The effort of his exhortation left the old man gasping. He tried to control himself. Something in the smug faces of three of his younger listeners made control difficult. Would these inheritors of an old struggle that had at last been won by default on the material side, have the willpower to win the greater struggle he had tried to make them comprehend? He doubted.
"You young members of our Society were born long after I had reached maturity," he resumed. "I am older than your fathers, most of whom have been dead for many years. I sometimes wonder," he continued after a reflective pause, "whether the young Liberators have the courage of their fathers. Will they, when the hour comes to strike, remember, as we did, the indignities that had been heaped upon us?" Suddenly he sat up, his eyes blazing. "If when the time comes you turn aside for reasons of what our enemies call 'humanity', may you–" He did not finish, conscious in his cold, scientific mind that all curses are fantastic.
"Let that go," he panted. "To understand me, you must now learn something of my life. Then perhaps you, whose blood is undefiled, will see why I have labored all my life for one end as you have not.
"My blood is not pure, as yours is. My father was of the enemy. Only my mother was worthy to put blood in my viens. I am not alone in my disgrace. Many of our people have tainted blood. Temporary unions, forgotten as soon as the father returns to his own country, are common among our people. Some even are proud of their mongrel lineage. I am not, and I never was. My father, to his credit if any is due, saw that I was properly educated and that my material needs were supplied for life by a modest but sufficient income. I was sent to Europe, to the best schools and universities of France, Germany and Italy to develop my scientific talents, which revealed themselves at a very early age.
"The first stages of my education completed, and one or two investigations of merit already to may account, I returned to my native country. My intention was to organize relief, in the way of adequate education for those who, like myself, were of tainted lineage. My own father was the exception. Too often the illegitimate offspring of those mixed unions were left in squalor to shift for themselves, outcasts alike from masters and slaves. Before a year had passed I realized that my project was impracticable. Those whom I would help either had no spirit or they had too much. The first were beaten before the battle started; the others never knew when they were defeated beyond hope.
"Despairing of ever helping my people directly, I pondered on indirect means. In my darkest hour I found the light. Certain high members of the Society of Liberators cautiously approached me with veiled hints which one of my intelligence could not fail to understand. In a flash I saw my opportunity. The secrets and aspirations of the Liberators were divulged to me without reserve, and I dedicated my life to their service.
"Ours, as you know, is a wealthy organization. It is, as some might say, colossally rich. The accumulated hoards of at least a dozen princes of our blood, slowly amassed for twenty or thirty centuries, are at the disposal of the Liberators. When first I joined the Society, many of our members were planning to use all this inordinate wealth to accomplish their end directly, by corruption of the dominant leaders among our oppressors so that they, sold out to us, should influence their avaricious countrymen to let us redeem ourselves. The Society planned, in short, to buy freedom for our people by offering the oppressors a hoard that would glut even them. Our country, as you know, has been, for centuries, the bottomless sink into which finally all the gold of the world drains, to be buried unproductively in trinkets and miserly hoards of useless wealth. In their innocence, I say, the Liberators dreamed of purchasing freedom. Rome, I reminded them, had failed to bribe the vandals. The scheme was abandoned.
"Another faction proposed that we use our vast wealth to perfect such a military machine as this world had not yet known. On its face this scheme was wildly futile. Great military despotisms cannot be created in secret. Our oppressors were armed and watchful. We could not have begun the creation of an efficient army. Finally, I pointed out, our race had not then, if it ever had, a genius for war.
"Unable to attack either by bribery or the sword, what remained? When all else fails, question nature. Sudden victory was not for us with any weapons we could then command. To attack in our own country was out of the question. What, in all the arsenals of nature, would be an effective weapon to destroy our enemies in their own country? The problem was not an impossible one. Patience and talent, I knew, would ultimately solve it and give us our freedom.
"I returned to Europe to resume my scientific investigations. It was in chemistry that I first sought the key to liberty. Five years of incessant labor gave me much. The most precious of all my gains from those five laborious years was personal. They taught me that I was not a great chemist. Once, and only once, was I tempted to persevere in one possible attack suggested by all that barren search. My critical judgment, however, perfected by arduous years of scientific discipline, warned me that poison gases were not, and never could be, the key to military or national supremacy. They maim, disable and kill, but they do not destroy an enemy. The proper weapons for combatting that form of attack are too readily devised, and the conflict ends with honors even, neither side destroyed.
"My greatest discovery of those five years, I said, was that I was not a chemist of the first rank. Was I of sufficient mentality to be first in any science? As a student, I had been drawn most strongly to biology – the study of life. Living things, I dared to hope, were my true field. I resumed my biological researches where I had abandoned them five years before. This time I attacked my problems with a new strength, for my understanding of chemistry put a hitherto untried weapon into my patient hands.
"Do you imagine I was wasting precious years while our people were still enslaved? Was I merely playing with the pretty things of nature – flowers and butterflies – while the oppressor's hold tightened about our throat? If so, you are deluded. To accomplish a task of the magnitude I had set myself takes more time than to build a city or an army. When I began, I was prepared to face failure on my deathbed, and to pass on to others of our Society what little I might have accomplished.
"I did not work at random. From the first the grand outlines of my campaign were clearly before my eyes. Two principles of victory have guided all my attacks.
"First, there is no partial success. To be victorious, a conqueror must defeat his enemies once and for all. The enemy that is left with a chance, however slight, of further attack, however futile, is not defeated. Victory, in this sense, must be complete.
"Second, it is impossible, by any known means of attack, to achieve complete victory as I have defined it in my first principle. New assaults must be devised.
"With these principles before me, I critically studied the causes of failure of all known methods of warfare. What have these in common that invariably renders them futile in the end? The answer is so obvious that few will ever dream what it is. All attacks have failed, I say, because they seek to destroy the enemy from without. To abolish a nation or a race, it must be attacked from within.
"I do not refer, of course, to the crude device of fomenting revolutions and counter-revolutions, such as was employed in both World Wars. These are merely variants of the attack from without. What I have in mind is more radical, slower of attainment, and lasting. Once my attack has been launched, there is no answer possible.
"In essence, the ideal attack is simple. What I have called the attack from without has as its objectives the destruction of life and property. Complete victory, in my sense, is unattainable by the attack from without, because it is impossible, for financial and humanitarian reasons among others, ever to destroy the last life and the last remnants of wealth of a beleaguered nation. The attack from within overcomes these fatal disadvantages in the following way.
"Life without reason and intelligence is not life as human beings know it. Property without intellect to imagine it and to conserve the gains created by organized imagination, is impossible. Deprive a
nimals of their minds – their faculties of reason and intelligence – and they become so much vegetation, slowly stagnating to sterility and death.
"The essence of my attack from within is the destruction, not of the enemy's life and property, but of his reason. That accomplished, the enemy will himself, in four generations at the most, annihilate himself and all of his possessions. As a human race he will cease to exist. The means for such an attack are within your reach.
"Whether, on grounds of our common humanity, which we share with our enemies as well as with our friends, you will refuse to this, I do not venture to predict. Years ago, when I was about the age of the oldest of you, I myself would have hesitated. And here, on my deathbed, I again might hold back. For, facing the light as I do now, I see that life is greater than any man or any race of men. Are we sinning against life in destroying its highest manifestation – reason – in millions of our fellow men? I shall leave that decision with you.
"If I am not mistaken, you will reach a high plateau in your lives, midway between old age and death, when your feeling for humanity will atrophy, and you will see only the ancient wrongs of our people, and their spiritual freedom as the only things that justify your life and give it meaning. That is the hour to strike. Delay, and the shadow of death will make you merciful.
"The weapon I offer you is irresistible. By destroying the minds of our oppressors and of all their race, I do not mean that they will be driven to violent madness. Their decay will be mild, a form of heritable imbecility rather than an explosion of insanity that would serve but to make its victims dangerous to the whole world and in particular to us. Their taint will render them incapable of constructive reason and of ordinary human living.
Under its influence, transmitted infallibly from father to daughter and from mother to son, they will cease to exist as human beings within four generations. To every enemy, even the weakest and least efficient, they will be as helpless as idiots. It will, however, be unnecessary to attack them, in the old way. They will slowly extinguish themselves. Their bodies, accustomed by slow centuries of evolution to the necessities of life as human beings know them, will waste away as those necessities are no longer supplied.
"To provide the means of human livelihood, human reason is necessary. Without nurses and attendants, the inmates of our asylums for the insane would starve to death in a month. By the end of the fourth generation, the native countries of our oppressors will be madhouses in which all are patients and in which there are neither keepers nor nurses. Their unreasoning attempts to help themselves will but hasten the inevitable end. Then our minds shall be free.
"This is not a sick man's dream, impossible of fulfilment. That the simple means for achieving my purpose are available, I know. When first I turned to serious biological study as my life work, I had only faith. Now I have knowledge. If nature, I argued, has evolved human reason, the natural means of reversing the process must be within our reach. For every living thing carries with it the seeds of its death. The evolution of reason is not yet perfected. Otherwise not one imbecile would be born in any generation, and no living man or woman would ever lose his or her mind. That was my first clue.
"I was seeking, as you have guessed, destruction of the mind on a wholesale, racial scale. The problem should be less difficult than it seems at first. The constantly increasing numbers of imbeciles and insane in our civilized societies are unmistakable evidence that evolution has not yet triumphed, and that our reasoning, thinking race is constantly in danger of slipping back to the unreasoning, mechanical brutes from which it has started to evolve. How do we increase the number of reversions to the mindless stuff from which we sprang? The balance between evolution forward and retrogression was so delicate, so slightly in favor of ever-higher intelligence, that it should not be difficult, I argued, to destroy the balance and reverse the ratio of ascent to one of descent. For ten years I devoted my life, drawing on the practically limitless resources of our Society, to a minute historical study of insanity in all of its forms.
"This work, locked away in our archives, anticipates most of the modern studies by the statisticians of insanity, and much that is unknown to them. I was seeking, let me remind you, clues to at least one form of heritable insanity. Unbalanced minds resulting from injury or the accidents of disease were of no importance for my purpose. Such were mere casualties of nature's war from without. I sought the secret of her attack from within against human reason. Therefore I instructed my searchers and historians who never dreamed the true object of their work – to prepare exact and detailed histories of all cases of inherited madness or insanity which they found in their researches.
"Two cases of supreme importance emerged early from this exhaustive study. Remember, I beg of you, that in all of this the highest skills of spies and of scientifically trained searchers were at my disposal. If but a single fact was lacking in a particular case, I counted ten thousand pounds a trifling expenditure to obtain it, either by the patient search of semipublic records or by the slow corruption of servants or dependents to whom private family histories were accessible. In one instance my agents spent three years and twelve thousand pounds on the corruption of a private secretary. Their gain, well worth the time and money, was a five minutes' inspection of the secret records pertaining to one branch of a certain family tree. This was in fact the crucial step in my first conquest of outstanding importance.
"The two cases to which I have referred proved, as I had early guessed they might, to be different manifestation of one and the same cause. The first was a mere matter of one family only; the second concerned a numerous caste – if one can call it that – of zealots in our own country. The single family whose history I found of such importance, is one of the oldest in England, that of those Brasseys who trace their lineage back to Saxon times in England, long before the Conquest by the Normans in 1066, and who now are known all over the earth as the proprietary owners of that great scientific seed and plant establishment, Brassey House, founded in 1776.
"I need not detain you with a detailed account of the tragic history of that great House, with every aspect of which I made myself familiar nearly fifty years ago. It is sufficient to state that their family tree is the most perfect example – scientifically it is a thing of flawless beauty – of the Mendelian laws of heritable insanity in existence. The taint entered their blood in the year 1100. The subsequent history of their family, once I had verified conclusively that its affliction was subject to an inexorable law as mathematically beautiful as that which governs the tides, did not interest me. Their tragedy, inescapable, was their own, and I could not have helped them if I would. I saw in it only the first hint of a completely victorious attack from within upon our enemies.
"The one point of supreme interest in the tragedy of the great Brassey House was, to me, its origin. On that the family history was clear as to dates and persons. The sane members of the family for generations have followed every turn of their misfortune minutely and intelligently. For at least two centuries they have been able to predict, within reasonable limits of error, the outcome in a particular generation. Only as to the origin of their misfortune were they obscure. Here, for a moment, I must digress, to make clear how I succeeded in unravelling the mystery where the historians of the Brassey family failed.
"Mendel's great discovery on the laws of heredity was published long before I began my life work in biology. It had been ignored or forgotten by any who chanced to see it, until the beginning of this century, when it was unearthed from the unimportant journal in which it had been buried for thirty-five years. My expert bibliographical assistants had anticipated the official rediscovery. One of these abstracted the short paper, and laid the conclusions before me. From that moment, it became one of my chief guides in the research toward complete victory. The other, as I shall tell you presently, came nearly thirty years later.
"What uses did I make of Mendel's great discovery? Many. The one which concerns me now is the application whi
ch I early made to the Brassey family. Their insanity was as beautiful an example of Mendel's laws as any on record. I did not stop, however, with the genetics of their insanity. Remember, I was seeking to discover its cause and, if reasonably fortunate, to duplicate that cause at will. In my efforts to proceed rationally, I analysed every recorded event in the hundreds of Brassey histories preserved by their annalists, and studied minutely the rhythmic recurrences of their striking abilities. These, no less than their insanity, followed Mendel's laws with beautiful consistency. There was, however, one difference between the law of their abilities and that of their madness which showed up as but another verification of Mendel. Whereas the rhythm of insanity entered abruptly with the initial pollution in the first year of the twelfth century, the other regularities went straight back to the earliest records, long before the taint entered their blood, or rather, I should say more exactly, before their germ cells were radically and permanently changed in such members of the family as sprang from the fatal union. After the eleventh century, the two rhythms, that of their abilities and the other of their insanity, surge on together, without mutual interference, like trains of waves on still water intersecting but maintaining their respective individualities.
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