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wise men that the Food was giving the world nothing but a crop of
unmanageable, disconnected irrelevancies, that might shake and trouble
indeed, but could do no more to the established order and fabric of
mankind.
To one observer at least the most wonderful thing throughout that period
of accumulating stress is the invincible inertia of the great mass of
people, their quiet persistence in all that ignored the enormous
presences, the promise of still more enormous things, that grew among
them. Just as many a stream will be at its smoothest, will look most
tranquil, running deep and strong, at the very verge of a cataract, so
all that is most conservative in man seemed settling quietly into a
serene ascendency during these latter days. Reaction became popular:
there was talk of the bankruptcy of science, of the dying of Progress,
of the advent of the Mandarins,--talk of such things amidst the echoing
footsteps of the Children of the Food. The fussy pointless Revolutions
of the old time, a vast crowd of silly little people chasing some silly
little monarch and the like, had indeed died out and passed away; but
Change had not died out. It was only Change that had changed. The New
was coming in its own fashion and beyond the common understanding of the
world.
To tell fully of its coming would be to write a great history, but
everywhere there was a parallel chain of happenings. To tell therefore
of the manner of its coming in one place is to tell something of the
whole. It chanced one stray seed of Immensity fell into the pretty,
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