Lord of the World | Page 8

off. "He must be a good linguist, at
any rate. This is at least the fifth crowd he has addressed; perhaps he is just the American
interpreter. Christ! I wonder who he is."
"Has he any other name?"
"Julian, I believe. One message said so."
"How did this come through?"
Oliver shook his head.
"Private enterprise," he said. "The European agencies have stopped work. Every
telegraph station is guarded night and day. There are lines of volors strung out on every
frontier. The Empire means to settle this business without us."
"And if it goes wrong?"
"My dear Mabel--if hell breaks loose---" he threw out his hands deprecatingly.

"And what is the Government doing?"
"Working night and day; so is the rest of Europe. It'll be Armageddon with a vengeance if
it comes to war."
"What chance do you see?"
"I see two chances," said Oliver slowly: "one, that they may be afraid of America, and
may hold their hands from sheer fear; the other that they may be induced to hold their
hands from charity; if only they can be made to understand that co-operation is the one
hope of the world. But those damned religions of theirs---"
The girl sighed, and looked out again on to the wide plain of house-roofs below the
window.
The situation was indeed as serious as it could be. That huge Empire, consisting of a
federalism of States under the Son of Heaven (made possible by the merging of the
Japanese and Chinese dynasties and the fall of Russia), had been consolidating its forces
and learning its own power during the last thirty-five years, ever since, in fact, it had laid
its lean yellow hands upon Australia and India. While the rest of the world had learned
the folly of war, ever since the fall of the Russian republic under the combined attack of
the yellow races, the last had grasped its possibilities. It seemed now as if the civilisation
of the last century was to be swept back once more into chaos. It was not that the mob of
the East cared very greatly; it was their rulers who had begun to stretch themselves after
an almost eternal lethargy, and it was hard to imagine how they could be checked at this
point. There was a touch of grimness too in the rumour that religious fanaticism was
behind the movement, and that the patient East proposed at last to proselytise by the
modern equivalents of fire and sword those who had laid aside for the most part all
religious beliefs except that in Humanity. To Oliver it was simply maddening. As he
looked from his window and saw that vast limit of London laid peaceably before him, as
his imagination ran out over Europe and saw everywhere that steady triumph of common
sense and fact over the wild fairy-stories of Christianity, it seemed intolerable that there
should be even a possibility that all this should be swept back again into the barbarous
turmoil of sects and dogmas; for no less than this would be the result if the East laid
hands on Europe. Even Catholicism would revive, he told himself, that strange faith that
had blazed so often as persecution had been dashed to quench it; and, of all forms of faith,
to Oliver's mind Catholicism was the most grotesque and enslaving. And the prospect of
all this honestly troubled him, far more than the thought of the physical catastrophe and
bloodshed that would fall on Europe with the advent of the East. There was but one hope
on the religious side, as he had told Mabel a dozen times, and that was that the Quietistic
Pantheism which for the last century had made such giant strides in East and West alike,
among Mohammedans, Buddhists, Hindus, Confucianists and the rest, should avail to
check the supernatural frenzy that inspired their exoteric brethren. Pantheism, he
understood, was what he held himself; for him "God" was the developing sum of created
life, and impersonal Unity was the essence of His being; competition then was the great
heresy that set men one against another and delayed all progress; for, to his mind,
progress lay in the merging of the individual in the family, of the family in the

commonwealth, of the commonwealth in the continent, and of the continent in the world.
Finally, the world itself at any moment was no more than the mood of impersonal life. It
was, in fact, the Catholic idea with the supernatural left out, a union of earthly fortunes,
an abandonment of individualism on the one side, and of supernaturalism on the other. It
was treason to appeal from God Immanent to God Transcendent; there was no God
transcendent; God, so far as He could be known, was man.
Yet these