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The headlines of those unwieldy sheets were all taken up at that time with ruction-news of one sort or another: tantrums the French or Irish or Fascisti were getting into about something or somebody. Away inside of all this I noticed an inch of information something like:

GLACIERS COMING HERE PERHAPS SCIENTIFIC records, says Professor Lestrop, of the Royal Geographical Society, who landed here yesterday from the Gatamaran, show that most of the glaciers of the world are slowly extending. They are stretching down their icy claws farther and farther into the valleys. Exactly what conclusions the man in the street might draw from this information, Professor Lestrop did n't say, beyond remarking that, so far, this is a rather cold winter.

I drew some conclusions though, boy as I was. I shivered on the sleepingporch that night, wondering what was going to happen- and rather hoping it would. I'd read the venerable Van Loon and the classic Wells: they were n't venerable or classic then. Consequently I knew about Ice Ages in a rather realizing way. Plenty of other people knew about Ice Ages too, but I could n't manage to infect any of my friends with my own shivers and thrills.

Everybody took notice, however, of the monstrous inferno of earthquakes in the summer of 1928 in the Aleutian Islands. Those Gargantuan volcanoes, eight or ten at a time spouting both from land and sea, went on intermittently from June until January. I remember that that was the beginning of the regular airplane excursions to Alaska. People went up there to see the volcanoes as they'd once gone to see the devastated war-areas in France. I see them sometimes still in dreams, after all these years and all the water that's run under the bridges since! those bubbling kettles of the gods,

those appearing and disappearing islands, those square miles of hot spitting ground, those immeasurable ocean geysers!

The volcanic-dust theory about Ice Ages was a new one at that time. Seismists and meteorologists were discussing it. There was even then a school of geologists who believed the Ice Ages had come on quite suddenly. Of course they inclined to the volcanicdust theory. Naturally the theory got a good deal of prestige from the Aleutian volcanoes. Still, to the majority of people it did n't seem possible that enough powdered rock could ever sift into the atmosphere to dim the sunshine actually dim it to a point which would be perceptible.

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In the autumn of 1929 Ar Barrue published his conclusions. Of course Ar Barrue was n't then a great discoverer, but an obscure young Negro from the Sudan who was making astronomical researches at the brand new Gandhi University in Bengal. His modest little article in the Hibbert Journal only said that the sunshine seemed to be changing color. It seemed to be losing some part of its red-goldness red-goldness I reduce, of course, his scientific language to an ordinary style. Nobody that I knew at that time paid any attention to this statement. But of course scientific people paid attention, and two or three months afterward, there was a Committee of Correspondence discussing it - meteorologists, astronomers, geologists, and others. The general public heard nothing about them; and yet it was their first meeting, at Munich, in the winter of 1929-30, that set on foot the plans for the never-to-be-forgotten Rio meeting.

Ah, that winter of 1929-30! Nothing in the way of cold will ever seem so cold, to us who remember it, as that first mild little taste of coolness that we

got in the winter following the Aleutian earthquakes. To this day I can't help feeling that it must have been the coldest winter the Earth has ever known. I was then a thin young fellow with a habit of stooping, and I remember wishing I could coil my long neck down inside my collar like a flamingo. But all through November we we rather rather laughed at it. November was about like what we'd used to consider a normal February. We all said that after such a start we might look for an open winter: the cold was using itself all up at the beginning. Then, when December was so much colder than November had been, we began to feel bewildered and perhaps a little scared. We had to give up driving cars — or even horses — as much as possible; we could keep warm best by walking. We walked without talking, very fast. When the wind was blowing we could n't keep our windows open at night, health or no health.

Time-clocks in factories had to come down from their high horses that winter and pay a little attention to human limitations. Working-hours imperatively had to be shorter. And that 's just one of a hundred things we owe to Earth's taking a hand directly in our affairs. Why every other every other shortening of the workday had always cost a pretty penny of effort and ructions to bring about. But now the strange thought began to seep into people's minds that afterward became so great an anxiety: 'Suppose the people who are weighed down with some social handicap or other should n't complain of it soon enough? It might be too late, by the time they complained.' For the first time, how quaint that seems! - the general public began to disapprove of the suicidal patience of the poor.

This came out especially in the question of fuel. We have to remember

that most people still burned coal or oil, in the twenties and thirties; an easy thing it is to forget. The very idea of tanking up the waste heat of summer and the waste cold of winter, to use in the extremes of the opposite season, had n't then been seriously conceived, any more than the notion of utilizing the whole tidal power and harnessing the pulling force of the moon to human needs. And the Workerscult, in large numbers, lived on niggardly scuttlefuls of coal, from scuttleful to scuttleful, in thousands of crowded homes, every winter in the years before the Ice Age Bubble. But in the terrible so it

seemed then winter of 1929-30, the fear of widespread death from cold became so general that practically all householders joined the Fraternal Warmth Association and agreed each to report his coal-supply from week to week, so that before the middle of January the custom was well established that no private family should permit itself to have more than a week's supply on hand, until every family had a week's supply. Of course there was hoarding and smuggling; but public opinion was decided about hoarding and smuggling, and neither was ever very prevalent. Fridays were 'coal days,' and busy days they were: all other business had to give way to coaling, from nine o'clock to four.

The cold alone was enough for us to bear: it put a strain on our endurance, just to get through the days and nights and hang together so that no poor footless creature among us should freeze. But that really was n't the worst of it. It was n't just the local cold. What bothered all of us the most was the realization that it was n't local. We knew from the beginning that it was an Earth-wide phenomenon. The South Argentine and Tasmanian weather bureaus, for instance, agreed with the Canadian and Siberian ones;

what had been a cold winter in the Northern Hemisphere had been a cold summer in the Southern one.

And then, as the summer of 1930 came on, the reports from the Southern hemisphere were that a frightfully cold winter was raging there. Great areas of Argentine pasture land were winterkilled by thick, implacable sheets of ice. Round Cape Horn the storms of that July were extraordinarily severe. Furious snowstorms driving up from the Pole wrecked a ghastly number of stout sailing vessels, and the Seamen's Union was making a herculean effort to get the route outlawed by international agreement.

By the middle of that summer of 1930, anyway, even the best-informed people were in a state not far removed from panic. For the cold kept on, implacably; and in some ways the cool summer was harder to bear than the ice-cold winter. The state of the average person's mind was such that the news in August 1930- that the glaciers had doubled their rate of advance, created something which I think might really be called a general panic. You'll hear people sometimes dispute the term. But among the people I knew, it certainly would n't have been too strong a word. We did n't need the 'New Titanic' cartoon, reprinted so widely from the New York World, to scare us; nor the movies featuring Bill Hart as Primitive Man, waking up one morning in his lake dwelling to find his ladder frozen into the marsh, and Douglas Fairbanks riding a sabre-toothed tiger to safety just ahead of a blizzard that suddenly snowed the jungle under!

Oh to know more about the other Ice Ages! Was the Earth chilling by slow and even degrees, or manifolding its rate? Or was it chilling by leaps and bounds, mysterious and incalculable? Oh, for a record of the Fourth Ice Age!

If the wandering tribes could but have notched it on a cliff, or hieroglyphed it on a buried hatchet! If they could but have blazed a record on the rocks of how fast they were driven southward - how often they trekked!

It was one of the most singular things in the world to see land values suddenly fall a mile. Such a world-wide slump in real estate had never been imagined. It needed a Jules Verne or a Balzac. If you remember the story of the Magic Skin, it was something like that. Everybody had it in mind that the timber-, farm-, and mininglands of the temperate zones might some day, not too remote, turn into icefields. Somebody would probably be left owning tracts of lost land, buried under ice a mile thick. What many and many a weary book had been written to bring about the reclamation of land for present use at present value merely took place in a moment when the cool foreshadow of the Ice Age fell over the speculator's purse. And all the time there was a contradictory feeling of confidence among those who lived as tenants on the land. For the first time that I remember they felt at home upon it, and felt confident that it would n't be snatched away from under their feet by climbing prices.

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I always date the duration of the panic stage of the great Bubble from that news in August, that the glaciers were advancing twice as fast, to the opening of the Rio meeting in May.

The Rio meeting is too distinguished in history, of course, for me to have to recapitulate much about it. And yet the excitement of this past decade about the exploration of the ether, and the discussions of abstract Animals' Rights, have begun, I fear, to make the Rio meeting shrink somewhat into that mere name and reverberation of greatness that all great events turn

into by the softening and muffling and darkening of time.

Everybody used to know how the meteorologists and astronomers and geographers of the world decided at their Munich meeting to call another meeting at Rio, in the spring, to discuss the whole 'climate situation.' This assembly was to consist of one hundred and seventy scientists in various lines, representing all the great universities and observatories of the world. And everybody knows or used to know - that no sooner did the news of the forthcoming Rio meeting reach a certain group of Jewish tailors in Warsaw, than they decided to stint themselves yet a little further than they always stinted themselves to maintain their union, in order to send a delegate to the Rio meeting, to hear what the scientists should say and come back and report to them.

No sooner, again, did the news of this action appear in the Advance, the organ of the great union of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in the United States, than the Amalgamated decided to send a delegate to represent them, who should sit with his Polish fellow workmen; and then the Russian coöperatives and the British coöperatives came in, and then the International Machinists and Miners; and after that it went on with a rush, until long before May 14, 1931, there was assembled a second committee, known as the Listening Delegates, about forty in number, representing, in addition to these, and others I can't recall:

The Forest Schools of India
The Chinese Students' Association
The Federated Women's Clubs
Australia

The Fellowship of Reconciliation
The Vatican

As the representatives of these conglomerated organizations sat and listened to the speculations the assembled scientists were advancing, criticizing, and discussing, several of them kept diaries. And it seems to me enough to establish my Interpretation that Earth itself took a hand directly in our affairs at that time if we only glance into any one of those diaries. For all of them are filled, are flooded, with the same overwhelming sense of the vastness of time and the power of cosmic forces. Mrs. Magoon of Sydney, I recollect, said that she felt all the time a kind of creative darkness brooding over her as she heard the geologists estimating the lapse of ages. The representative of the Nitrate Workers said that craft unionism versus industrial unionism had been his chief concern for twenty years, and suddenly now it began to seem to him impossibly picayune. The Vatican representative - a convert from protestantism - had been writing for years a monumental work on the persecutions by Queen Elizabeth. Now he was startled to find that he could n't even remember the name of his book.

The representative of the Dukhobors astonished everybody by her poise and calm before the overwhelming realization that so changed the scale of thinking of the rest. Perhaps this was only because, like all habitual mystics, she lived in the presence of cosmic thoughts. An ignorant old woman, worn by a life of labor in the fields, there she sat and heard without a tremor the unimaginable durations of sidereal time roughly guessed at, the incredible bulk of the ages before man, of dimly outlined against the darkness

The Street Traders of Constantinople
The Federal Council of Churches.

of man's wonder and curiosity about them. I believe it was said that she spoke but once throughout the proceedings. What she then said has always seemed to me the essence

of my own conviction,- poetically condensed,

It then called upon scientific men everywhere to investigate-so far as

"The stars in their courses have they were equipped to do so ended war.'

The meeting sat for about six weeks. At the end of that time it issued its never-to-be-forgotten Recommendation: the greatest document, I think, since the Sermon on the Mount. In language it is n't so noteworthy, perhaps, though passages of it rise to eloquence; but in scope, and in range, and in its wonderful simplification of the profundities with which it deals, it is - I think - without any other rival. It began, as we all know, by pointing out the fact that in the coldest parts of Earth no fuel is used.

Races who live beyond the timber line [it said] never trouble about the fuel supply. They have none. There is no fuel of any sort for them, and so they keep warm without it. It is true that they burn a little oil for cooking and to dry their wet clothes; but they keep warm as their and our remotest fathers did, by animal heat. Like the cows in a northern farmer's stable, like primitive man in the dark chill of his cave, they keep each other warm.

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In any possible climatic changes of great extremity which may lie ahead of us, for all is problematic, and we have been able to reach no conclusions in our recent sessions,

we too must be prepared above all things to keep each other alive; to keep each other warm. For this reason, animal heat, above all things, must be preserved upon the earth.

To this, every business, every profession, every art, all other possible interests, callings, research, rights, privileges, profits, laws, treaties, and constitutions must give way. Neither national nor international, neither ecclesiastical nor racial interests can stand before this paramount human obligation.

Life must be cherished; and all things possible must be done that can enrich and invigorate and vitalize the common life. All that is good for us all must stay; all that is good for some and bad for others must go.

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possibilities of trekking on a large scale, and the possibilities, in sanitation and industry, of the equatorial lands.

'And above all,' the Recommendation ended, 'let Africa be studied. For Africa, in the last emergency of possible cold, must be the refuge of man and beast.'

There was something in this expression that especially caught the imagination of Americans. We got a sudden vivid picture of the White race fleeing from its pleasant temperate zone. It was a strange thought! And to think that they might flee to Africa! the Black Man's Land, the Ice Age homestead, the one only huge-enough shelter from the on-coming cold! It was the strangest thing in the world to think of Europe and America forsaken, icebound, silent, glittering, and dead!

The Recommendation was broadcasted in thirty-seven languages. It was printed in thirty, and posted in every church, lodge, school, station, and public library; printed of course in all newspapers. It appeared early in August.

There was some bewilderment in Government offices when the Recommendation was first read there. Of course, such a proposition had never before challenged any Government. One elderly statesman who left his Memoirs confesses that he felt that it was in some way beneath his dignity, and that of his colleagues, to be asked to take measures to invigorate and enliven the life of the ordinary man. 'We seemed,' he writes, 'to be relegated to the mere functions of a Board of Health or a Welfare Bureau.' Many others, who were only too anxious to act on the Recommendation as soon as it should be humanly possible, were

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