by M. P. Shiel
_Greek_ritual, their cult a Greek cult--preferably, perhaps, a South Greekone, a Spartan one, for it was here that the highly conservativepeoples of that region clung longest and fondliest to thissemi-barbarous worship. This then being so, I was made all the morecertain of my conjecture that the central figures on the papyrus weredrawn from a Greek model.
'Here, however, I came to a standstill. I was infinitely puzzled by therod in the man's hand. In none of the Greek grave-reliefs does any suchthing as a rod make an appearance, except in one well-known examplewhere the god Hermes--generally represented as carrying the _caduceus_,or staff, given him by Phoebus--appears leading a dead maiden to theland of night. But in every other example of which I am aware thesculpture represents a man _living_, not dead, banqueting _on earth_,not in Hades, by the side of his living companion. What then could bethe significance of the staff in the hand of this living man? It wasonly after days of the hardest struggle, the cruellest suspense, thatthe thought flashed on me that the idea of Hermes leading away the deadfemale might, in this case, have been carried one step farther; thatthe male figure might be no living man, no man at all, but _Hermeshimself_ actually banqueting in Hades with the soul of his disembodied_protegee_! The thought filled me with a rapture I cannot describe, andyou witnessed my excitement. But, at all events, I saw that this was atruly tremendous departure from Greek art and thought, to which ingeneral the copyists seemed to cling so religiously. There musttherefore be a reason, a strong reason, for vandalism such as this. Andthat, at any rate, it was no longer difficult to discover; for now Iknew that the male figure was no mortal, but a god, a spirit, a DAEMON(in the Greek sense of the word); and the female figure I saw by themarked shortness of her drapery to be no Athenian, but a Spartan; nomatron either, but a maiden, a lass, a LASSIE; and now I had forced onme lassie daemon, _Lacedaemon._
'This then was the badge, the so carefully-buried badge, of thissociety of men. The only thing which still puzzled and confounded me atthis stage was the startling circumstance that a _Greek_ society shouldmake use of a _Latin_ motto. It was clear that either all myconclusions were totally wrong, or else the motto _mens sana in corporesano_ contained wrapped up in itself some acroamatic meaning which Ifound myself unable to penetrate, and which the authors had found noGreek motto capable of conveying. But at any rate, having found thismuch, my knowledge led me of itself one step further; for I perceivedthat, widely extended as were their operations, the society wasnecessarily in the main an _English,_ or at least an English-speakingone--for of this the word "lassie" was plainly indicative: it was easynow to conjecture London, the monster-city in which all things losethemselves, as their head-quarters; and at this point in myinvestigations I despatched to the papers the advertisement you haveseen.'
'But,' I exclaimed, 'even now I utterly fail to see by what mysteriousprocesses of thought you arrived at the wording of the advertisement;even now it conveys no meaning to my mind.'
'That,' he replied,' will grow clear when we come to a rightunderstanding of the baleful _motive_ which inspired these men. I havealready said that I was not long in discovering it. There was only onepossible method of doing so--and that was, by all means, by any means,to find out some condition or other common to every one of the victimsbefore death. It is true that I was unable to do this in some fewcases, but where I failed, I was convinced that my failure was due tothe insufficiency of the evidence at my disposal, rather than to theactual absence of the condition. Now, let us take almost any two casesyou will, and seek for this common condition: let us take, for example,the first two that attracted the attention of the world--the poor womanof the slums of Berlin, and the celebrated man of science. Separated byas wide an interval as they are, we shall yet find, if we look closely,in each case the same pathetic tokens of the still uneliminated_striae_ of our poor humanity. The woman is not an old woman, for shehas a "small young" family, which, had she lived, might have beenincreased: notwithstanding which, she has suffered from hemiplegia,"partial paralysis." The professor, too, has had not one, but two,large families, and an "army of grand-children": but note well thestartling, the hideous fact, that _every one of his children is dead!_The crude grave has gaped before the cock to suck in _every one_ ofthose shrunk forms, so indigent of vital impulse, so pauper of civism,lust, so draughty, so vague, so lean--but not before they have had timeto dower with the ah and wo of their infirmity a whole wretched "armyof grand-children." And yet this man of wisdom is on the point, in hisold age, of marrying once again, of producing for the good of his racestill more of this poor human stuff. You see the lurid significance,the point of resemblance,--you see it? And, O heaven, is it not toosad? For me, I tell you, the whole business has a tragic pitifulnesstoo deep for words. But this brings me to the discussion of a largematter. It would, for instance, be interesting to me to hear what you,a modern European, saturated with all the notions of your little day,what _you_ consider the supreme, the all-important question for thenations of Europe at this moment. Am I far wrong in assuming that youwould rattle off half a dozen of the moot points agitating rivalfactions in your own land, select one of them, and call that "thequestion of the hour"? I wish I could see as you see; I wish to God Idid not see deeper. In order to lead you to my point, what, let me askyou, what _precisely_ was it that ruined the old nations--that brought,say Rome, to her knees at last? Centralisation, you say, top-heavyimperialism, dilettante pessimism, the love of luxury. At bottom,believe me, it was not one of these high-sounding things--it was simplyWar; the sum total of the battles of centuries. But let me explainmyself: this is a novel view to you, and you are perhaps unable toconceive how or why war was so fatal to the old world, because you seehow little harmful it is to the new. If you collected in a promiscuousway a few millions of modern Englishmen and slew them allsimultaneously, what, think you, would be the effect from the point ofview of the State? The effect, I conceive, would be indefinitely small,wonderfully transitory; there would, of course, be a momentary lacunain the boiling surge: yet the womb of humanity is full of sap, anduberant; Ocean-tide, wooed of that Ilithyia whose breasts are many,would flow on, and the void would soon be filled. But the effect wouldonly be thus insignificant, if, as I said, your millions were takenpromiscuously (as in the modern army), not if they were _picked_men----in _that_ case the loss (or gain) would be excessive, andpermanent for all time. Now, the war-hosts of the ancientcommonwealths--not dependent on the mechanical contrivances of themodern army--were necessarily composed of the very best men: thestrong-boned, the heart-stout, the sound in wind and limb. Under theseconditions the State shuddered through all her frame, thrilled adownevery filament, at the death of a single one of her sons in the field.As only the feeble, the aged, bided at home, their number after eachbattle became larger _in proportion to the whole_ than before. Thus thenation, more and more, with ever-increasing rapidity, declined inbodily, and of course spiritual, quality, until the _end_ was reached,and Nature swallowed up the weaklings whole; and thus war, which to themodern state is at worst the blockhead and indecent _affairesd'honneur_ of persons in office--and which, surely, before you and Idie will cease altogether--was to the ancient a genuine andremorselessly fatal scourge.
'And now let me apply these facts to the Europe of our own time. We nolonger have world-serious war--but in its place we have a scourge, theeffect of which on the modern state is _precisely the same_ as theeffect of war on the ancient, only,--in the end,--far more destructive,far more subtle, sure, horrible, disgusting. The name of thispestilence is Medical Science. Yes, it is most true, shudder--shudder--as you will! Man's best friend turns to an asp in hisbosom to sting him to the basest of deaths. The devastating growth ofmedical, and especially surgical, science--that, if you like, for usall, is "the question of the hour!" And what a question! of whatsurpassing importance, in the presence of which all other "questions"whatever dwindle into mere academic triviality. For just as the ancientState was wounded to the heart through the death of her healthy sons inthe field, just so slowly, just so sil
ently, is the modern receivingdeadly hurt by the botching and tinkering of her unhealthy children.The net result is in each case the same--the altered ratio of the totalamount of reproductive health to the total amount of reproductivedisease. They recklessly spent their best; we sedulously conserve ourworst; and as they pined and died of anaemia, so we, unless we repent,must perish in a paroxysm of black-blood apoplexy. And this prospectbecomes more certain, when you reflect that the physician as we knowhim is not, like other men and things, a being of gradual growth, ofslow evolution: from Adam to the middle of the last century the worldsaw nothing even in the least resembling him. No son of Paian _he_, buta fatherless, full-grown birth from the incessant matrix of ModernTime, so motherly of monstrous litters of "Gorgon and Hydra andChimaeras dire"; you