What were they asking for?

They had been overtaken by unexpected things.  Nobody had foreseen——­

It flashed suddenly into his mind just what the multitudinous shambling enigma below meant.  It was an appeal against the unexpected, an appeal to those others who, more fortunate, seemed wiser and more powerful, for something—­for intelligence.  This mute mass, weary footed, rank following rank, protested its persuasion that some of these others must have foreseen these dislocations—­that anyhow they ought to have foreseen—­and arranged.

That was what this crowd of wreckage was feeling and seeking so dumbly to assert.

‘Things came to me like the turning on of a light in a darkened room,’ he says.  ’These men were praying to their fellow creatures as once they prayed to God!  The last thing that men will realise about anything is that it is inanimate.  They had transferred their animation to mankind.  They still believed there was intelligence somewhere, even if it was careless or malignant....  It had only to be aroused to be conscience-stricken, to be moved to exertion....  And I saw, too, that as yet there was no such intelligence.  The world waits for intelligence.  That intelligence has still to be made, that will for good and order has still to be gathered together, out of scraps of impulse and wandering seeds of benevolence and whatever is fine and creative in our souls, into a common purpose.  It’s something still to come....’

It is characteristic of the widening thought of the time that this not very heroical young man who, in any previous age, might well have been altogether occupied with the problem of his own individual necessities, should be able to stand there and generalise about the needs of the race.

But upon all the stresses and conflicts of that chaotic time there was already dawning the light of a new era.  The spirit of humanity was escaping, even then it was escaping, from its extreme imprisonment in individuals.  Salvation from the bitter intensities of self, which had been a conscious religious end for thousands of years, which men had sought in mortifications, in the wilderness, in meditation, and by innumerable strange paths, was coming at last with the effect of naturalness into the talk of men, into the books they read, into their unconscious gestures, into their newspapers and daily purposes and everyday acts.  The broad horizons, the magic possibilities that the spirit of the seeker had revealed to them, were charming them out of those ancient and instinctive preoccupations from which the very threat of hell and torment had failed to drive them.  And this young man, homeless and without provision even for the immediate hours, in the presence of social disorganisation, distress, and perplexity, in a blazing wilderness of thoughtless pleasure that blotted out the stars, could think as he tells us he thought.