Yet what should become of the world? There was London and the industrial
counties spreading like a blackness over all the world, horrible, in the
end destructive. And the Garda was so lovely under the sky of sunshine,
it was intolerable. For away, beyond, beyond all the snowy Alps, with
the iridescence of eternal ice above them, was this England, black and
foul and dry, with her soul worn down, almost worn away. And England was
conquering the world with her machines and her horrible destruction of
natural life. She was conquering the whole world.
And yet, was she not herself finished in this work? She had had enough.
She had conquered the natural life to the end: she was replete with the
conquest of the outer world, satisfied with the destruction of the Self.
She would cease, she would turn round; or else expire.
If she still lived, she would begin to build her knowledge into a great
structure of truth. There it lay, vast masses of rough-hewn knowledge,
vast masses of machines and appliances, vast masses of ideas and
methods, and nothing done with it, only teeming swarms of disintegrated
human beings seething and perishing rapidly away amongst it, till it
seems as if a world will be left covered with huge ruins, and scored by
strange devices of industry, and quite dead, the people disappeared,
swallowed up in the last efforts towards a perfect, selfless society.
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