The Wife of Sir Isaac HarmanWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
England -- Fiction; Upper class -- Fiction; Women's rights -- Fiction
Because before you have done with the business of the modern employé,
you must, if you are an intelligent person, have taken a view of the
whole vast process of social reorganization that began with the
development of factory labour and big towns, and which is even now
scarcely advanced enough for us to see its general trend. For a time
Mr. Brumley did not realize the magnitude of the thing he was looking
at; when he did, theories sprouted in his mind like mushrooms and he
babbled with mental excitement. He came in a state of the utmost
lucidity to explain his theories to Lady Harman, and they struck that
lady at the time as being the most illuminating suggestions she had
ever encountered. They threw an appearance of order, of process, over a
world of trade and employment and competition that had hitherto seemed
too complex and mysterious for any understanding.
“You see,” said Mr. Brumley—they had met that day in Kensington Gardens
and they were sitting side by side upon green chairs near the frozen
writings of Physical Energy—“You see, if I may lecture a little,
putting the thing as simply as possible, the world has been filling up
new spaces ever since the discovery of America; all the period from
then to about 1870, let us say, was a period of rapid increase of
population in response to new opportunities of living and new fulnesses
of life in every direction. During that time, four hundred years of it
roughly, there was a huge development of family life; to marry and rear
a quite considerable family became the chief business of everybody,
celibacy grew rare, monasteries and nunneries which had abounded
vanished like things dissolving in a flood and even the priests became
Protestant against celibacy and took unto themselves wives and had huge
families. The natural checks upon increase, famine and pestilence, were
lifted by more systematized communication and by scientific discovery;
and altogether and as a consequence the world now has probably three or
four times the human population it ever carried before. Everywhere in
that period the family prevailed again, the prospering multiplying
household; it was a return to the family, to the reproductive social
grouping of early barbaric life, and naturally all the thought of the
modern world which has emerged since the fifteenth century falls into
this form. So I see it, Lady Harman. The generation of our grandfathers
in the opening nineteenth century had two shaping ideas, two forms of
thought, the family and progress, not realizing that that very progress
which had suddenly reopened the doors of opportunity for the family
that had revived the ancient injunction to increase and multiply and
replenish the earth, might presently close that door again and declare
the world was filled. But that is what is happening now. The doors
close. That immense swarming and multiplying of little people is over,
and the forces of social organization have been coming into play now,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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