In the Days of the Comet by H. G. Wells Read Free Book Online Page A

to
say, of some particular article, to abandon and dismiss them, nor
was there anything to prevent the sudden frantic underselling of
some trade rival in order to surprise and destroy his trade, secure
his customers for one's own destined needs, and shift a portion of
one's punishment upon him. This operation of spasmodic underselling
was known as "dumping." The American ironmasters were now dumping on
the British market. The British employers were, of course, taking
their loss out of their workpeople as much as possible, but in addition
they were agitating for some legislation that would prevent—not
stupid relative excess in production, but "dumping"—not the disease,
but the consequences of the disease. The necessary knowledge to
prevent either dumping or its causes, the uncorrelated production
of commodities, did not exist, but this hardly weighed with them
at all, and in answer to their demands there had arisen a curious
party of retaliatory-protectionists who combined vague proposals
for spasmodic responses to these convulsive attacks from foreign
manufacturers, with the very evident intention of achieving
financial adventures. The dishonest and reckless elements were
indeed so evident in this movement as to add very greatly to the
general atmosphere of distrust and insecurity, and in the recoil
from the prospect of fiscal power in the hands of the class of men
known as the "New Financiers," one heard frightened old-fashioned
statesmen asserting with passion that "dumping" didn't occur, or
that it was a very charming sort of thing to happen. Nobody would
face and handle the rather intricate truth of the business. The
whole effect upon the mind of a cool observer was of a covey of
unsubstantial jabbering minds drifting over a series of irrational
economic cataclysms, prices and employment tumbled about like towers
in an earthquake, and amidst the shifting masses were the common
work-people going on with their lives as well as they could,
suffering, perplexed, unorganized, and for anything but violent,
fruitless protests, impotent. You cannot hope now to understand
the infinite want of adjustment in the old order of things. At one
time there were people dying of actual starvation in India, while
men were burning unsalable wheat in America. It sounds like the
account of a particularly mad dream, does it not? It was a dream,
a dream from which no one on earth expected an awakening.
    To us youngsters with the positiveness, the rationalism of youth,
it seemed that the strikes and lockouts, the overproduction and
misery could not possibly result simply from ignorance and want
of thought and feeling. We needed more dramatic factors than these
mental fogs, these mere atmospheric devils. We fled therefore to
that common refuge of the unhappy ignorant, a belief in callous
insensate plots—we called them "plots"—against the poor.
    You can still see how we figured it in any museum by looking up
the caricatures of capital and labor that adorned the German and
American socialistic papers of the old time.
Section 2
    I had cast Nettie off in an eloquent epistle, had really imagined
the affair was over forever—"I've done with women," I said to
Parload—and then there was silence for more than a week.
    Before that week was over I was wondering with a growing emotion
what next would happen between us.
    I found myself thinking constantly of Nettie, picturing her—sometimes
with stern satisfaction, sometimes with sympathetic remorse—mourning,
regretting, realizing the absolute end that had come between us.
At the bottom of my heart I no more believed that there was an end
between us, than that an end would come to the world. Had we not
kissed one another, had we not achieved an atmosphere of whispering
nearness, breached our virgin shyness with one another? Of course
she was mine, of course I was hers, and separations and final
quarrels and harshness and distance were no more than flourishes
upon that eternal fact. So at least I