THE NEXT BIG TOPIC.
JOURNALISTS, who of all men, or of all men next to diners- out, feel moat keenly the exceeding dulness of the times, the almost total disappearance of topics in which anybody feels more than a languid or a perfunctory interest, would just now almost give their ears for some large event, an event which would interest everybody, and bear writing about for the next three months ; and one of them suggests to us a curious, though it may be an unprofitable, speculation. Suppose a man of average in- telligence to be bound, say by a rash bet made in an exalte mood, and quite beyond his means, to predict the next big thing that will interest Englishmen or the Western world, how would he set about it? Right-minded persons, with good digestions and not given to dreams, would say he would decline the effort, inasmuch as no answer is attainable, and no mortal can tell what the morrow will bring forth, and right-minded persons never can be answered ; but still, he might be wrong-minded, wrong-minded people of intelligence being a known variety of men ; and the compulsion granted, what would an intelligent, though wrong- minded, person do ? He would never be content to guess, as the Scotch land agent swore, at large. Clearly he would try first of all so to limit his imagination by artificial but sensible rules, as to seem to himself to be calculating from antecedent probabilities. He would say, to begin with, we think, that the event anticipated must be a catastrophe or unpleasant occurrence of some sort. Pleasant occurrences rarely interest nations, because they so rarely take the catastrophic form. No- body's birth is seen to be a world's blessing till, at all events, he is ten years old. The conversion of India to Christianity, or of the Papacy to tolerance, or of Ireland to loyalty, would be pleasant occurrences, and so would be the excavation of the canal into the Sahara, or the discovery of a cheap motor or a new capacity in the brain, or the invention of a substitute for shaving— which, by the way, exists in Asia, and has never travelled to Europe—but these events would be as slow as the growth of trees, or would not be recognised at the time as great occurrences at all. The occurrence must be, if history is any guide, one that at first sight will appear a misfortune of magni- tude to some section of humanity. Next, if the occurrence must be catastrophic, a new limitation arises, for it must also be in a measure usual. There is no earthly reason why it should be so ; but nevertheless, the dreamer's mind, however dreamy, insists with unconscious vehemence on submission to that law also. There is no certainty that Paris shall not be destroyed by earth- quake, as Lisbon was ; or that wheat may not be diseased, as the potato was ; or that the Black Death may not reappear in the United Kingdom, and sweep away one-third of the Population; but the mind, all the same, thrusts aside all
those terrible chances. They do not count. They are too much like the chance of a meteoric stone big enough to be dangerous hitting the planet Earth, that is, too much like the possibilities which, if we once accept them as data, paralyse intellectual power by upsetting the machinery through which it has been accustomed to work. The catastrophe must be usual, that is, must have recurred sufficiently often within historic periods not to make the mind recoil, as if in imagining such an event it were entering a new world blind, the most awful of imaginable conceptions.
Now, what are the catastrophes which fulfil that condition of osuality ? Chiefly War, Civil War, Insurrection, Revolution, Famine, Sickness, and Death; and which of these is it to be ? One would say, if the calculation or dream were to be regu- lated as ordinary calculations would be—and a man forced to calculate even about dreams would instinctively fall back upon his habitual methods—that the rule of recurrence should be studied, that of recurrent misfortunes the one from which men bad been exempt for the most unusual time 'was the one most reasonably to be expected soon. We may most reasonably, because although man knows little or nothing of the laws which govern the recurrence of events, and did not till very recently suspect that such laws could exist, and does not even now feel certain whether he is not mistaking phenomena for facts, still, if he is to reason on probabilities at all, he must obey the instinct which compels his mind to think the recurrence of what has been, possible, and the recurrence of what has frequently been, very likely. If, then, regularity of recurrence is to enter into the calculation, which it ought not to do, though every gambler thinks it ought, the speculator will be driven bythe necessities of his calculation to fix upon a great death as the most probable immi- nent event. Of all usual catastrophes, none has been with- out recurrence so long. The last unexpected death that can be said to have affected mankind, that is, to have immediately affected the fate, and conduct, and thoughts of the ruling races of the world, was that of the Emperor Nicholas of Russia, and hap- pened just twenty years ago. People have forgotten its importance now, as they forget everything ; but in the natural course of events Nicholas, who was born in 1796, might have been reigning now ; and had he been reigning now the probability, amounting to cer- tainty, is that the whole course of history would have been different. He would never have stood silent while his pet German Princes were eaten up, till his great-grandchildren will hardly know where to look for wives. Since his death most of the calamities we have mentioned have occurred, have interested man, and have passed ; but there has been no great death. There have been three first-class wars, between France and Austria, Prussia and Austria, and Prussia and France ; one first-class eivil war, that which shook the United States ; one first-class Revolution, that of September, 1870, in Paris ; two great insurrections, that of the Sepoys and that of the Communists ; four considerable famines, in Orissa, Persia, Behar, and Asia Minor, but no epidemic and no death. Lord Palmerston's was expected, and did not greatly change the face of affairs, and no other has apparently affected mankind much, though, of course, that of Cavour, that of the last King of Prussia, that of Prim, and that of Lincoln may have done so without men perceiving it. Cavour's, in fact, probably did, as he would have found some solution for the Ultramontane trouble. Epidemics of the first-class in modem times have not been frequently recurrent, and a death, therefore, would seem the most probable of events. Then comes the question of whose death. No man can tell, of course, whose life is most important to the world, for some unknown physicist may have achieved a discovery equal to that of fire, and some obscure divine may have proved a theological truth ; but the conditions require that the death shall be appreciated—that is, shall involve great apparent, though it may be imaginary results, a great commotion in men's minds, a great amount of newspaper discussion—and the list of men so placed that their deaths make serious gaps is very narrow. We cannot include in it more than six names—those of Bismarck, Frederick William of Germany, President MacMahon, Czar Alexander, Leon Gambetta, and the Pope—and among these six men only three,—Bismarck, whose death would seem to affect all Europe and close an era ; the Pope, whose death would let loose all elements of discord in the Catholic Church ; and Gambetta, whose death might break up the French Republic—would in- stantly strike the majority of men as missing. Dreamy calcula- tion, therefore, points to one of these three, and as in all cata- strophes there must be some element of the unexpected, the Pope, who is exceedingly old, may be struck out of the list.
Continuing on the same lines, the calculator will, we think, decide for some very terrible epidemic, striking large numbers of men who can be ill spared, or hitting some nation at a vital point ; some war of unprecedented immediate result ; or some insurrection where within historic memory there has never been one. The sickness to be notable, to be rare, and to be catas- trophic, must be in Europe, and must either be formidable enough to affect the welfare of a nation, breaking out, for example, in the barracks of Germany, or, and much more probably, among the cavalry horses of Europe ; or in some seat of learning like Oxford, or in some centre of fierce activity like Paris or London. Nothing of the kind has occurred in Europe on a great scale for two centuries, and its recurrence, if improbable, owing to the immensely improved conditions of modem life, is not impossible, or fairly to be classed with the catastrophes which are outside reason. It is unlikely, but that is all that can be said, and the recurrence of the unlikely, if it has occurred often, must obey some law. The most unusual war would be one in Asia in which England was defeated, and that would be almost of course a war is China, where war is always possible, and defeat has never been anti- cipated, much less discounted. That chance seems to come rather within the list of contingencies than of speculative probabili- ties, but in reality it is not so, for the chance is one considered only by a very few minds specially provoked to observation. An English defeat in China would still, to most men, be like a bolt
out of the blue. And the most unexpected insurrection would be one in Russia, where nothing of the kind on the great scale has occurred since Dmitri died, and where an insurrection to last, or indeed to assume any importance at all, must, in some way beyond calculation, draw into itself a large section of the soldiery. A mutiny in Russia would indeed fulfil all the conditions suggested of a grand catastrophe, affecting, as it would, the fate of the whole world, attracting the attention of all Europe, and being entirely without precedent— there have been some great mutinies in Russia, but they have been directed against particular sets of officers, not against the Empire or the military system—and absolutely beyond ex- pectation, though not beyond the limits fixed by historic pre- cedent. Those, then, are the four events among which a calcu- lating Zadkiel, disbelieving in astrology, but believing in the recurrence of sensations, would choose his next Big Topic,—a great death, a great pestilence among soldiers or cavalry horses, a great defeat of the English in China, or a great mutiny in the Russian Army. Having chosen them, he would probably, then, decide that—the failures of prediction considered—it would be something else which he had not reckoned on, perhaps the discovery of a method of war which shall as completely change its conditions on land as the success of the ' Monitor' did at sea. Who knows? A step forward in chemistry and the training of battalions may be useless, and victory dependent on conditions in which drill has no part.
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