sly trusty and honourable men. There
was not a people in Western Europe in the early twentieth century that
seemed capable of hideous massacres, and none that had not been guilty
of them within the previous two centuries. The free, frank, kindly,
gentle life of the prosperous classes in any European country before the
years of the last wars was in a different world of thought and feeling
from that of the dingy, suspicious, secretive, and uncharitable
existence of the respectable poor, or the constant personal violence,
the squalor and naive passions of the lowest stratum. Yet there were
no real differences of blood and inherent quality between these worlds;
their differences were all in circumstances, suggestion, and habits of
mind. And turning to more individual instances the constantly observed
difference between one portion of a life and another consequent upon
a religious conversion, were a standing example of the versatile
possibilities of human nature.

The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities and
businesses and economic relations shook them also out of their old
established habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs and
prejudices that came down to them from the past. To borrow a word from
the old-fashioned chemists, men were made nascent; they were released
from old ties; for good or evil they were ready for new associations.
The council carried them forward for good; perhaps if his bombs had
reached their destination King Ferdinand Charles might have carried them
back to an endless chain of evils. But his task would have been a harder
one than the council's. The moral shock of the atomic bombs had been a
profound one, and for a while the cunning side of the human animal
was overpowered by its sincere realisation of the vital necessity for
reconstruction. The litigious and trading spirits cowered together,
scared at their own consequences; men thought twice before they sought
mean advantages in the face of the unusual eagerness to realise new
aspirations, and when at last the weeds revived again and 'claims' began
to sprout, they sprouted upon the stony soil of law-courts reformed,
of laws that pointed to the future instead of the past, and under
the blazing sunshine of a transforming world. A new literature, a new
interpretation of history were springing into existence, a new teaching
was already in the schools, a new faith in the young. The worthy man
who forestalled the bu