No such shocking and shattering misery as had befallen Scotland had as yet engulfed England, especially its southern counties, but the darkening days brought more clearly to the observation of the most recalcitrant and obtuse, the most reluctant and temporizing, the fact that England’s climate was approaching that of Labrador, that the restraints of trade would soon become enormous, that its products would be unmitigatedly diminished and restricted, and that it could no longer raise wheat; that its railroads, for half the year, would endure a dangerous embargo; that its population would perish; that its industries would undergo the most serious curtailment; that foreign ports would absorb its commerce, steal its prestige, insinuate themselves, by its crippled resources, into the markets of the earth in its place; that the ramifications of disaster would penetrate its social, intellectual and political life, and cloud its mental horizon with the gaunt and stupid spectres of Torpor and Helplessness. This monstrous dilemma submerged all minor passions, and plunged England into the noisiest outbreak of argument, suggestion and panic-stricken questionings. Leacraft buried himself in the questions that now with the more forward and statesmanly thinkers were coming to the front with relentless insistence. Amongst these, conspicuously outstrode and outshone the rest, H. G. Wells, the brilliant author and prophet of the New Republicanism, whose book had five years before roused an intense and frightened protest from the servitors of antiquity, and the selfish lackies of a superannuated and mythical class system. Mr. Wells, with his trained skill in scientific deduction and the exercised powers of imagination, with a reckless and defiant desire to unravel the future, with the slenderest regard for the prejudices of religion or old-fogey political conservatism, was now half-deluded himself with the sudden dream of starting the English nation on new grounds. Released from the impedimenta of ceremonies and ruins, names and titles, furnished with a _tabula rasa_ where the new ideals of which he set himself up as a sort of avatar and preacher might most keenly set and develop themselves, he believed--as in a measure Leacraft did himself--that the English cultus would put on those insignia of the coming eras which meant intellectual emancipation, and a social and civil regime where the greatest happiness and the widest material prosperity would unite, in which, too, would not be wanting a radical rearrangement of the relations of the sexes, hinted at in the same author’s later books, but which again, naturally, by many who followed Mr. Wells a certain way, was indignantly repudiated. A more dignified and august group of men--among whom the names of Churchill, Chamberlain, Rosebery, Balfour, Prof. Stubbs, and Bryce led--had assembled themselves in a council of deeply concerned and profoundly patriotic advisers. These men secured