Will there be no form of
election, for example?'

'Why should there be?' asked the king, with intelligent curiosity.

'The consent of the governed.'

'Firmin, we are just going to lay down our differences and take over
government. Without any election at all. Without any sanction. The
governed will show their consent by silence. If any effective opposition
arises we shall ask it to come in and help. The true sanction of
kingship is the grip upon the sceptre. We aren't going to worry people
to vote for us. I'm certain the mass of men does not want to be bothered
with such things.... We'll contrive a way for any one interested to join
in. That's quite enough in the way of democracy. Perhaps later--when
things don't matter.... We shall govern all right, Firmin. Government
only becomes difficult when the lawyers get hold of it, and since these
troubles began the lawyers are shy. Indeed, come to think of it, I
wonder where all the lawyers are.... Where are they? A lot, of course,
were bagged, some of the worst ones, when they blew up my legislature.
You never knew the late Lord Chancellor. . . .

'Necessities bury rights. And create them. Lawyers live on dead rights
disinterred.... We've done with that way of living. We won't have more
law than a code can cover and beyond that government will be free....

'Before the sun sets to-day, Firmin, trust me, we shall have made our
abdications, all of us, and declared the World Republic, supreme and
indivisible. I wonder what my august grandmother would have made of it!
All my rights! . . . And then we shall go on governing. What else is
there to do? All over the world we shall declare that there is no longer
mine or thine, but ours. China, the United States, two-thirds of Europe,
will certainly fall in and obey. They will have to do so. What else can
they do? Their official rulers are here with us. They won't be able
to get together any sort of idea of not obeying us.... Then we
shall declare that every sort of property is held in trust for the
Republic....'

'But, sir!' cried Firmin, suddenly enlightened. 'Has this been arranged
already?'

'My dear Firmin, do you think we have come here, all of us, to talk
at large? The talking has been done for half a century. Talking
and writing. We are here to set the new thing, the simple, obvious,
necessary thing, going.'

He stood up.

Firmin, forgetting the habits of a score of years, remained seated.

'WELL,' he said at last. 'And I have known nothing!'

The king smiled very cheerfully. He liked these talks with Firmin.

Section 3

That conference upon the Brissago meadows was one of the most
heterogeneous collections of prominent people that has ever met
together. Principalities and powers, stripped and shattered until all
their pride and mystery were gone, met in a marvellous new humility.
Here were kings and emperors whose capitals were lakes of flaming
destruction, statesmen whose countries had become chaos, scared
politicians and financial potentates. Here were leaders of thought and
learned investigators dragged reluctantly to the control of affairs.
Altogether there were ninety-three of them, Leblanc's conception of
the head men of the world. They had all come to the realisation of the
simple truths that the indefatigable Leblanc had hammered into them;
and, drawing his resources from the King of Italy, he had provisioned
his conference with a generous simplicity quite in accordance with the
rest of his character, and so at last was able to make his astonishing
and entirely rational appeal. He had appointed King Egbert the
president, he believed in this young man so firmly that he completely
dominated him, and he spoke himself as a secretary might speak from the
president's left hand, and evidently did not realise himself that he was
telling them all exactly what they had to do. He imagined he was
merely recapitulating the obvious features of the situation for their
convenience. He was dressed in ill-fitting white silk clothes, and he
consulted a dingy little packet of notes as he spoke. They put him out.
He explained that he had never spoken from notes before, but that this
occasion was exceptional.

And then King Egbert spoke as he was expected to speak, and Leblanc's
spectacles moistened at that flow of generous sentiment, most amiably
and lightly expressed. 'We haven't to stand on ceremony,' said the king,
'we have to govern the world. We have always pretended to govern the
world and here is our opportunity.'

'Of course,' whispered Leblanc, nodding his head rapidly, 'of course.'

'The world has been smashed up, and we have to put it on its wheels
again,' said King Egbert. 'And it is the simple common sense of this
crisis for all to help and none to seek advantage. Is that our tone or
not?'

The gathering was too old and seasoned and miscellaneous for any great
displays of enthusiasm, but that was its tone, and with an astonishment
that somehow became exhilarating it began to resign, repudiate, and
declare its intentions. Firmin, taking notes behind his master, heard
everything that had been foretold among the yellow broom, come
true. With a queer feeling that he was dreaming, he assisted at the
proclamation of the World State, and saw the message taken out to the
wireless operators to be throbbed all round the habitable globe. 'And
next,' said King Egbert, with a cheerful excitement in his voice, 'we
have to get every atom of Carolinum and all the plant for making it,
into our control....'

Firman was not alone in his incredulity. Not a man there who was not a
very amiable, reasonable, benevolent creature at bottom; some had been
born to power and some had happened upon it, some had struggled to get
it, not clearly knowing what it was and what it implied, but none was
irreconcilably set upon its retention at the price of cosmic disaster.
Their minds had been prepared by circumstances and sedulously cultivated
by Leblanc; and now they took the broad obvious road along which King
Egbert was leading them, with a mingled conviction of strangeness and
necessity. Things went very smoothly; the King of Italy explained the
arrangements that had been made for the protection of the camp from any
fantastic attack; a couple of thousand of aeroplanes, each carrying a
sharpshooter, guarded them, and there was an excellent system of relays,
and at night all the sky would be searched by scores of lights, and the
admirable Leblanc gave luminous reasons for their camping just where
they were and going on with their administrative duties forthwith. He
knew of this place, because he had happened upon it when holiday-making
with Madame Leblanc twenty years and more ago. 'There is very simple
fare at present,' he explained, 'on account of the disturbed state of
the countries about us. But we have excellent fresh milk, good red wine,
beef, bread, salad, and lemons. . . . In a few days I hope to place
things in the hands of a more efficient caterer....'

The members of the new world government dined at three long tables on
trestles, and down the middle of these tables Leblanc, in spite of
the barrenness of his menu, had contrived to have a great multitude of
beautiful roses. There was similar accommodation for the secretaries and
attendants at a lower level down the mountain. The assembly dined as it
had debated, in the open air, and over the dark crags to the west the
glowing June sunset shone upon the banquet. There was no precedency now
among the ninety-three, and King Egbert found himself between a pleasant
little Japanese stranger in spectacles and his cousin of Central Europe,
and opposite a great Bengali leader and the President of the United
States of America. Beyond the Japanese was Holsten, the old chemist, and
Leblanc was a little way down the other side.

The king was still cheerfully talkative and abounded in ideas. He fell
presently into an amiable controversy with the American, who seemed to
feel a lack of impressiveness in the occasion.

It was ever the Transatlantic tendency, due, no doubt, to the necessity
of handling public questions in a bulky and striking manner, to
over-emphasise and over-accentuate, and the president was touched by
his national failing. He suggested now that there should be a new era,
starting from that day as the first day of the first year.

The king demurred.

'From this day forth, sir, man enters upon his heritage,' said the
American.

'Man,' said the king, 'is always entering upon his heritage. You
Americans have a peculiar weakness for anniversaries--if you will
forgive me saying so. Yes--I accuse you of a lust for dramatic effect.
Everything is happening always, but you want to say this or this is the
real instant in time and subordinate all the others to it.'

The American said something about an epoch-making day.

'But surely,' said the king, 'you don't want us to condemn all humanity
to a world-wide annual Fourth of July for ever and ever more. On account
of this harmless necessary day of declarations. No conceivable day could
ever deserve that. Ah! you do not know, as I do, the devastations of
the memorable. My poor grandparents were--RUBRICATED. The worst of these
huge celebrations is that they break up the dignified succession of
one's contemporary emotions. They interrupt. They set back. Suddenly
out come the flags and fireworks, and the old enthusiasms are furbished
up--and it's sheer destruction of the proper thing that ought to be
going on. Sufficient unto the day is the celebration thereof. Let the
dead past bury its dead. You see, in regard to the calendar, I am for
democracy and you are for aristocracy. All things I hold, are august,
and have a right to be lived through on their merits. No day should be
sacrificed on the grave of departed events. What do you think of it,
Wilhelm?'

'For the noble, yes, all days should be noble.'

'Exactly my position,' said the king, and felt pleased at what he had
been saying.

And then, since the American pressed his idea, the king contrived to
shift the talk from the question of celebrating the epoch they were
making to the question of the probabilities that lay ahead. Here every
one became diffident. They could see the world unified and at peace, but
what detail was to follow from that unification they seemed indisposed
to discuss. This diffidence struck the king as remarkable. He plunged
upon the possibilities of science. All the huge expenditure that had
hitherto gone into unproductive naval and military preparations, must
now, he declared, place research upon a new footing. 'Where one man
worked we will have a thousand.' He appealed to Holsten. 'We have only
begun to peep into these possibilities,' he said. 'You at any rate have
sounded the vaults of the treasure house.'

'They are unfathomable,' smiled Holsten.

'Man,' said the American, with a manifest resolve to justify and
reinstate himself after the flickering contradictions of the king, 'Man,
I say, is only beginning to enter upon his heritage.'

'Tell us some of the things you believe we shall presently learn, give
us an idea of the things we may presently do,' said the king to Holsten.

Holsten opened out the vistas....

'Science,' the king cried presently, 'is the new king of the world.'

'OUR view,' said the president, 'is that sovereignty resides with the
people.'

'No!' said the king, 'the sovereign is a being more subtle than that.
And less arithmetical. Neither my family nor your emancipated people. It
is something that floats about us, and above us, and through us. It is
that common impersonal will and sense of necessity of which Science is
the best understood and most typical aspect. It is the mind of the race.
It is that which has brought us here, which has bowed us all to its
demands....'

He paused and glanced down the table at Leblanc, and then re-opened at
his former antagonist.

'There is a disposition,' said the king, 'to regard this gathering as if
it were actually doing what it appears to be doing, as if we ninety-odd
men of our own free will and wisdom were unifying the world. There is
a temptation to consider ourselves exceptionally fine fellows, and
masterful men, and all the rest of it. We are not. I doubt if we should
average out as anything abler than any other casually selected body
of ninety-odd men. We are no creators, we are consequences, we are
salvagers--or salvagees. The thing to-day is not ourselves but the wind
of conviction that has blown us hither....'

The American had to confess he could hardly agree with the king's
estimate of their average.

'Holster, perhaps, and one or two others, might lift us a little,' the
king conceded. 'But the rest of us?'

His eyes flitted once more towards Leblanc.

'Look at Leblanc,' he said. 'He's just a simple soul. There are
hundreds and thousands like him. I admit, a certain dexterity, a certain
lucidity, but there is not a country town in France where there is not a
Leblanc or so to be found about two o'clock in its principal cafe. It's
just that he isn't complicated or Super-Mannish, or any of those things
that has made all he has done possible. But in happier times, don't
you think, Wilhelm, he would have remained just what his father was,
a successful epicier, very clean, very accurate, very honest. And on
holidays he would have gone out with Madame Leblanc and her knitting
in a punt with a jar of something gentle and have sat under a large
reasonable green-lined umbrella and fished very neatly and successfully
for gudgeon....'

The president and the Japanese prince in spectacles protested together.

'If I do him an injustice,' said the king, 'it is only because I want
to elucidate my argument. I want to make it clear how small are men and
days, and how great is man in comparison....'

Section 4

So it was King Egbert talked at Brissago after they had proclaimed the
unity of the world. Every evening after that the assembly dined together
and talked at their ease and grew accustomed to each other and sharpened
each other's ideas, and every day they worked together, and really for
a time believed that they were inventing a new government for the world.
They discussed a constitution. But there were matters needing attention
too urgently to wait for any constitution. They attended to these
incidentally. The constitution it was that waited. It was presently
found convenient to keep the constitution waiting indefinitely as King
Egbert had foreseen, and meanwhile, with an increasing self-confidence,
that council went on governing....

On this first evening of all the council's gatherings, after King Egbert
had talked for a long time and drunken and praised very abundantly the
simple red wine of the country that Leblanc had procured for them,
he fathered about him a group of congenial spirits and fell into a
discourse upon simplicity, praising it above all things and declaring
that the ultimate aim of art, religion, philosophy, and science alike
was to simplify. He instanced himself as a devotee to simplicity. And
Leblanc he instanced as a crowning instance of the splendour of this
quality. Upon that they all agreed.

When at last the company about the tables broke up, the king found
himself brimming over with a peculiar affection and admiration for
Leblanc, he made his way to him and drew him aside and broached what he
declared was a small matter. There was, he said, a certain order in his
gift that, unlike all other orders and decorations in the world,
had never been corrupted. It was reserved for elderly men of supreme
distinction, the acuteness of whose gifts was already touched to
mellowness, and it had included the greatest names of every age so
far as the advisers of his family had been able to ascertain them.
At present, the king admitted, these matters of stars and badges were
rather obscured by more urgent affairs, for his own part he had never
set any value upon them at all, but a time might come when they would
be at least interesting, and in short he wished to confer the Order
of Merit upon Leblanc. His sole motive in doing so, he added, was his
strong desire to signalise his personal esteem. He laid his hand
upon the Frenchman's shoulder as he said these things, with an almost
brotherly affection. Leblanc received this proposal with a modest
confusion that greatly enhanced the king's opinion of his admirable
simplicity. He pointed out that eager as he was to snatch at the
proffered distinction, it might at the present stage appear invidious,
and he therefore suggested that the conferring of it should be postponed
until it could be made the crown and conclusion of his services. The
king was unable to shake this resolution, and the two men parted with
expressions of mutual esteem.

The king then summoned Firmin in order to make a short note of a number
of things that he had said during the day. But after about twenty
minutes' work the sweet sleepiness of the mountain air overcame him, and
he dismissed Firmin and went to bed and fell asleep at once, and slept
with extreme satisfaction. He had had an active, agreeable day.

Section 5

The establishment of the new order that was thus so humanly begun,
was, if one measures it by the standard of any preceding age, a rapid
progress. The fighting spirit of the world was exhausted. Only here
or there did fierceness linger. For long decades the combative side
in human affairs had been monstrously exaggerated by the accidents of
political separation. This now became luminously plain. An enormous
proportion of the force that sustained armaments had been nothing more
aggressive than the fear of war and warlike neighbours. It is doubtful
if any large section of the men actually enlisted for fighting ever at
any time really hungered and thirsted for bloodshed and danger. That
kind of appetite was probably never very strong in the species after the
savage stage was past. The army was a profession, in which killing had
become a disagreeable possibility rather than an eventful certainty. If
one reads the old newspapers and periodicals of that time, which did
so much to keep militarism alive, one finds very little about glory and
adventure and a constant harping on the disagreeableness of invasion
and subjugation. In one word, militarism was funk. The belligerent
resolution of the armed Europe of the twentieth century was the
resolution of a fiercely frightened sheep to plunge. And now that its
weapons were exploding in its hands, Europe was only too eager to drop
them, and abandon this fancied refuge of violence.

For a time the whole world had been shocked into frankness; nearly all
the clever people who had hitherto sustained the ancient belligerent
separations had now been brought to realise the need for simplicity
of attitude and openness of mind; and in this atmosphere of moral
renascence, there was little attempt to get negotiable advantages out of
resistance to the new order. Human beings are foolish enough no doubt,
but few have stopped to haggle in a fire-escape. The council had its
way with them. The band of 'patriots' who seized the laboratories and
arsenal just outside Osaka and tried to rouse Japan to revolt against
inclusion in the Republic of Mankind, found they had miscalculated the
national pride and met the swift vengeance of their own countrymen. That
fight in the arsenal was a vivid incident in this closing chapter of the
history of war. To the last the 'patriots' were undecided whether, in
the event of a defeat, they would explode their supply of atomic bombs
or not. They were fighting with swords outside the iridium doors,
and the moderates of their number were at bay and on the verge of
destruction, only ten, indeed, remained unwounded, when the republicans
burst in to the rescue....

Section 6

One single monarch held out against the general acquiescence in the new
rule, and that was that strange survival of mediaevalism, the 'Slavic
Fox,' the King of the Balkans. He debated and delayed his submissions.
He showed an extraordinary combination of cunning and temerity in his
evasion of the repeated summonses from Brissago. He affected ill-health
and a great preoccupation with his new official mistress, for his
semi-barbaric court was arranged on the best romantic models. His
tactics were ably seconded by Doctor Pestovitch, his chief minister.
Failing to establish his claims to complete independence, King Ferdinand
Charles annoyed the conference by a proposal to be treated as a
protected state. Finally he professed an unconvincing submission, and
put a mass of obstacles in the way of the transfer of his national
officials to the new government. In these things he was enthusiastically
supported by his subjects, still for the most part an illiterate
peasantry, passionately if confusedly patriotic, and so far with no
practical knowledge of the effect of atomic bombs. More particularly he
retained control of all the Balkan aeroplanes.

For once the extreme naivete of Leblanc seems to have been mitigated by
duplicity. He went on with the general pacification of the world as if
the Balkan submission was made in absolute good faith, and he announced
the disbandment of the force of aeroplanes that hitherto guarded the
council at Brissago upon the approaching fifteenth of July. But instead
he doubled the number upon duty on that eventful day, and made various
arrangements for their disposition. He consulted certain experts, and
when he took King Egbert into his confidence there was something in his
neat and explicit foresight that brought back to that ex-monarch's
mind his half-forgotten fantasy of Leblanc as a fisherman under a green
umbrella.

About five o'clock in the morning of the seventeenth of July one of the
outer sentinels of the Brissago fleet, which was soaring unobtrusively
over the lower end of the lake of Garda, sighted and hailed a strange
aeroplane that was flying westward, and, failing to get a satisfactory
reply, set its wireless apparatus talking and gave chase. A swarm of
consorts appeared very promptly over the westward mountains, and before
the unknown aeroplane had sighted Como, it had a dozen eager attendants
closing in upon it. Its driver seems to have hesitated, dropped down
among the mountains, and then turned southward in flight, only to find
an intercepting biplane sweeping across his bows. He then went round
into the eye of the rising sun, and passed within a hundred yards of his
original pursuer.

The sharpshooter therein opened fire at once, and showed an intelligent
grasp of the situation by disabling the passenger first. The man at the
wheel must have heard his companion cry out behind him, but he was too
intent on getting away to waste even a glance behind. Twice after that
he must have heard shots. He let his engine go, he crouched down, and
for twenty minutes he must have steered in the continual expectation of
a bullet. It never came, and when at last he glanced round, three great
planes were close upon him, and his companion, thrice hit, lay dead
across his bombs. His followers manifestly did not mean either to upset
or shoot him, but inexorably they drove him down, down. At last he was
curving and flying a hundred yards or less over the level fields of
rice and maize. Ahead of him and dark against the morning sunrise was
a village with a very tall and slender campanile and a line of cable
bearing metal standards that he could not clear. He stopped his engine
abruptly and dropped flat. He may have hoped to get at the bombs when he
came down, but his pitiless pursuers drove right over him and shot him
as he fell.

Three other aeroplanes curved down and came to rest amidst grass close
by the smashed machine. Their passengers descended, and ran, holding
their light rifles in their hands towards the debris and the two dead
men. The coffin-shaped box that had occupied the centre of the machine
had broken, and three black objects, each with two handles like the ears
of a pitcher, lay peacefully amidst the litter.

These objects were so tremendously important in the eyes of their
captors that they disregarded the two dead men who lay bloody and broken
amidst the wreckage as they might have disregarded dead frogs by a
country pathway.