An Englishman Looks at the World | Page 8

at one time and
come back into towns for artistic work and organised work in factories
at another. They can move from rain and darkness into sunshine, and
from heat into the coolness of mountain forests. Children can be sent
for education to sea beaches and healthy mountains.
Men will harvest in Saskatchewan and come down in great liners to
spend the winter working in the forests of Yucatan.
People have hardly begun to speculate about the consequences of the
return of humanity from a closely tethered to a migratory existence. It
is here that the prophet finds his chief opportunity. Obviously, these
great forces of transport are already straining against the limits of
existing political areas. Every country contains now an increasing

ingredient of unenfranchised Uitlanders. Every country finds a growing
section of its home-born people either living largely abroad, drawing
the bulk of their income from the exterior, and having their essential
interests wholly or partially across the frontier.
In every locality of a Western European country countless people are
found delocalised, uninterested in the affairs of that particular locality,
and capable of moving themselves with a minimum of loss and a
maximum of facility into any other region that proves more attractive.
In America political life, especially State life as distinguished from
national political life, is degraded because of the natural and inevitable
apathy of a large portion of the population whose interests go beyond
the State.
Politicians and statesmen, being the last people in the world to notice
what is going on in it, are making no attempt whatever to re-adapt this
hugely growing floating population of delocalised people to the public
service. As Mr. Marriott puts it in his novel, "_Now,"_ they "drop out"
from politics as we understand politics at present. Local administration
falls almost entirely--and the decision of Imperial affairs tends more
and more to fall--into the hands of that dwindling and adventurous
moiety which sits tight in one place from the cradle to the grave. No
one has yet invented any method for the political expression and
collective direction of a migratory population, and nobody is
attempting to do so. It is a new problem....
Here, then, is a curious prospect, the prospect of a new kind of people,
a floating population going about the world, uprooted, delocalised, and
even, it may be, denationalised, with wide interests and wide views,
developing no doubt, customs and habits of its own, a morality of its
own, a philosophy of its own, and yet from the point of view of current
politics and legislation unorganised and ineffective.
Most of the forces of international finance and international business
enterprise will be with it. It will develop its own characteristic
standards of art and literature and conduct in accordance with its new
necessities. It is, I believe, the mankind of the future. And the last thing
it will be able to do will be to legislate. The history of the immediate
future will, I am convinced, be very largely the history of the conflict of
the needs of this new population with the institutions, the boundaries
the laws, prejudices, and deep-rooted traditions established during the

home-keeping, localised era of mankind's career.
This conflict follows as inevitably upon these new gigantic facilities of
locomotion as the Mauretania followed from the discoveries of steam
and steel.

OF THE NEW REIGN
(_June, 1911_.)
The bunting and the crimson vanish from the streets. Already the vast
army of improvised carpenters that the Coronation has created set
themselves to the work of demolition, and soon every road that
converges upon Central London will be choked again with great loads
of timber--but this time going outward--as our capital emerges from
this unprecedented inundation of loyalty. The most elaborately
conceived, the most stately of all recorded British Coronations is past.
What new phase in the life of our nation and our Empire does this
tremendous ceremony inaugurate? The question is inevitable. There is
nothing in all the social existence of men so full of challenge as the
crowning of a king. It is the end of the overture; the curtain rises. This
is a new beginning-place for histories.
To us, the great mass of common Englishmen, who have no place in
the hierarchy of our land, who do not attend Courts nor encounter
uniforms, whose function is at most spectacular, who stand in the street
and watch the dignitaries and the liveries pass by, this sense of critical
expectation is perhaps greater than it is for those more immediately
concerned in the spectacle. They have had their parts to play, their
symbolic acts to perform, they have sat in their privileged places, and
we have waited at the barriers until their comfort and dignity was
assured. I can conceive many of them, a little fatigued,