Reconstruction! I remember those early days when I sat in my office for hours together, making notes of schemes which I tore up next day with an ever-increasing irritation at my own sterility. Given a clean slate to start with, it seems at first sight the easiest thing in the world to draw the plans of a Utopia, or at any rate to rough in the outlines when one is not hampered by details. Try it yourself! You may have better luck or a greater imagination than I had; and possibly you may succeed in satisfying yourself: but remember that I had real responsibility upon me; mine was not the easy dreaming of a literary man dealing with puppets drawn from his ink-pot, malleable to his will; it was a flesh-and-blood humanity with all its weaknesses, its failings, its meannesses that I had to deal with in my schemes.
I cannot tell how many sketches I made and discarded in turn. Most of them I had not even courage to put upon the files; so that I cannot now trace the evolution of my ideas. I can recall that, as time went on, my projects became more and more modest in their scope; and I think that they seem to fall into four main divisions.
At the start, I began by imagining an ideal humanity, something like the dwellers in our Fata Morgana; and from this picture I deducted bit by bit all that seemed unrealisable with humanity as it was. I cut away a custom here, a tradition there, until I had reduced the whole sketch to a framework. And when I put this framework together upon paper and saw what it contained, I found it to be an invertebrate mass of disconnected shreds and tatters with no life in it and no hope of existence. I remember even now the disappointment which that discovery gave me. I began to understand the gulf between comfortable theories and hard facts.
In the next stage of my development, I leaned mainly upon the future. I was still under the sting of my disillusion; and I discarded the idea that existing humanity could ever enter the courts of Fata Morgana. I tried to plan foundations upon which the newer generations could rise to the heights. Education! Had we ever in the old days understood the meaning of the word? Had we ever consciously tried to draw out all that was best in the human mind? Or had we merely stuffed the human intellect with disconnected scraps of knowledge, the mere bones from which all the flesh had wasted away? We had a clean slate—how often my mind recurred to that simile in those days—could we not write something better upon it than had been written in the past? A chasm separated us from the older days; we need be hampered by no traditions. Could we not start a fresh line?
I pondered this for days on end. It seemed to be feasible in some ways; but in other directions I saw the difficulties to the full. The clean slate was not a real thing at all. Environment counts for so much; and all the adult minds in the community had been bred in the atmosphere of the past. Their influence would always be there to hamper us, bearing down upon the younger generations and cramping them in the old ideas. There could be no clean severance between present and future, only a gradual change of outlook through the years.
My third stage of evolution led on from this conclusion. I accepted the present as it was and then tried to discover ways in which improvements might be made in the future. Again I spent days in picking out faults and making additions to the fabric of society; and at the end of it all I found, as I had done before, that the result was a patchwork, something which had no organic life of its own.
At this point, I think, I began to despair entirely; and I fell back upon pure materialism. I considered the matter solely from the standpoint of the practical needs of the time; for there I felt myself upon sure ground. Whatever happened, I must have ready a concrete scheme which would tide us over our early stages in the future.
I secured statistics showing the proportions of the population which would be required in all the different branches of labour during the coming year; and in doing this I had to divide them into groups according as they were to work on the land or were required for keeping up the supply of fixed nitrogen from the factories. My charts showed me the areas which we expected to have under cultivation at given dates in the future. I was back again in the unreal world of graphs and curves; and I think that in some ways it was an advantage to me to eliminate the human factor. It kept me from brooding too much over my recollections of humanity in its decline.
On this materialistic basis, the whole thing resolved itself
