crowded, crowning victory of the Battle of the Nations....  Everybody in those days, wise or foolish, believed that the division of the world under a multitude of governments was inevitable, and that it was going on for thousands of years more.  It was inevitable until it was impossible.  Any one who had denied that inevitability publicly would have been counted—­oh! a silly fellow.  Old Bismarck was only just a little—­forcible, on the lines of the accepted ideas.  That is all.  He thought that since there had to be national governments he would make one that was strong at home and invincible abroad.  Because he had fed with a kind of rough appetite upon what we can see now were very stupid ideas, that does not make him a stupid man.  We’ve had advantages; we’ve had unity and collectivism blasted into our brains.  Where should we be now but for the grace of science?  I should have been an embittered, spiteful, downtrodden member of the Russian Intelligenza, a conspirator, a prisoner, or an assassin.  You, my dear, would have been breaking dingy windows as a suffragette.’

‘Never,’ said Edith stoutly....

For a time the talk broke into humorous personalities, and the young people gibed at each other across the smiling old administrator, and then presently one of the young scientific men gave things a new turn.  He spoke like one who was full to the brim.

’You know, sir, I’ve a fancy—­it is hard to prove such things—­that civilisation was very near disaster when the atomic bombs came banging into it, that if there had been no Holsten and no induced radio-activity, the world would have—­smashed—­much as it did.  Only instead of its being a smash that opened a way to better things, it might have been a smash without a recovery.  It is part of my business to understand economics, and from that point of view the century before Holsten was just a hundred years’ crescendo of waste.  Only the extreme individualism of that period, only its utter want of any collective understanding or purpose can explain that waste.  Mankind used up material—­insanely.  They had got through three-quarters of all the coal in the planet, they had used up most of the oil, they had swept away their forests, and they were running short of tin and copper.  Their wheat areas were getting weary and populous, and many of the big towns had so lowered the water level of their available hills that they suffered a drought every summer.  The whole system was rushing towards bankruptcy.  And they were spending every year vaster and vaster amounts of power and energy upon military preparations, and continually expanding the debt of industry to capital.  The system was already staggering when Holsten began his researches.  So far as the world in general went there was no sense of danger and no desire for inquiry.  They had no belief that science could save them, nor any idea that there was a need to be saved.  They could not, they would not, see