population was streaming steadily in from the country-side and

concentrating in hitherto unthought-of masses about a few city

centres, food was coming to them over enormous distances upon a

scale that made the one sole precedent, the corn ships of

imperial Rome, a petty incident; and a huge migration of peoples

between Europe and Western Asia and America was in Progress,

and-nobody seems to have realised that something new had come

into human life, a strange swirl different altogether from any

previous circling and mutation, a swirl like the swirl when at

last the lock gates begin to open after a long phase of

accumulating water and eddying inactivity…

The sober Englishman at the close of the nineteenth century could

sit at his breakfast-table, decide between tea from Ceylon or

coffee from Brazil, devour an egg from France with some Danish

ham, or eat a New Zealand chop, wind up his breakfast with a West

Indian banana, glance at the latest telegrams from all the world,

scrutinise the prices current of his geographically distributed

investments in South Africa, Japan, and Egypt, and tell the two

children he had begotten (in the place of his father's eight)

that hethought the world changed very little. They must play

cricket, keep their hair cut, go to the old school he had gone

to, shirk the lessons he had shirked, learn a few scraps of

Horace and Virgil and Homer for theconfusion of cads, and all

would be well with them…

Section 5

Electricity, though it was perhaps the earlier of the two to be

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