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 building 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.
Pages:
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242