The World in 2000 Years Read online

  “Error!” replied the savant. “Souls enjoy down here the compensations of happiness, fortune and condition, according to their merits or demerits, while awaiting the end. Reward and punishment are purely terrestrial.”

  “What about all those worlds gravitating in space?” asked Hobson. “Are they subject to the same revolutions as the Earth? Do they recognize the same principles? Are they inhabited?”

  “We don’t know,” the savant replied. “We only reason from hypotheses—but the hypotheses are conclusive. What would be the objective of their existence, if they only serve to ornament the immensity of space? Evidently, they are populated, as our world is by ourselves. Are their inhabitants of a species similar to ours? Are they more advanced than us? We don’t know that either. Science has discovered the existence of these worlds and defined their nature, but it has not been able to penetrate the mysteries of their existence.

  “However, one can easily conceive that their existence implies the idea of inhabitants, and that the stars around which they gravitate fulfill the office of suns in their regard.”

  “And what if you were to transport yourself to one of these planets, of your choice?” Hobson suggested.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because once outside the terrestrial atmosphere I would asphyxiate for lack of air in free space.”

  “Try anyway!”

  “What good would it do to tire myself out uselessly?”

  “Try—I want you to.”

  And Hobson, bracing himself and directing his flamboyant eyes at the savant, overwhelmed him with the full weight of his will-power.

  The savant, crushed by that fluidic pressure, cried out in an imploring voice: “Oh, you don’t know the harm you’re doing me.”

  “Obey, then!” said Hobson, imperiously.

  “I obey,” murmured Monsieur Landet—and, letting himself go, he abandoned himself to the impulsion of the magnetic current.

  Suddenly, his face became livid, then red, and then purple; his lips trembled and his chest heaved; unintelligible words stuck in his throat; his arms extended in desperate efforts. He was suffocating.

  Hobson realized too late the imprudence of his curiosity and rose to his feet, his eyes fixed and his muscles taut and his hands clenched. He deployed all his energy to reawaken his subject.

  Monsieur Landet, however, was struggling against asphyxia. The distance to be crossed was too long for Hobson to be able to bring him back instantaneously into the terrestrial atmosphere.

  Will-power crackled behind the magnetizer’s forehead; his eyes emitted flashes; his hands streamed with the fluid that he was dispersing to earth; sweat beaded on his face—and in the meantime, nothing, nothing; the savant was still choking.

  In the end, Hobson took a supreme decision; he lifted Monsieur Landet in his muscular arms and held him pressed against his body, in such a fashion that the molecules of his fluid penetrated his every pore.

  It was a frightful thing to see, that struggle of two men, in which one was fighting death for the other.

  Finally, the savant’s respiration became more regular. When he was able to speak, he cried: “Take me away—take me away from this Infinity that is crushing me!”

  It was only after a further quarter of an hour, during which the minutes seemed like centuries to the magnetizer, that Monsieur Landet reopened his eyes.

  He stood up, and fell back into his armchair. He had fainted.

  Chapter IV

  INTERNAL POLITICS

  Monsieur Landet paid dear for his temerity in having dared to rise toward free space and fathom the mysterious abysms of Infinity.

  He was confined to bed for a weeks, and was prey to a kind of delirium that almost provoked a brain seizure. He talked about the absorption of worlds, the absorption of souls, incarnation, the end of the world, magnetic attraction. Then he named the planets one by one and fell back on to his pillow, murmuring: “Infinity! Always infinity!”

  Evidently, he was still the victim of a magnetic influence, and Hobson, in using all the power of his will to snatch him back from suffocation in free space, had shaken the foundations of his reason.

  Every day, the magnetizer, visibly anxious, came to obtain news of the savant.

  Finally, the ideas in Monsieur Landet’s head became coherent. His excitement eased and he fell into a profound sleep, which lasted no less than 48 hours.

  When his domestic handed him the cards of the people who had come to enquire after his health, his first words were: “Let us take things in order”—a certain sign that the ideas were systematically arranged in the lobes of his brain.

  Meanwhile, the physicians had formally forbidden him to involve himself with magnetism for a month. They had even had the barbarity to demand that it should not be mentioned in his presence during that lapse of time—otherwise, there was a danger of madness.

  Hobson therefore avoided that topic of conversation in the invalid’s presence, and whenever the latter, impatient to get astride his hobby-horse and dive into the tenebrous darkness of centuries to come, Hobson immediately hastened to call his attention to the progress of Phylloxera14 in France—a subject that interested Monsieur Landet keenly in his capacity as the owner of a small vineyard on the hills of Beaujolais.

  As distraction was recommended to him, he profited from it broadly, going to the theater, the Bois and racecourses, contrary to his habit; apart from that, he spent the greater number of his evenings at the home of the Marquise de Roche-Houdion.

  One evening, when he was dining with her, a guest had the imprudence to talk about the impossibility of the Moon being inhabited, for want of an atmosphere. Monsieur Landet, as if impelled up by an invisible hand, launched into endless speculations about the utility of everything in the universe, making every effort to prove that the bodies clothing souls on planets are appropriate to the physical exigencies of their nature and that, although air is indispensable to the human organism, that does not mean that the inhabitants of other planets have the same needs as us, nor that their souls have envelopes identical to ours.

  In spite of the desperate efforts of the Marquise, the savant was going on and on when a charitable neighbor, to create a diversion, asked him to fetch her something to drink.

  Monsieur Landet, in the full flow of his oratory, looked at her in bewilderment. “What, Madame!” he cried. “You have conserved the habits of another world?”

  An immense outburst of laughter greeted the savant’s reply. The latter, believing it to be a deceptive echo, looked around in amazement. Then, falling from the height of his dreams, he said: “Oh! A thousand pardons, Madame. I thought I was on the Moon.”

  There was fear of a relapse, but fortunately, nothing happened. Apart from that incident, Monsieur Landet conscientiously kept silent for a month. When the last day had expired, he came into Hobson’s study like a bolide.

  “Finally!” he cried. “I have returned to you, dear Master.” And he almost threw himself into the magnetizer’s arms.

  “One moment,” said the later. “Not too fast. You know from experience, my dear Monsieur Landet, that there is a limit to human faculties.”

  “Alas!” sighed the savant. “I’ve wasted a month.”

  “No more imprudence, then.”

  “I swear to you…on your head.”

  “Thank you. I have only to be careful, then.”

  “When can we begin?”

  “Soon. You’re in a great hurry.”

  “I can no longer contain myself.”

  “Ah! If you excite yourself in advance, you’ll spoil your lucidity and falsify your vision.”

  “What do you expect? A month of waiting, a month of starvation!”

  “All right, I give in. Isolate yourself from any anticipatory thought—otherwise, the ideas of the day before will become confused with the ideas if the somnambulistic sleep.”

  So saying, Hobson stared at the savant and transpierced him with his gaze
. That gaze sufficed to put him to sleep, by virtue of the habit that he and his subject had acquired.

  “With what are you going to occupy yourself today?” he asked.

  “Internal politics.”

  “No foreign thought is crossing your mind?”

  “None. I’m lucid.”

  “Speak, then,” said the magnetizer—and, addressing himself to the stenographers: “And you, gentlemen, write.”

  The Constitution

  “I commenced the study of the world in 2000 years with the family, the basis of society,” said the savant. “Then I talked about religion, the basis of human institutions. Today, I shall occupy myself with internal politics, born of the extension and division of families and the unification of the divinity.

  “So long as the family was restricted to the narrow circle of its members, its internal organization served to direct it. It knew no other laws that those dictated to it by its daily needs, by the relationships between its members, by its simple and patriarchal life. On the day when the generations, in multiplying, ramify from the common branch, however, when the extension of the family makes its members unfamiliar to one another, a sanction more efficacious and positive than domestic right is required. Fixed limits are required on kinship. It is necessary to divide the mother-family into as many families as there are branches. From that division is born internal politics, the supreme tribunal around which all the families converge, organizing themselves under institutions elaborated in common, with a view to protecting them from one another.

  “The first form of government adopted by humans corresponded with the instinct that he had of his independence. It was Republican, so far as we can judge from the monuments that remain to us from the earliest ages. The liberty of each individual was, however, subordinate to a superior will, to a directive will, as our free will is subordinate to God. At all times, humans have imposed a yoke upon themselves; either by virtue of sloth, or consciousness of their weakness, they have always bowed down before a master.

  “That master, appointed by mutual confidence, was not long delayed in abusing his discretionary powers; he made use of them against those who had granted them to him, made them an instrument of his cupidity, his vanity and his passions; he overstepped his mandate and, finally, transformed into acquired property that which was only a temporary loan, by oppressing those he was supposed to support. He established inheritance. Inheritance! By virtue of what right? By virtue of the right of the strongest. Humans quickly fall into servitude; it is a need inherent in their nature to yield to the domination of the most audacious—always the influence of a superior will on an inferior one. Magnetism links souls to other souls; they obey the law of currents.

  “Once inheritance was consecrated by human consent, its beneficiaries rooted themselves in the minds of peoples, by the intermediary of a so-called divine sanction. That gave rise to absolute power. The monarch became a sort of substitute, a kind of divine steward. That regime lasted for centuries, until the people, reawakened by the cry of indignant conscience, the voice of free will, by everything noble and generous sensed within, brought about a return to the past and, rising above the horrific spectacle of the crimes of an ambitious fist, broke their chains and raised their heads again.

  “That revolution, suddenly effected with a great fracas, had been long in preparation in their minds. Wrath had been rumbling dully, and the masters, sensing the storm approaching, gradually made derisory concessions until the day when the wave, swollen to excess, overflowed.

  “Humankind renews itself, like nature. Nations are superimposed on nations as terrains are superimposed on terrains, and these social convulsions are called revolutions. Internal revolutions are the work of healthy and energetic minds; external revolutions are the work of new and vigorous peoples.

  “Thus, in antiquity, and especially at the commencement of the Christian Era, the Barbarians attacked the bastardized races of the Occident and exerted the chronic pressure that centuries bring over time: invasion.

  “But the irresistible example of sloth, idleness and debauchery quickly insinuates itself into the heart of conquerors. The contagion spreads. Victors and vanquished, uniting in their fall, inevitably roll down the slope of decadence. Then comes a new invasion of Barbarians and a new race is extinguished by the impact.

  “Was there not seen, in fallen Rome, proud Rome, the fatherland of heroes, a Nero clad in female garments, crowned with flowers, his face painted, his hair curled, dancing with courtesans in the smoking ruins of his capital—to admire what? The magical sight of a fire.

  “When a people has reached the stage of being indifferent to such follies, it is finished.

  “However, the Roman Empire was further sustained by the prestige of its former grandeur. The shadow of its past was respected—but the memory of men like Brutus, Fabricius and Marius was soon effaced in the night of forgetfulness. Wealth, power and the immensity of the empire taught Romans voluptuousness.

  “Having nothing more to vanquish, their arm fell back, inactive for want of new conquests. They no longer thought of anything but enjoying the fruits of their triumphs. That is what doomed them.

  “The Barbarians, who were watching the decadence attentively, launched themselves upon that effeminate people and, on founded a new empire the vestiges of the Roman Empire. Their generous blood vivified the vanquished, and from that interbreeding a new race was born. But that hybrid race did not take long to reject what was pure and healthy within it; it abandoned itself to the base instincts of the fallen race. Luxury, condemned momentarily, reappeared more dazzling than ever, dragging in its wake the procession of all the vices. Such is, in brief, the eternal history of nations. The highs and lows that have marked their different periods are due to the impact of invasions and the superimposition of social strata.

  “The chronology of the first invasions is lost in the night of time. Monuments of those forgotten eras remain, however, to testify to the successive phases that those nations have passed through. Without going back to antediluvian epochs, only rare fossils of which remain to us, the Israelites, to begin with, implanted themselves in the land of Canaan by defeating the peoples who lived there before them. Victims themselves of the Roman invasion, they were dispersed throughout the entire world and, from the powerful people they had been, became a nomadic people, wandering in tribes from city to city sand town to town.

  “In Egypt, the Pharaohs, or shepherd kings, overturned the 16th dynasty, and imposed themselves in its place.

  “In the Occident, the Franks gradually penetrated all the way to the heart of Gaul, already Romanized by the campaigns of Julius Caesar, and succeeded in enslaving al the lands extending from the coast of Brittany to the Pyrenees, either directly or indirectly, instituting feudalism there. Their king was a suzerain to whom all the possessors of fiefs, great or small, owed liege-homage in the title of vassals. It was not until the departure of Louis XI that France fell under the immediate power of the sovereign.

  “And it should be noted that the majority of invasions come from the north-east, relative to the invaded territory. Thus, the Visigoths fell upon Spain from the left bank of the Danube; the Vandals on Rome from the deserts of Scythia; the Huns on all of Europe from the icy steppes of the Caucasian regions; the Saxons on England from the Danish provinces, to give way to the Normans, themselves originally from the shores of the Baltic; the Franks on the Gallo-Roman lands from the forests of northern Germany; and the Tartars, finally, on the Chinese from the Kamchatka peninsula. The Turks, going from victory to victory, quit the heart of Asia, crossed the Archipelago and established themselves in Constantinople, the seat of the Greek Empire.

  “The world, when it has reached a certain degree of civilization, is like a fruit eaten away within by a worm; it needs to purify itself by contact with barbarism, because that civilization, which ought to be solely concerned with the development of its intelligence, only addresses itself to its senses. It requires a shock; it require
s a reaction. And interior revolutions are no less revelatory of a people numbed by excess than foreign revolutions. Civil war, condemned in principle, relieves it by its crimes, by its horrors. The sight of blood, of the blood of fellow citizens, stings its indignation, and when it rests, weary of carnage, its reason clears; the heart-rending spectacle of its dementia suddenly brings sobriety, and remorse causes long-suppressed good sentiments to germinate. But if it has shed blood, it has at least taken a step toward liberty.

  “Yes, it is civilization that dooms great nations; it is also destined to raise them up again. The fault is in the application. The world is not sufficiently experienced to make appropriate use of it; it is a big baby, which it is prudent to keep in harness.

  “Before arriving at the perfection that will be its end, it must pass through the various phases of existence. Having vegetated in infancy for a long time, it scarcely emerges from adolescence to enter into maturity; what for us is counted in decades is counted for civilization in centuries. The phases of society are regulated like the human life, proportional to the duration of their existence.

  “Everything in nature obeys uniform laws, the simplicity of which we make a game of distorting; everything, on mature reflection, is intimately related and analogically concordant.

  “Was it not civilization, in fact, that, by progressive refinement, delivered Media to the Persians, Greece to the Romans and Rome to the Barbarians?

  “So long as a people is content with the facile and relaxed life that nature provides, it is strong and powerful. The day when it exaggerates its needs, the day when gives free rein to the fantasies of its imagination, it is a dead people; it has killed its liberty.

  “In modern times, was it not the absolute monarchy that dragged France through the dirt progressively, to that terrible but fortunate reaction, the Revolution?