XXXIV.

Lord de Jones put down the newspaper, and closed his eyes. After the reading of a newspaper, particularly a Sunday newspaper, he generally experienced an acute feeling of nausea, as though he had eaten a fruit salad of the very worst kind. And indeed there was enough in it to-day to disconcert a sensitive reader. There was the “Dog Election” in England; the Fundamentalist-Evolutionist feud in America growing into what looked very like a civil war; and a European embroglio likely to develop into a new world war overnight. Yet in all three cases the initial cause of contention had been so slight that but for the gravity of the consequences he would have dismissed it all as unreal.

The “Dog Election” which had shaken the country in the second half of April had its origin, he recalled, in Frank Dickin’s, on a previous evening, as he was hurrying to keep an appointment with Lord Ottercove, slipping on the pavement and, in his indignation, recommending to his host the wholesale extermination of the breed of dogs. Lord Ottercove, who had made a note of it at the time, caused it to be described in his newspapers as a public nuisance which the government should put a speedy end to, and when, a week later, a prominent member of Parliament slipped and broke his leg, Lord Ottercove’s newspapers rose _en masse_ against dogs. In a hundred years’ time, one of his papers affirmed, historians would note with horror that in the first half of the twentieth century dogs were allowed complete license of behaviour in the public thoroughfares. An altogether unexpected outburst of support from readers, thousands of whom had apparently been storing up for many years a somewhat unmanly resentment against the dog race, emboldened Lord Ottercove to push the matter to extremities. DOGS MUST GO--his posters cried in unison. Now the Prime Minister, a man of inconspicuous curiosity, and an overwhelming sense of right and wrong, read these articles. A country squire, who had been persuaded to shoulder the burden of government much against his inclination, he was a confirmed dog lover. The thought of exterminating our dumb and loyal friends was repugnant to him. But his conscience told him that pavements erected with the taxpayers’ money were being abused by caninity; accidents were accumulating, deaths might ensue any day. The dogs were in the wrong; yes, the dogs must go. It was his duty to carry out the policy however unpopular, if he thought it a matter of duty that the policy should be carried out. And he was a man of duty. “Exterminate the dog breed!” became the slogan and policy (though largely against the advice of the older statesmen) of the Conservative Party. The Liberal Party, it would seem, had only been waiting for that. Assisted and advised by Lord Ottercove, they made “The Preservation and Protection of Our Friend the Dog” the chief item of their party programme. “Joe,” (as he was called by his intimates) the Liberal leader, temperamentally repelled by dogs, had been photographed sitting in a basket chair, a grave-eyed poodle with his front legs across the Liberal leader’s knees. “The heart of England is sound,” they said, stealing the Tory touch, “so long as she remains a dog-loving Nation.” And again: “Do away with the dogs: and the country will assuredly go with them!”

“Where will it go?” from a heckler (put there by the Liberal candidate himself).

“To the dogs, sir!” blandly and crushingly.

Loud laughter.

The Labour Party unfortunately split itself over the issue. The more responsible section sympathised with the socialising efforts of the Conservative Prime Minister; the other half resented the adoption on the part of the reactionaries of what by the look and sound of it should have been a Socialist programme, and they were helped by the lovers of whippets and rabbit coursing and the gamblers who flocked to the dog races. The controversy grew in passion; something not unlike a civil war loomed behind this sinister antagonism; a St. Bartholomew Night threatened from day to day, a pogrom with extensive dog massacres having been organised by the more energetic Die-hard section of the Tory Party who did not believe in half measures, distrusted the Prime Minister’s tendency to conciliation and compromise and were anxious to check his retreat and by forcing his hand oblige him to take a firm stand. Till _The Nation_, commenting in a leading article upon the situation that had arisen over the “Right of Dog” question, pointed out with characteristic pertinence and good sense that in the heat of passion the main issue had been overlooked, as usual, namely, whether there was not a possibility of doing away with the indubitable nuisance caused by dogs who are wrongly granted the freedom of the pavement, without necessarily doing away with the dogs themselves. _The New Statesman_ and _The Spectator_ raised the same question in their individual voice. But nobody cared to listen to them. The Conservative Government resigned on a vote of confidence, and in the General Election which ensued the Liberals carried everything before them.

In America, Lord de Jones read, there was a growing feud between Fundamentalists and Evolutionists. An Evolutionist had declared that he was ready to appear at a Fundamentalist meeting and “dare” God to smite him dead. An ardent Fundamentalist disciple, believing that he was serving his cause, connected the steel platform on which the Evolutionist was speaking by a wire with the main electric current of the premises, thereby electrocuting the Evolutionist in the very act of his challenge. Details, however, leaked out by and by, resulting in what threatened to become a religious war between the two faiths hardly to be paralleled since the Wars of the Crusades, if then. The Fundamentalist declared at his trial that in so far as God Himself had put the idea into his head, it was the hand of God that had struck down the blasphemer; and in his summing-up the judge directed the jury to determine just how far it was God and how far devilry. The jury were reluctant to pass a verdict of “guilty” against so almighty a being, and Counsel at a subsequent trial conceded so much to the scientific bias of the day as to declare that the electrocution of the Evolutionist was in the nature of a miracle intended to create and sustain faith, elevating an otherwise unimportant mechanical trick into the realms of the supernatural. The Fundamentalist was acquitted; and in the ensuing riots directed by outraged Free Thinkers and Revolutionaries against the headquarters of the Fundamentalists in Massachusetts, the responsible leaders of the faith, though admitting the uncalled-for action and excessive zeal of their feather-brained disciple who, while wishing to assist their cause, had unwittingly damaged it, yet claimed that a little trick like that could not implicate the essential wisdom of their faith nor undermine the foundations of Fundamentalism.

All over the world, Lord de Jones knew, and particularly in England, the struggle between capital and labour grew more bitter and, as time went on, threatened to develop into a general revolution; to side-track which the respective Governments agreed to have a war. A _casus belli_ was looked for; and was found. A Russian Tsarist “Government” living in exile in Paris had published its claims on Eastern Prussia which once upon a time was Slav; inasmuch as Petrograd (though this they were reluctant to admit) had once been Finnish soil, and was now being claimed by a Fascist Government in Helsingfors whose motto was “A Greater Finland!” Germany, while admitting the justice of the Finnish claims, disputed those of Russia; and Russia, while disputing the Finnish claim to Petrograd, insisted on its own to Eastern Prussia. The new war was broadly (and amicably) conceived on these lines, and the British Government, declaring that it could not countenance another war in Europe, plunged into it--so as to stop it.

Lord Ottercove hailed the prospect of war (in lieu of revolution) with mixed feelings of journalistic felicity and human discomfiture. As the probability--and later the unavoidability--of war became more certain, the humane resistance in him yielded to the _force majeure_ of patriotic excitement, and he wrote himself the leading article, heading it: “The Nation Demands--.” And the nation, reading it at breakfast next morning, felt that, yes, it was in them to demand, and they demanded and would not sheathe the sword until they had fought to utter exhaustion. And young men from the public schools were already training in bayonet drill on the lawns of Kensington Gardens under sergeants whose dictum, oft repeated, was that the war was to be won by saluting by numbers. Grey haired City men were forming fours everywhere, and, as a relaxation from it, forming two deep. Once again there was “A Cause.”

When, to forget the war, Lord de Jones turned in to a music hall matinée, a comedian was singing:

“_I joined the Army yesterday,_ _So the Army of to-day_ _’S all right;_

and a stoutish prima donna replied in mezzo soprano:

“_I didn’t like you, John,_ _Before you joined the Army, John;_ _I like you now_ _You’ve got your khaki on!_”

and displayed her fat legs in a whirl.