3.6 KiB
CHAPTER THE FIRST. THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY
Section 4
There was a certain truth in Holsten's assertion that the law was 'hundreds of years old.' It was, in relation tocurrent thought and widely accepted ideas, an archaic thing. While almost all the material and methods of life hadbeen changing rapidly and were now changing still more rapidly, the law−courts and the legislatures of the worldwere struggling desperately to meet modern demands with devices and procedures, conceptions of rights andproperty and authority and obligation that dated from the rude compromises of relatively barbaric times. Thehorse−hair wigs and antic dresses of the British judges, their musty courts and overbearing manners, were indeedonly the outward and visible intimations of profounder anachronisms. The legal and political organisation of theearth in the middle twentieth century was indeed everywhere like a complicated garment, outworn yet strong, thatnow fettered the governing body that once it had protected. Yet that same spirit of free−thinking and outspoken publication that in the field of natural science had been thebeginning of the conquest of nature, was at work throughout all the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries preparingthe spirit of the new world within the degenerating body of the old. The idea of a greater subordination ofindividual interests and established institutions to the collective future, is traceable more and more clearly in theliterature of those times, and movement after movement fretted itself away in criticism of and opposition to firstthis aspect and then that of the legal, social, and political order. Already in the early nineteenth century Shelley,with no scrap of alternative, is denouncing the established rulers of the world as Anarchs, and the entire system ofideas and suggestions that was known as Socialism, and more particularly its international side, feeble as it was increative proposals or any method of transition, still witnesses to the growth of a conception of a modernisedsystem of inter−relationships that should supplant the existing tangle of proprietary legal ideas. The word 'Sociology' was invented by Herbert Spencer, a popular writer upon philosophical subjects, whoflourished about the middle of the nineteenth century, but the idea of a state, planned as an electric−tractionsystem is planned, without reference to pre−existing apparatus, upon scientific lines, did not take a very stronghold upon the popular imagination of the world until the twentieth century. Then, the growing impatience of theAmerican people with the monstrous and socially paralysing party systems that had sprung out of their absurd
The World Set Free
The World Set Free
17
electoral arrangements, led to the appearance of what came to be called the 'Modern State' movement, and agalaxy of brilliant writers, in America, Europe, and the East, stirred up the world to the thought of bolderrearrangements of social interaction, property, employment, education, and government, than had ever beencontemplated before. No doubt these Modern State ideas were very largely the reflection upon social and politicalthought of the vast revolution in material things that had been in progress for two hundred years, but for a longtime they seemed to be having no more influence upon existing institutions than the writings of Rousseau andVoltaire seemed to have had at the time of the death of the latter. They were fermenting in men's minds, and itneeded only just such social and political stresses as the coming of the atomic mechanisms brought about, tothrust them forward abruptly into crude and startling realisation.