Transcriber’s Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
The Island of Anarchy.
A Fragment of History in the 20th Century.
Chapter I.
“As for my particular, I amverily perswaded, that since thatage (thirtie yeares), both myspirit and my body have moredecreased than encreased, morerecoyled than advanced. It maybe that knowledge and experienceshall encrease in them,together with life, that bestowtheir time well: but vivacitie,promptitude, constancie, andother parts much more our owne,more important, and more essentiall,they droope, they languish,and they faint.”—Montaigne(Florio’s translation).
The ending of thenineteenth century,like that ofthe eighteenth,was a time of terrible and6strange things, as if it werecoming to be the law ofhuman affairs that the sunsetsof the centuries shouldbe red with a “Terror”and dark with despair.
In England—then, as inthe past, the refuge of banishedmen—social disorderreached a height thatwould soon have driven allher quiet dwellers to seekmore peaceful homes onthe other side of the globe,had not a new and strangething changed the wholeaspect of affairs.
It began to be perceived,and was soon widely acknowledged,that the causeof the great weakness andfutility of our governmentlay in the advanced age of7those by whom the mostimportant offices were held.Age is wont to trifle, totake things lightly, and tostudy life, of which it canat best hope to possess solittle, from a frivolous andtemporary point of view.
“Things are well enoughas they are,” say they; “alittle tinkering here, a littlefancy legislation there, andthey will last our time;meanwhile, let us hear ourselvestalk.”
The only wonder nowseemed that the world hadbeen so slow to perceivethis, that it had taken thehuman race so many thousandyears to discover atruth which now seemed assimple and patent as the8converse one, that it wouldnot be wise to entrust graveaffairs to children in theirfirst decade.
And so the you