JAIPUR - FROM JESTING PILATE -HUXLEY - I SHOULD SEND FIVE RUPEES TO GET THE DETAILS OF THE ADULTERY CURE ...SO MUCH CHEAPER THAN DIVORCE

AT JAIPUR we were fortunate in having an introduction to one of the 
great thakurs of the State. He was a mighty landholder, the owner of 
twenty villages with populations ranging from five hundred to as many 
thousands, a feudal lord who paid for his fief (until, a year or two ago, 
a somewhat simpler and more modern system of tenure was introduced) 
by contributing to the State army one hundred and fifty armed and 
mounted men. This nobleman was kind enough to place his elephant at 
our disposal. 

It was a superb and particularly lofty specimen, with gold-mounted 
tusks; ate two hundredweight of food a day and must have cost at least 
six hundred a year to keep. An expensive pet. But" for a man in the 
thakur's position, we gathered, indispensable, a necessity. Pachyderms in 
Rajputana are what glass coaches were in Europe a century and a half 
ago essential luxuries. 

The thakur was a charming and cultured man, hospitably kind as only 
Indians can be. But at the risk of seeming ungrateful, I must confess 
that, of all the animals I have ever ridden, the elephant is the most 
uncomfortable mount. On the level, it is true, the motion is not too 
bad. One seems to be riding on a small chronic earthquake; that is all. 
The earthquake becomes more disquieting when the beast begins to 
climb. But when it goes downhill, it is like the end of the world. The 
animal descends very slowly and with an infinite caution, planting one 
huge foot deliberately before the other, and giving you time between 
each calculated step to anticipate the next convulsive spasm of movement 
a spasm that seems to loosen from its place every organ in the rider's 
body, that twists the spine, that wrenches all the separate muscles of 
the loins and thorax. The hills round Jaipur are not very high. Fortu- 
nately; for by the end of the three or four hundred feet of our climbing 
and descending, we had almost reached the limits of our endurance. I 
returned full of admiration for Hannibal. He crossed the Alps on an 
elephant. 

We made two expeditions with the pachyderm; one over a rocky 



pass entailing, there and back, two climbs and two sickening descents 
to the tanks and ruined temples of Galta, and one to the deserted 
palaces of Amber. Emerging from the palace precincts I record the 
trivial and all too homely incident, because it set me mournfully reflect- 
ing about the cosmos our monster halted and, with its usual delibera- 
tion, relieved nature, portentously. Hardly, the operation over, had it 
resumed its march when an old woman who had been standing at the 
door of a hovel among the ruins, expectantly waiting we had wondered 
for what darted forward and fairly threw herself on the mound of 
steaming excrement. There was fuel here, I suppose, for a week's cooking. 
"Salaam, Maharaj," she called up to us, bestowing in her gratitude the 
most opulent title she could lay her tongue to. Our passage had been 
to her like a sudden and unexpected fall of manna. She thanked us; she 
blessed the great and charitable Jumbo for his Gargantuan bounty. 

Our earthquake lurched on. I thought of the scores of millions of 
human beings to whom the passage of an unconstipated elephant seems 
a godsend, a stroke of enormous good luck. The thought depressed me. 
Why are we here, men and women, eighteen hundred millions of us, 
on this remarkable and perhaps unique planet? To what end? Is it to go 
about looking for dung cow dung, horse dung, the enormous and 
princely excrement of elephants? Evidently it is for a good many of 
us, at any rate. It seemed an inadequate reason, I thought, for our being 
here immortal souls, first cousins of the angels, own brothers of Buddha 
and Mozart and Sir Isaac Newton. 

But a little while later I saw that I was wrong to let the consideration 
depress me. If it depressed me, that was only because I looked at the 
whole matter from the wrong end, so to speak. In painting my mental 
picture of the dung-searchers I had filled my foreground with the figures 
of Sir Isaac Newton and the rest of them. These, I perceived, should 
have been relegated to the remote background and the foreground should 
have been filled with cows and elephants. The picture so arranged, I 
should have been able to form a more philosophical and proportionable 
estimate of the dung-searchers. For I should have seen at a glance how 
vastly superior were their activities to those of the animal producers of 
dung in the foreground. The philosophical Martian would admire the 
dung-searchers for having discovered a use for dung; no other animal, 
he would point out, has had the wit to do more than manufacture it. 

We are not Martians and our training makes us reluctant to think of 
ourselves as animals. Nobody inquires why cows and elephants inhabit 
the world. There is as little reason why we should be here, eating, drink- 
ing, sleeping and in the intervals reading metaphysics, saying prayers, 



CAWNPORE  

or collecting dung. We are here, that is all; and like other animals we 
do what our native capacities and our environment permit of our doing. 
Our achievement, when we compare it with that of cows and elephants, 
is remarkable. They automatically make dung; we collect it and turn it 
into fuel. It is not something to be depressed about; it is something to 
be proud of. Still, in spite of the consolations of philosophy, I remained 
pensive. 



Cawnpore 

From Jesting Pilate 

FROM its advertisements much may be learned of a nation's character 
and habits of thought. The following brief anthology of Indian adver- 
tisements is compiled from newspapers, magazines, medical catalogues, 
and the like. Several of the most characteristic specimens are taken from 
the Cawnpore Congress Guide, an official publication intended for the 
use of delegates and interested visitors. It is with one of these appeals 
to India's most enlightened public that I make a beginning. 

Beget a son and Be Happy by using the SON BIRTH PILLS, 
my special secret Hindu Shastrick preparation, according to direc- 
tions. Ladies who have given birth to daughters only WILL SURELY 
HAVE SONS NEXT, and those who have sons MUST HAVE MALE ISSUES 
ONCE AGAIN by the Grace of God. Fortunate persons desirous of 
begetting sons are bringing this marvelous Something into use for 
brightening their dark homes and making their lives worth their 
living. It is very efficacious and knows no failure. Self-praise is no 
recommendation. Try and be convinced. But if you apply, mention- 
ing this publication, with full history of your case, along with a con- 
sultation fee ot Rupees Ten (Foreign one guinea) only giving your 
"Word of Honor" to give me a SUITABLE REWARD (naming the 
amount) according to your means and position in life, just on the 
accomplishment of your desire in due course of time, you can have 
the same Free, ABSOLUTELY FREE. Act immediately, for this FREE 
OFFER may not remain open indefinitely. 

Here are some pleasing Hair-oil advertisements from various sources: 



Dr. *s Scented Almond Oil. Best preparation to be used as 

hair oil for men who do mental work. The effects of almond oil on 
brain are known to everybody. 

Jabukusum is a pure vegetable oil, to which medicinal ingredients 
and the perfume have been added to prevent all affectations (sic) of 
the hair and the brain. 

There are several panaceas on the Indian market. There is, for exam- 
ple, Sidda Kalpa Makaradhwaja which "is a sure and infallible specific 
for all Diseases, and it never fails to effect a satisfactory cure in the 
patient, be his ailment whatever it may. Among the various diseases 
amenable to its administration, to state a few, are the following: Debility, 
general or nervous, including Nervous Prostration, due to whatever cause, 
Loss of Memory, Giddiness and Insanity . . . Asthma and Consumption, 
all stomach troubles . . . Cholera ... all Kidney and Bladder Troubles 
... all Acute and Chronic Venereal Diseases . . . Leprosy of all kinds, 
White, Black, Red, etc. . . . Rheumatism, Paralysis, Epilepsy . . . Hysteria, 
Sterility . . . and all Fevers, including Malaria, Pneumonia, Influenza, 
and such other poisonous ones." 

Not a bad medicine, but I prefer the "Infallible Cure for Incurable 
Diseases, Habits, and Defects'* advertised in the Cawnpore Guide. The 
announcement runs as follows: 

I have discovered the natural system of cure for all diseases, 
habits, defects, failings, etc., without the use of deleterious and 
pernicious drugs or medicines. Being Scientific, it is absolutely safe, 
simple, painless, pleasant, rapid, and infallible. Diseases like hysteria, 
epilepsy, rheumatism, loss of memory, paralysis, insanity and mania; 
addiction to smoking, opium, drink etc.; impotence, sterility, adultery, 
and the like can be radically cured duly by My System. Come to me 
after everyone else has failed to do you good. I guarantee a cure in 
every case undertaken. Every case needs to be treated on its special 
merits, and so applicants should furnish me with the complete history 
of the health of the patient and general occupation from birth, height, 
measurement over chest or bust, waist and hips, and a photograph 
with as little dress on as possible, along with a consultation fee of 
Rupees Five, without which no replies can be sent. 

If the buying of a postal order were not so insuperable a nuisance, I 
should send five rupees to get the details of the adultery cure. So much 
cheaper than divorce. 

CHRONICON SAXONICUS 867 ANNO DOMINUS - DOGS OF IMENSE SIZE -PRUSSIA 856 AD MONSTER DOGS IN TRIER - THE MONSTERS AMONG US IN TIMES OF WONDERS AND FAMISHED POOR PEOPLE

LONDON'S FAMISHED

POOR

LEADERS OF RANK AND FASHION GO SLUMMING.

SHOCKING SIDELIGHTS

ON GREAT CITY'S

UNDERWORLD.

(By Wilkinson Sherren;

LONDON, December 31, 1903.

Among the rich in England there is a sudden boom in slumming. Though often spoken of as the "wealthiest city in the world," London presents this -winter a startling spectacle of contrasting luxury and dire distress. The Thames Embank- ment gradually developed into the clear- ing-house of human -wreckage, until a week or two ago the scandal became so great that the Salvation Army, -with official en- couragement, took tho situation in hand. Every night officers from General Booth's headquarters escort thousands of derelicts to shelters and "doss-houses," where warmth and soup are provided free.

»So compelling has this glaring demon- stration of London misery become, how- ever, that all sections of society, and »li political partie« in the realm have awak- ened to the necessity for action. Conserva- tive politicians charge all the unemplry

ment to the account of the Freetraders, |

who have maintained England's policy of . free imports. They contend if a tariff j were imposed on manufactured goods im-

ported from abroad there would be greater industrial activity in home centres, and I many ot these penniless wrecks would bs I ' employed. Liberals, on the other hand,

blame the British bystem of land tenure, and say the only hope is to make it pos- sible for country laborers to secure access

! to small holdings, so that they may not

DEAD OR MERELY SLEEPING?

It is hard to tell very often whether the human wrecks along the Embankment are dead or slumbering. Their pallid faces have the hue of death. Sometimes in the grey dawn police do come upon unfortunate victims crushed beneath Fortune's wheel-starved to death, under the shadow of luxurious hotels.

j drift to towns in the mistaken expectation of improving' their position.

Meanwhile wealthy men and women in their West End mansions have heard the wail of the starving denizens of London's back alleys more this winter than ever be- fore. Tremendous impetus has been given to the Personal Service Association, born | just a year ago, whose ? members pledge

themselves to devote personal efforts to better the lot of those who exist miserably in the shadow of metropolitan poverty. How widely the movement has gripped society may be seen from the fact that tne president of this new organisation is the Marquis of Salisbury, son of the famous Conservative ex-Premier, and a vice-pre- sident is Mrs. Asquith, wife 'of the head of the Liberal Party to-day.

For it has become known to all that while the ingenuity of. British statesmen has been bent on organising a territoiial force of volunteers, and men have bean enthusing over the rapidly-growing bat- talions of citizen soldiers, an army of a different character has been mustering the capital of the British Empire.

London is a magnefc that draws all types of people from the country, and a tradition that her streets arc paved with gold at- tracts not only the ambitious but the un- fortunate from every part of the land. During the summer months the presence of the social failures is not so noticeable, bo cause of the lure of the open road and the facilities for sleeping out in the parks. But now, with the arrival of winter, rich and comfortable London is confronted with her spectral army of failures and unfortu- nates, of unemployables and genuine out

of-works.

By an irony of circumstance London's spectacle of want and woe assumes its most wretched and heartrending phase within hail of the Houses of Parliament, where nt» raw has yet been devised to benefit the lot of th<- distressed to any material extent. The Thames Embankment has the national "talking shop" at one end and Blackfriars Bridge at the other, and between thefee points there is a nightly parade of the army of despair, a large number of whom belong to the class described by Gorky as "crea- tures that once were men." Above them may be seen the sparkling windows of

ONE OF LONDON'S HOMELESS WOMEN.

Bound for some railway arch, with a bag oí shavings for-her bed and scraps of broken food in her basket.

famous hotels shining cheerily in the night -symbols of well-being in brutal juxta- position to human misery.

To accompany one of the emissaries of the Salvation Army at midnight is to come full tilt against tragedy. Men, stupeäed with sleep blunder by with moth-like mo- tions, or snatch fitful repose on the seats.

To each is given a food ticket, but most of the recipients might be dead men for all the response it evokes.

There have been many pilgrimages in the history of England, but none like the nightly journey of homeless and starving

men along the Thames Embankment to the Millbank Shelter, for a basin of soup and a hunch of bread. I saw all sorts and con- ditions of men too dazed by ills-self-in- flicted and fate-inflicted-even to enjoy the brief respite from the cold horror of the streets. Drugged with weariness, gaunt with hunger, fevered with impotent de- spair, the battalions'of the lost looked like dismal caracatnres of the busy and well employed people who carry on the work ol London. As a handful of chaff is scattered in the air and lost, so the members of this

midnight supper party disappeared. ¡

Shelter of any kind is their life's great problem. Old women may be seen carry- ing bits of broken food in their baskets or a bed of shavings in a sack, which the,y spread under a railway arch. Their faces are seamed with lines of sordid care; tlteiv

mouths are shaped in the curves of a hope- '? less destiny. Other unfortunates limp the streets all night, snatching brief intervals

of unquiet slumber on doorsteps, to be sup- ! plemented with "forty winks" on E-nbank- j

ment seats till moved cm by the police.

The British workhouse is a notoriously ' unpopular institution -with the poor folk it ! was designed by law to help. Poverty in Britain is still considered to be more or less of a crime, anêl social failures incur some stigma even now by availing them,-." selves of the help the Poor Law affords.

A few days ago there came to light the case of two old people yvno preferred to die of destitution rather than go into the workhouse. Sarah Smith, aged 71, earned her bread by cleaning doorsteps, and had never applied for an old age pension, the probability being that she had not heard of the scheme. Isaac Harris, agEd 63. formerly a policeman and a publican, though practically starving, declined to apply for relief of any kind, stating that he "would not lower himself" by do'ng so. The coroner spoke the epitaph over these two unfortunate people, in which the ugly word starvation figured as a con- tributory cause of death. So, it will be seen, pride is not an exclusive attribute of the highest ranks of British society.

One of the most shocking stories of want and woe this -winter has been told to the magistrate at Willesden, a northern district of London. The authorities ha'ed

a man before the court for non-payment . of the poor rate-a levy made on the pub- lic for the assistance of the indigent. In answer to the charge he handed the magis- trate a letter from his wife couched in the following terms:

"Poer rates! Why, there are none poorer than we are, and if you take my husband away I don't know what -will be- come of me and the children. If you knew what we have gone through you would have pity. A few months ago my baby, aged eight months, died of starvation, and at night the parish undertaker called for the body and placed it in his handbag, in which was another body." Such cases frequently crop up. confirming the truth of the saying, "HalF the world does-not know how the other half lives." Police Court authorities in such cases excuse the payment of the rates, but there are thousands whose plaint is never heard.

Ugly pospibilities of modern civilised life are made terribly plain by this leal torn from the page of living London-the

poor taxed for the poor, and their offspring when dead carried away like a parcel from the store.

1171 ANDOVER GIGANTIC PIG LIKE THING 

PRIEST STRUCK BY LIGHTNING 

O CHUPA-CABRAS SURGE COM MAIS FREQUÊNCIA 

 NOS ANOS DE MISÉRIA DO MÉXICO ANOS 90

NA IRLANDA UND ENGLAND NOS ANOS DE 1874 E 1905 DEAD SHEEP

o jornalismo prefere os temas sobrenaturaes à miséria humana é natural

1855 great sea serpent - silver lake new york

Michigan  - scores of airships 1896-97

1925 THE YETI DOESN'T EXIST 

BUT HE DOESN'T HAVE ENOUGH BRAINS TO REALIZE IT 

Society at large is uneasy. The groans of the slaves of hunger have at last pene- trated into the secluded atmosphère ot mansions and castles. Nobody is ignorant of the fact that winter has let loose the hounds of cold and wet upon England's army of unwilling martyrs. Social students, knowing the close connection between de- spair and violence, have agitated in season and out of season among tlie well-to-do for sympathetic attention to social problems. Hence the establishment of this Personal Service Association, which ca'ls for nvn and women to visit regularly through the winter one or more families in the poorer i districts of London.

1 Some of the best-known names in English

life are associated with this effort and ap- peal. They work in co-operation with various philanthropic agencies. Al- ready many families have been lifted out of the ranks of distress by the ¡ persistent interest and influence of a

friend. Young girls and boys have been rescued from illness and idleness, side , people given the chance of recoveiy, and j wage-earners persuaded to make provision

I for the future. Besides the actual services

I rendered, real friendships have been formed j between the helper and the helped, and

some understanding arrived at of eacñ other's problems.

Sentimental sops for economic woes is the generaî verdict passed bj- Socialists on Icindly and ameliorative efforts such as those fostered by this association. Some pobtical theorists foresee the red rag of revolu- tion, and talk wildly of the omnipotence ot the proletariat. 

Sober and competent observers discount wiLd prophecies, and look hopefully to Parliament to work out a scheme of salvation _ for the unemployed and of care and disciplinary control of the unemployables. This problem figures largely in the general election in England to-day.

Though the visits of the moneyed to the moneyless is a healthy sign of the state ot public sentiment, there are still many places never penetrated by well to-do visitors, where lurid lights from the under-

world shine in ominous warning.

Among the stunted and starvling freqiienters of the Anarchist and Socialist clubs in the East-End of London can be heard the threats bom of dangerous prOpaganda. There congregate many different i types-idealists more or less broken in the machinery of modem conditions, men obsessed with enthusiasm, half crazy with theories of immediate social betterment who find inspiration in despair, and who in- toxicate themselves on revengeful dreams. They have no country; men of eyery nationality, they are united by a creed that, maintained with aposto'ic fervor, gains many recruits in times of distress.

Social workers on London's East side are therefore sounding the warning that it left alone in their misery, the half-starved, worklesB atoms in the slums may, by the forces of desperation, be brought into dangerous cohesion under the goadir* gibes

of reckless agitators. 

SOCIAL OUTCASTS SLEEPING ON THE EMBANKMENT.

Day and night the Embankment by the side of the Thames is the resting-place of many of London's homeless ?wanderer, though it is at night that the horde gathers in full force to receive tickets for food and shelter. The police often have difficulty in rousing the starving slumbers.

 

THE ROAD TO THE FMI OR IMF OR FIM OR FIN OR FINIS OR WHATEVER IS FOREVER OPEN

Officially, US debt stands at more than $17 trillion. In reality, it is many times more. The cost of the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq may be more than six trillion dollars. President Obama's illegal invasion of Libya cost at least a billion dollars and left that country devastated. The costs of US regime change efforts in Syria are likely thus far enormous, both in dollars and lives. That's still a secret.
So who in his right mind would think it is a good time to start a war with Russia over Ukraine? And worse, who would commit the United States to bail out a Ukraine that will need at least $35 billion to survive the year?
Who? The president and Congress, backed by the neocons and the so-called humanitarian interventionists!
The House voted overwhelmingly last week to provide $1 billion in loan guarantees to Ukraine. That is just the beginning, you can be sure. But let's be clear: this is not money for the population of that impoverished country. The Administration is sending a billion dollars from US taxpayers to wealthy international bankers who hold Ukrainian debt. It is an international bank bailout, not aid to Ukrainians. And despite the escalating anti-Russia rhetoric, ironically some of that money will likely go to Russia for Ukraine's two billion dollar unpaid gas bill!

O ALIENISTA - MACHADO DE ASSIS Y ASSAD - THE BASTILLE OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE IS KAPPUT ....THE UCRANIAN - VENEZUELAN - SYRIAN DEBACLE

The ALIENISTA OR THE ALIENADO ANALISTA OR  Psychiatrist" follows the scientific efforts of
 Dr. Simão Bacamarte, a prominent Portuguese physician whose obsession for discovering a universal method to treat and consequently cure pathologic disturbs drives inhabitants of the small Brazilian town of Itaguaí to fear, conspiracy and revolutionary attempts.
 In a short space of time,
 Bacamarte's madhouse, popularly named "Green House", passes to take inside of its walls not only mentally ill patients but also healthy citizens who, according to the doctor's diagnoses, are about to develop some sort of mental illness. 
Porfírio, the town's barber, indicts Bacamarte for his corruptive influence over the Municipal Assemlency, which since the beginning approved the experiments taken place at the Green House, "the Bastille of human Knowledge".

QUATERNARY EXTINCTIONS: A PREHISTORIC REVOLUTION THAT NEVER ENDS .....AND IS GOING NICELY...

Quaternary Extinctions: A Prehistoric Revolution FROM GIANT CAVE BEARS TO LAME VICUÑAS

4.What caused the extinction of so many animals at or near the end of the Pleistocene? Was it overkill by human hunters, the result of a major climatic change or was it just a part of some massive evolutionary turnover? Questions such as these have plagued scientists for over one hundred years and are still being heatedly debated today. Quaternary Extinctions presents the latest and most comprehensive examination of these questions. —Geological Magazine

"May be regarded as a kind of standard encyclopedia for Pleistocene vertebrate paleontology for years to come." —American Scientist

"Should be read by paleobiologists, biologists, wildlife managers, ecologists, archeologists, and anyone concerned about the ongoing extinction of plants and animals." —Science

"Uncommonly readable and varied for watchers of paleontology and the rise of humankind." —Scientific American

"Represents a quantum leap in our knowledge of Pleistocene and Holocene palaeobiology. . . . Many volumes on our bookshelves are destined to gather dust rather than attention. But not this one." —Nature

"Two strong impressions prevail when first looking into this epic compendium. One is the judicious balance of views that range over the whole continuum between monocausal, cultural, or environmental explanations. The second is that both the data base and theoretical sophistication of the protagonists in the debate have improved by a quantum leap since 1967." —American Anthropologist

Paperback, 892 pages is a little ...but is good to killing mosquito plagues and vicuñas

KONEC PROKRASTINACE AND HOW LIVE WITH IT - THE RECORD OF VARIATIONS OVER REVERSIBLE WEAKENINGS ....NEXT TOPIC TROPHIC FOOD-BORNE DISEASES...OR ARE WE NOW FACING SUCH A FOOD CHANGE

Konec prokrastinace je nová kniha Petra Ludwiga o prokrastinaci, chorobném odkládání důležitých úkolů a povinností.
 Historie lidského odkládání
Prokrastinací trpěli lidé od nepaměti. Již antický básník Hésiodos na tuto
problematiku upozorňoval ve své básni Práce a dni:[
„Na zítřek se nespoléhej,
na pozítří neodkládej;
Neboť člověk zameškalý
stodoly nenaplní,
Ani člověk odkládavec;
Zato píle množí dílo;
Ale člověk nedodělka
Bude tříti bídu s nouzí.“
Člověk zameškalý, člověk odkládavec, člověk nedodělka – tak by se dal
popsat i dnešní prokrastinátor.
Také římský filosof Seneca varoval: „Zatímco ztrácíme svůj čas váháním
a odkládáním, život utíká.“ Tento citát vyjadřuje hlavní důvod, proč je dob­
ré se naučit s prokrastinací bojovat.
Prokrastinace je jednou z hlavních překážek, která nám brání pro­
žít náš život naplno. Nedávný výzkum ukázal, že lidé více litují toho, co
ve svém životě neudělali, než toho, co udělali.
 Lítost a s ní spojené vý­
čitky kvůli promarněným příležitostem vydrží výrazně déle

Co je prokrastinace? and how we live with it

Podívejte se Když prokrastinujeme, nedokážeme se přemluvit k plnění úkolů, které
bychom měli nebo chtěli dělat. Místo důležitých věcí, ve kterých vidíme
smysl, často děláme něco nepodstatného.
Sledujeme seriály, zaléváme květiny v  kanceláři, hrajeme počítačo­
vé hry, trávíme hodiny na sociálních sítích, jíme (i když nemáme hlad),
opakovaně uklízíme, chodíme bezcílně po pracovišti nebo jen tak zíráme
do zdi. Později kvůli výčitkám a frustraci přichází pocit bezmoci vedoucí
k tomu, že opět nic neděláme.
Ale pozor. Prokrastinace není čistá lenost. Líný člověk nic dělat nechce
a je s tímto stavem spokojen. Prokrastinující člověk by naopak rád něco dělal,
ale nedokáže se k tomu přemluvit. Rád by něco dokázal, ale nejde mu to.
Prokrastinaci nelze zaměňovat ani za odpočinek.
Při odpočívání zís­
káváme novou energii. Při prokrastinaci ji naopak ztrácíme. Čím méně
energie máme, tím větší je šance, že naše úkoly opět odložíme a znovu nic

  


































Stává se vám, že odkládáte i věci, které opravdu dělat chcete? 
Snažíte si sami sobě poručit, ale neposlechnete se? 
Děláte místo důležitých věcí, ve kterých vidíte smysl, něco nepodstatného?
 Cítíte občas i vy, že jste se dostali do prokrastinačního začarovaného kruhu?

• Znáte pocit, když se vám nechce začít dělat na nějakém úkolu?
• Stává se vám, že odkládáte i věci, které opravdu dělat chcete?
• Snažíte si sami sobě poručit, ale neposlechnete se?

THE TIMES OF CHANGE THAT THE HERD LOVE AND THE HERD FEAR ARE COMING AND ARE COMING FAST

The first phase of that readjustment is necessarily destructive. The conceptions of life and obligation that have served and satisfied even the most vigorous and intelligent personalities hitherto, conceptions that were naturally partial, sectarian and limited, begin to lose, decade by decade, their credibility and their directive force. They fade, they become attenuated. It is an age of increasing mental uneasiness, of forced beliefs, hypocrisy, cynicism, abandon and impatience. What has been hitherto a final and impenetrable background of conviction in the rightness of the methods of behaviour characteristic of the national or local culture of each individual, becomes, as it were, a dissolving and ragged curtain. Behind it appear, vague and dim at first, and refracted and distorted by the slow dissolution of the traditional veils, the intimations of the type of behaviour necessary to that single world community in which we live to-day.

Until the Chronological Institute has completed its present labours of revision and defined the cardinal dates in our social evolution, it is best to refer our account of the development of man's mind and will throughout this hectic period of human experience to the clumsy and irrelevant computation by centuries before and after the Christian Era, that is still current. As we have explained more fully in a previous book*, we inherit this system of historical pigeonholes from Christendom; that arbitrary chequerwork of hundred-year blocks was imposed upon the entire Mediterranean and Atlantic literatures for two thousand years, and it still distorts the views of history of all but the alertest minds. The young student needs to be constantly on his guard against its false divisions. As Peter Lightfoot has remarked, we talk of the "eighteenth century", and we think of fashions and customs and attitudes that are characteristic of a period extending from the Treaty of Westphalia in C.E. [Christian Era] 1642 to the Napoleonic collapse in C.E. 1815; we talk of the "nineteenth century", and the pictures and images evoked are those of the gas-lighting and steam-transport era, from after the distressful years of post-Napoleonic recovery to the immense shock of the World War in C.E. 1914. The phase "twentieth century", again, calls forth images of the aeroplane, the electrification of the world and so forth; but an aeroplane was an extremely rare object in the air until 1914 (the first got up in 1905), and the replacement of the last steam railway train and the last steamship was not completed until the nineteen-forties. It is a tiresome waste of energy to oblige each generation of young minds to learn first of all in any unmeaning pattern of centuries and then to correct that first crude arrangement, so that this long-needed revision of our chronology is one that will be very welcome to every teacher. Then from the very outset he or she will be able to block out the story of our race in significant masses.

* [Nothing of this is to be found in Raven's notes.—ED.]

The Chronological Institute is setting about its task with a helpful publicity, inviting discussion from every angle. It is proposing to divide up as much of the known history of our race as is amenable to annual reckoning, into a series of eras of unequal length. Naturally the choice of these eras is the cause of some extremely lively and interesting interchanges; most of us have our own private estimates of the values of events, and many issues affecting the earlier civilized communities remain in a state of animated unsettlement. Our chronology is now fairly sure as to the year for most important events in the last 4,000 years, and, thanks largely to the minute and patient labours of the Selwyn-Cornford Committee for Alluvial Research, to the decade for another hundred centuries. So far as the last 3,000 years are concerned, little doubt remains now that the main dividing points to be adopted will be FIRST the epoch of Alexander and the Hellenic conquests which will begin the phase of the great Helleno-Latin monetary imperialism in the western world, the Helleno-Latin Era. This will commence at the crossing of the Hellespont by Alexander the Great and end either with the Battle of the Yarmuk (636 C.E.) or the surrender of Jerusalem to the Caliph Omar (638 C.E.). NEXT will come the epoch of Moslem and Mongol pressure on the West which opened the era of feudal Christendom vis-à-vis with feudal Islam: the Era of Asiatic Predominance. This ends with the Battle of Lepanto (1571 C.E.). Then THIRDLY there will follow the epoch of the Protestant and the Catholic (counter) Reformations, which inaugurated the era of the competing sovereign states with organized standing armies: the Era of European Predominance, or, as it may also be called, the Era of National Sovereignty. Finally comes the catastrophe of the World War of 1914, when the outward drive of the new economic methods the Atlantic civilizations had developed gave way under the internal stresses of European nationalism. That war, and its long-drawn sequelae, released the human mind to the potentialities and dangers of an imperfectly Europeanized world—a world which had unconsciously become one single interlocking system, while still obsessed by the Treaty of Westphalia and the idea of competing sovereign states. This mental shock and release marks the beginning of the Era of the Modern State. The opening phase of this latest era is this Age of Frustration with which we are now about to deal. That is the first age of the Era of the Modern State. A second age, but not a new era, began with the Declaration of Mégève which was accepted by the general commonsense of mankind forty-seven years ago. This closed the Age of Frustration, which lasted therefore a little short of a century and a half.

The date upon the title-page for the first publication of this History is C.E. 2106. Before many editions have been exhausted that will be changed to Modern Era (M.E.) 192 or M.E. 189 or M.E. 187, according to whether our chronologists decide upon 1914, the date of the outbreak of the Great War, or 1917, the beginning of the social revolution in Russia, or 1919, the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, as the conclusive opening of the Age of Frustration and the conflict for world unity. The second date seems at present to be the more practicable one.

In C.E. 1914 the concept of an organized world order did not seem to be within the sphere of human possibility; in C.E. 1919 it was an active power in a steadily increasing proportion of human brains. The Modern State had been conceived. It was germinating. One system, the Soviet system in Russia, was already claiming to be a world system. To most of the generation which suffered it, the Great War seemed to be purely catastrophe and loss; to us who see those hideous years in perspective and in proportion to the general dulness and baseness of apprehension out of which that conflict arose, the destruction of life and substance, unprecedented as they were, has none of that overwhelming quality. We see it as a clumsy, involuntary release from outworn assumptions by their reduction to tragic absurdity, and as a practically unavoidable step therefore in the dialectic of human destiny.

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2. — HOW THE IDEA AND HOPE OF THE
MODERN WORLD STATE FIRST APPEARED

The essential difference between the world before the Great War and the world after it lay in this, that before that storm of distress and disillusionment the clear recognition that a worldwide order and happiness, in spite of contemporary distresses, was within the reach of mankind was confined to a few exceptional persons, while after the catastrophe it had spread to an increasing multitude, it had become a desperate hope and desire, and at last a working conviction that made organized mass action possible.

Even those who apprehended this idea before the epoch of the Great War seem to have propounded it with what impresses us today as an almost inexplicable timidity and feebleness. Apart from the great star of Shelley, which shines the brighter as his successors dwindle in perspective, there is a flavour of unreality about all these pre-war assertions of a possible world order. In most of them the Victorian terror of "extravagance" is dominant, and the writer simpers and laughs at his own suggestions in what was evidently supposed to be a very disarming manner. Hardly any of these prophets dared believe in their own reasoning. Maxwell Brown has recently disinterred a pamphlet, The Great Analysis,* dated 1912, in which a shrewd and reasoned forecast of the primary structure of the Modern State, quite amazingly prescient for the time, was broached with the utmost timidity, without even an author's name. It was a scheme to revolutionize the world, and the writer would not put his name to it, he confesses, because it might make him ridiculous.

* (Here for once the editor knows better than the writer of the history. This pamphlet was written by William Archer, the dramatic critic, and reprinted under its author's name with a preface by Gilbert Murray in 1931. Apparently the book collectors of the years ahead are going to miss this book.—ED.)

Maxwell Brown's entertaining Modern State Prophets Before the Great War is an exhaustive study of the psychological processes by which this idea, which is now the foundation of our contemporary life, gradually ousted its opposite of combative patriotism and established itself as a practicable and necessary form of action for men of good-will a century and a half ago. He traces the idea almost to its germ; he shows that its early manifestations, so far from being pacific, were dreams of universal conquest. He tells of its age-long struggle with everyday usage and practical commonsense. In the first of his huge supplementary volumes he gives thousands of quotations going back far beyond the beginnings of the Christian Era. All the monotheistic religions were, in spirit, world-state religions. He examines the Tower of Babel myth as the attempt of some primordial cosmopolitan, some seer before the dawn, to account for the divisions of mankind. (There is strong reason now for ascribing this story to Emesal Gudeka of Nippur, the early Sumerian fabulist.)

Maxwell Brown shows how the syncretic religious developments, due to the growth of the early empires and the official pooling of gods, led necessarily to monotheism. From at least the time of Buddha onward, the sentiment, if not the living faith, in human brotherhood, always existed somewhere in the world. But its extension from a mere sentiment and a fluctuating sympathy for the stranger to the quality of a practicable enterprise was a very recent process indeed. The necessary conditions were not satisfied.

In the briefer studies of human innovations that preceded his more important contributions to human history, Maxwell Brown has shown how for the past ten thousand years at least, since the Cro-Magnards stamped their leather robes and tents, the art of printing reappeared and disappeared again and again, never culminating in the printed book and all its consequences, never obtaining a primary importance in human doings, until the fifteenth century (C.E.); he has assembled the evidence for man's repeated abortive essays in flying, from the fourth dynasty gliders recently found at Bedrashen, the shattered Yu-chow machine and the interesting wreckage, ornaments and human remains found last year in Mirabella Bay. (These last were first remarked in 2104 C.E. after an earthquake in the deep sea photographs of the survey aeroplane Crawford, and they were subsequently sought and recovered by the divers of the submarine Salvemini belonging to the Naples Biological Station. They have now been identified by Professor Giulio Marinetti as the remains of the legendary glider of Daedalus and Icarus.) Maxwell Brown has also traced the perpetual discovery and rediscovery of America from the days of the Aalesund tablets and the early Chinese inscriptions in the caves near Bahia Coqui to the final establishment of uninterrupted communications across the Atlantic by the Western Europeans in the fifteenth century C.E. In all there are sixteen separate ineffectual discoveries of America either from the east or from the west now on record, and there may have been many others that left no trace behind them.

These earlier cases of human enterprise and inadequacy help us to understand the long struggle of the Age of Frustration and the difficulty our ancestors found in achieving what is now so obviously the only sane arrangement of human affairs upon this planet.

The fruitlessness of all these premature inventions is very easily explained. First in the case of the Transatlantic passage; either the earlier navigators who got to America never got back, or, if they did get back, they were unable to find the necessary support and means to go again before they died, or they had had enough of hardship, or they perished in a second attempt. Their stories were distorted into fantastic legends and substantially disbelieved. It was, indeed, a quite futile adventure to get to America until the keeled sailing ship, the science of navigation, and the mariner's compass had been added to human resources.

Then again, in the matter of printing, it was only when the Chinese had developed the systematic manufacture of abundant cheap paper sheets in standard sizes that the printed book—and its consequent release of knowledge—became practically possible. Finally the delay in the attainment of flying was inevitable because before men could progress beyond precarious gliding it was necessary for metallurgy to reach a point at which the internal combustion engine could be made. Until then they could build nothing strong enough and light enough to battle with the eddies of the air.

In an exactly parallel manner, the conception of one single human community organized for collective service to the common weal had to wait until the rapid evolution of the means of communication could arrest and promise to defeat the disintegrative influence of geographical separation. That rapid evolution came at last in the nineteenth century, and it has been described already in a preceding chapter of this world history.* Steam power, oil power, electric power, the railway, the steamship, the aeroplane, transmission by wire and aerial transmission followed each other very rapidly. They knit together the human species as it had never been knit before. Insensibly, in less than a century, the utterly impracticable became not merely a possible adjustment but an urgently necessary adjustment if civilization was to continue.

* [Not Recorded by Raven.—ED.]

Now the cardinal prominence of the Great War in history lies in this, that it demonstrated the necessity of that adjustment. It was never considered to be necessary before. Recognition lagged behind accomplishment. None of the pre-war World-State Prophets betrays any sense of necessity. They make their polite and timid gestures towards human unity as something nice and desirable indeed but anything but imperative. The clearest demand for world-wide cooperation before the war, came from the Second International. And even after the war, and after the vague and vacillating adumbration of a federal super-state by the League of Nations at Geneva, most of even the most advanced writers seem to have been still under the impression that the utmost adjustment needed was some patching up of the current system so as to prevent or mitigate war and restrain the insurrectionary urge of the unprosperous.

Even the Communist movement which, as we had told already, had been able by a conspiracy of accidents to seize upon Russia and demonstrate the value of its theories there, lapsed from, rather than advanced towards, cosmopolitan socialism. Its theories, as we have shown, were hopelessly inadequate for its practical needs. The development of its ideology was greatly hampered by the conservative dogmatism imposed upon it by the incurable egotism of Marx. His intolerance, his innate bad manners, his vain insistence that he had produced a final doctrine to put beside Darwinism, cast a long shadow of impatience and obduracy upon the subsequent development of Communism. He was bitterly jealous of the Utopian school of socialism, and so, until Lenin faced the urgencies of power, the "orthodox" Marxist took a quite idiotic pride in a planless outlook. "Overthrow capitalism", he said, and what could happen but millennial bliss? Communism insisted indeed upon the necessity of economic socialization but— until it attained power in Russia—without a glance at its technical difficulties. It produced its belated and ill-proportioned Five Year Plan only in 1928 C.E., eleven years after its accession to power. Until then it had no comprehensive working scheme whatever for the realization of socialism. Thrown back on experiment, it was forced to such desperately urgent manoeuvres, improvisations and changes of front, and defended by such tawdry and transparent apologetics, that the general world movement passed out of its ken.

The reader of this world history knows already how the moral and intellectual force of the Communist Party proved unequal, after the death of Lenin, to control or resist the dictatorship of that forcible, worthy, devoted and limited man, the Georgian, Stalin. The premature death of the creative and adaptable Lenin and the impatient suppression by Stalin of such intelligent, troublesome, but necessary types as Trotsky—a man who, but for lack of tact and essential dignity, might well have been Lenin's successor—crippled whatever hope there may have been that the Modern State would first emerge in Russia. Terrible are the faithful disciples of creative men. Lenin relaxed and reversed the dogmatism of Marx, Stalin made what he imagined to be Leninism into a new and stiffer dogmatism. Thereafter the political doctrinaire dominated and crippled the technician in a struggle that cried aloud for technical competence. Just as theological disputes impoverished and devastated Europe through the long centuries of Christendom, and reduced the benefits of its unifying influence to zero, so in Russia efficiency of organization was prevented by the pedantries of political theorists. The young were trained to a conceit and a xenophobia, indistinguishable in its practical effects from the gross patriotism of such countries as France, Germany, Italy or Scotland.

Because of this subordination of its mental development to Politics, Russia passed into a political and social phase comparable, as Rostovtzeff pointed out at the time in his Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, in its universal impoverishment and its lack of any critical vigour, to the well-meaning but devitalizing autocracy of the Emperor Diocletian. From its very start the Russian revolution failed in its ambition to lead mankind. Its cosmopolitanism lasted hardly longer than the cosmopolitanism of the great French revolution a dozen decades earlier.

This almost inevitable lag of the constructive movement in Russia behind Western developments was foreseen by the shrewd and penetrating brain of Lenin even in the phase of its apparent leadership (see No. 3090 in the thirteenth series of the Historical Documents Collection, Left Wing Communism). But his observation found little or no echo in the incurably illiberal thought of the Marxian tradition.

It was in Western Europe especially that the conception of the organized and disciplined World-State as a revolutionary objective, ultimately grew to its full proportions. At first it grew obscurely. In 1933, any observer might have been misled by the fact of the Fascist régime in Italy, by the tumult of the Nazi party in Germany, by similar national-socialist movements in other countries, and by the increase in tariff barriers and other restraints upon trade everywhere, to conclude that the cosmopolitan idea was everywhere in retreat before the obsessions of race, creed and nationalism. Yet all the while the germs of the Modern State were growing, everywhere its votaries were learning and assembling force.

It needed the financial storm of the years 1928 and 1929 C.E. and the steadily progressive collapse of the whole world's economic life, of which this storm was the prelude, to give the World-State prophets the courage of their convictions. Then indeed they began to speak out. Instead of the restrained, partial and inconclusive criticism of public affairs which had hitherto contented them, they now insisted plainly upon the need of a world- wide reconstruction, that is to say of a world revolution—though "revolution" was still a word they shirked. The way in which this increased definition of aim and will came about is characteristic of the changing quality of social life. It was not that one or two outstanding men suddenly became audible and conspicuous as leaders in this awakening. There were no leaders. It was a widespread movement in human thought.

The conclusions upon which intelligent people were converging may be briefly stated. They had arrived at the realization that human society had become one indivisible economic system with novel and enormous potentialities of well-being. By 1931 C.E. this conception becomes visible even in the obstinately intellectualist mind of France—for example, in the parting speech to America of an obscure and transitory French Prime Minister, Laval, who crossed the Atlantic on some new undiscoverable mission in that year; and we find it promptly echoed by such prominent loud speakers as President Hoover of America and Mr. Ramsay MacDonald the British Prime Minister.

That idea at any rate had already become sufficiently popular for the politicians to render it lip service. But it was still only the intelligent minority who went on to the logical consequences of its realization; that is to say, the necessity of disavowing the sovereignty of contemporary governments, of setting up authoritative central controls to supplement or supersede them, and of putting the production of armaments, the production of the main economic staples and the protection of workers from destructive under-payment, beyond the reach of profit-seeking manipulation.

Yet by 1932-33 this understanding minority was speaking very plainly. These immense changes were no longer being presented as merely desirable things; they were presented as urgently necessary things if civilization was to be saved from an immense catastrophe. And not merely saved. The alternative to disaster, they saw even then, was not just a bleak and terrified security. That was the last thing possible. There was no alternative to disorder and wretchedness, but "such an abundance, such a prosperity and richness of opportunity", as man had never known before. (These words are quoted from a Scottish newspaper of the year 1929.) Enlightened people in 1932 C.E. were as assured of the possibility of world order, universal sufficiency and ever increasing human vitality as are we who live to-day in ample possession of our lives amidst the practical realization of that possibility.

Clearness of vision did not make for the happiness of the enlightened. Their minds were tormented not simply by contemporary fears and miseries, but by the sure knowledge of a possible world of free activity within the reach of man and, as it were, magically withheld. They saw hundreds of millions of lives cramped and crippled, meagrely lived, sacrificed untimely, and they could not see any primary necessity for this blighting and starvation of human life. They saw youthful millions drifting to lives of violence, mutilation and premature and hideous deaths. And beyond was our security, our eventfulness and our freedom.

Maxwell Brown, in a chapter called "Tantalus 1932", cites forty instances of these realizations. But the legendary Tantalus was put within apparent reach of the unattainable by the inexorable decrees of the gods. Mankind was under no such pitiless destiny. The world-wide Modern State shone bright upon the living imaginations of our race within a decade of the Great War, absurdly near, fantastically out of reach. For a century of passionate confusion and disorder, that modern state was not to be released from potentiality into actuality.

It is to the story of these battling, lost and suffering generations, the "generations of the half light", that we must now proceed.

 When now we look back to the scattered and diverse individuals who first give expression to this idea of the modern World-State which was dawning upon the human intelligence, when we appraise their first general efforts towards its realization, we need, before we can do them anything like justice, to attempt some measure of the ignorances, prejudices and other inertias, the habits of concession and association, the herd love and the herd fear.....