This was said a good many times by a good many kinds of men, and the intangible something it suggested, by repetition, assumed the force of demonstration. There was a distinguishable forgetfulness of the disasters that had come, and a listless thought of those that were threatened. A few observant and reflecting minds brooded over the strange catastrophe, and yielded an attention to their implications. This attitude sprang from knowledge, and in the case of Leacraft from a personal interest in the singular sequence of events which the President portrayed, and which even the placidity of an Englishman’s confidence in his destiny failed to contemplate as injurious fiction. It was a thing to be reflected upon, at least, and added its sombre influence to deepen the gloom of Leacraft’s disappointment. But it also gradually developed for him a remedial efficacy, not simply as a spurious employment for his thoughts, but through a substantial relevancy to his emotional needs. Leacraft’s mental inclinations carried him towards speculative forecasts. He had cultivated his predilections along all sorts of scientific horoscopes, and had enjoyed the indulgence of his fancy in studying nations and inventions, with a view to composing a plan or description of their future condition, phase and expression. He had arrived at some curious results, but they represented solely the changed surface of society, in its industrial, civic or social states, or else, in their more immaterial flights, pictured the enduring alterations of religious or philosophic systems. In all these speculations he had quite neglected the physical constants of the world, its climate and topography. His thought engaged itself with the mechanical structure of civilization, as affected by new discoveries, allied with an increasing utilitarianism, in which the individual vanishes before the imperious supervention of the State, the incorporated multitude, the abstract Wisdom of the most knowing minds, influenced by a solicitous paternalism for the Whole.