CHILDREN OF MEN BY EDEN PHILLPOTTS AUTHOR OF "EUDOCIA," "BRUNEL'S TOWER," ETC. LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD. _First Published_, 1923 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY WOODS & SONS, LTD., LONDON W.1. FOREWORD The egotism of a personal note may, for once, be permitted to me, since an enterprise, launched some thirty years ago in 'Children of the Mist,' now reaches its port of destination with the present story. When 'Widecombe Fair' was written, that book appeared the end of the matter; but fresh challenges from life on the Dartmoors, and renewed strength to meet them, enabled me to add certain passages to the total and render the design orbicular and complete. With 'Children of Men' it is accomplished and the purpose may be related in brief words. Without learning, or bias, or convictions to determine my trend, I have said 'Yes' to life as it unfolded in this small theatre. Mine was neither a great nor a subtle vision, but unvitiated within its limitations. Given faith that conscious Will is at the helm of human affairs, then a definite attitude must result before the spectacle of humanity; but if the mind be built to accept only unconscious Law as controller, the outlook differs and a resolute trust may develop in man, as ultimate arbiter of his own destiny. Neither assumption can be proved, or disproved; but the relation of a controlling, guiding Spirit to the Universe lies open to doubt; its subjection to Law does not; and building upon this latter certainty, I discovered, in the evolution of the moral principle, full cause for trust and for hope. Observation has convinced me that moral evolution is upward, despite massive, contemporary evidence to the contrary. For the War and the peace alike I recognise as a transient paralysis of human reason, not its negation. The War was an attack of familiar maladies for which man's own errors of ignorance were to be condemned, not the laws of his being; but it was an unutterable infamy and disgrace to him, for this reason, that it proves him to be lagging behind the time-table of moral evolution. Ere now he should have outgrown his present stature, and the causes of his tardy progress, his centuries of loitering in the desert, are as plain as pitiful. An impartial ethics can point to where his faith took the wrong turn; but progress in righteousness is only delayed; I have seen dawn upon the mountain tops too often not to trust that it will presently descend into the shadowed homes and sleeping hearts of men.