ilding of a research city for the English upon
the Sussex downs by buying up a series of estates, was dispossessed
and laughed out of court when he made his demand for some preposterous
compensation; the owner of the discredited Dass patents makes his last
appearance upon the scroll of history as the insolvent proprietor of
a paper called The Cry for Justice, in which he duns the world for a
hundred million pounds. That was the ingenuous Dass's idea of justice,
that he ought to be paid about five million pounds annually because he
had annexed the selvage of one of Holsten's discoveries. Dass came
at last to believe quite firmly in his right, and he died a victim of
conspiracy mania in a private hospital at Nice. Both of these men
would probably have ended their days enormously wealthy, and of course
ennobled in the England of the opening twentieth century, and it is just
this novelty of their fates that marks the quality of the new age.

The new government early discovered the need of a universal education
to fit men to the great conceptions of its universal rule. It made no
wrangling attacks on the local, racial, and sectarian forms of religious
profession that at that time divided the earth into a patchwork of
hatreds and distrusts; it left these organisations to make their peace
with God in their own time; but it proclaimed as if it were a mere
secular truth that sacrifice was expected from all, that respect had to
be shown to all; it revived schools or set them up afresh all around the
world, and everywhere these schools taught the history of war and the
consequences and moral of the Last War; everywhere it was taught not as
a sentiment but as a matter of fact that the salvation of the world from
waste and contention was the common duty and occupation of all men and
women. These things which are now the elementary commonplaces of human
intercourse seemed to the councillors of Brissago, when first they dared
to proclaim them, marvellously daring discoveries, not untouched by
doubt, that flushed the cheek and fired the eye.

The council placed all this educational reconstruction in the hands of
a committee of men and women, which did its work during the next few
decades with remarkable breadth and effectiveness. This educational
committee was, and is, the correlative upon the mental and spiritual
side of the redistribution committee. And prominent upon it, and indeed
for a time quite dominating it, was a Russian named