A JOURNEY TO THE MOON. (continued 3)

One part of this room is assigned to public fears, which are contained in large urns. These are the apprehensions which have seized a great part of our nation from time to time. There is great variety in the nature of them. At one time a small party of men are suddenly convinced that all the rest of the nation are soon to be mad by agreement at the same instant, leaving only themselves in possession of reason: every thing they see tends to a general insanity; and by the expectation of this event they are much harassed, as is reasonable. Sometimes those who are earnest in religion apprehend that the people, at a stated time, are going to disbelieve Christianity and abolish it. And sometimes the farmers of England are seized with a belief that parliament, instigated by a bad ministry, intends to pass a law forbidding the practices of ploughing and sowing, to the manifest injury of agriculture.

These epidemic fears are so frequent in England that every body must remember a great number of them. Sometimes they seem to invade the country of their own accord, and at other times are contrived by the invention and industry of certain statesmen,—for one of these terrors has often power to ruin or secure a ministry; so that the great wisdom of state in England is a skill in prompting and regulating fears. I know not whether there is more art or fortune in the beginning and progress of a fear: very able men often undertake to be the authors of one without any success; and in spite of the reasoning with which they tell the world to be afraid, not a man will consent to feel any alarm. Sometimes a most plausible apprehension is invented, and sent into the world with the countenance of eminent men, and every other advantage for its promotion, and yet it can obtain no credit, but is almost immediately lost, while, at another time, a terror is obscurely raised, and, although without probability, favour, or any arts of advancement, it is instantly spread and established.

It is vain to oppose a successful fear: a wise minister attacked by one will enrol himself under it, and be as much terrified as any body. These apprehensions differ much in duration, the life of some being only a few weeks, and others lasting for many months, or even for some years.

I have said that the public fears are kept in large urns, with this difference from the private fears, that a bottle contains the apprehensions of only one person, while an urn holds the terror of a whole party, each public fear having an urn to itself. Every urn is inscribed with the name of the fear that it preserves, and is larger or smaller according to the numbers who have been possessed by its contents. On one urn I read "Popery," on another, "Revolution."

But while I was reading the names of these past disturbances, a fearful clamour rushed into the room, sounding like the sudden shout of a vast crowd, but incessantly repeated. I found it was a public terror newly arrived from the earth, and the guardian of the room made haste to secure it. He brought an urn, the size of which he had determined by his ear, and enticed the uproar into it by a proceeding very similar to the art which inveigles a swarm of bees into a hive. This clamour was the repetition of a single word by thousands of voices. What the word was I shall not disclose; for since it has very lately been a prevalent fear, some excellent persons not yet dispossessed, on learning its departure to the moon, would be distressed by the fatal security that has befallen us.

It is possible that a skilful statesman might employ these urns in his service by letting out some terror judiciously chosen at a time favourable to its progress. I am not able to say whether it would prosper a second time, or return instantly to the moon, as having been discharged, but I think the experiment worthy of being tried by any administration that wants aid. Great care and judgment would be required in the selection of a fear for release, lest it should turn against its deliverers.

I next entered a building filled with the unavailing projects of Englishmen, and spent a short time in examining these enterprises, which are political, moral, religious, mechanical, and chemical. The collection has been much enriched by recent contributions. Many excellent designs of the present age for the benefit of England and the rest of the world are here honourably preserved. I saw numerous projects for making morality: every virtue had some contrivance to be practised by; and these schemes appeared very easy of execution, requiring nothing for their success except the universal concurrence of mankind in receiving them.

I found here plans for dispensing with all laws, and extinguishing crime by a general resolution of men in favour of virtue, for preventing the birth of children by argument, for discontinuing war throughout the world, for converting all nations to the true religion, that is, the religion of the projector.

Amongst all the noble schemes that I saw here, I most admired those which were not content with the improvement of England, but designed the good of the whole world, such as the plan last mentioned, for including all the inhabitants of the globe in one religion. The means of effecting so great a work were not described, but the inventor of this unanimity was said to have devised so infallible a project, that for spreading truth over the earth he required nothing but a steam vessel, and undertook by a few tons of coal to convince all mankind.

I saw many other English schemes for the welfare of distant nations, so that not a people was to remain vicious, ignorant, or oppressed. In examining these ample designs, I felt a secret pride in the noble spirit of some amongst my countrymen; and it appeared to me that nothing has been so much improved in modern times as the virtue of humanity. Men were formerly satisfied with relieving the distresses which they saw and heard; but there is now a large body of men in England who busy themselves with the troubles of distant nations, and consider all sufferings on the farther side of the globe as their own calamities. It is well known how many persons of all ranks in England pined away under the lashes inflicted upon the negroes in the West Indies. Others could not be cheerful as long as Greece was under the dominion of Turkey; and another party, who were not concerned either about Greece or the negroes, regarded themselves as the most unfortunate of men because in India widows sometimes burned themselves at the funerals of their husbands. How would one of the ancient moralists admire the dismay which has been caused in England by the conflagration of an old woman in the East!

It is observable that one who is thoroughly inspired with this remote pity disdains to do a kindness in his own hemisphere, and despises that superficial humanity which makes us supply the wants of those who are immediately round us. He can only pity at a distance, and feels compassion in proportion to the number of leagues that intervene between him and the sufferer. He can see with firmness the starvation of those who live near him, but shudders to think that a man may be hungry two thousand miles off. Thus he claims a share in the misery of every man at a sufficient distance: a lash inflicted on the other side of the Atlantic makes a mark upon his back—he is flogged with the negro, enslaved with the Greek, and burned to ashes with the Indian widow.

I had now been wandering in our satellite almost a fortnight, according to the earth, and almost a day according to the moon, for I arrived there in the morning, and the day was now almost ended. I have not related all that I saw, but selected a few of the most remarkable places that I visited; nor have I instructed the world in what manner I provided for my own personal comforts, according to the practice of many travellers, who rescue every one of their meals from oblivion, and never eat or drink without recording it. I have also omitted all mention of the moon's inhabitants, because they are to be fully described by other travellers.

When I left the House of Projects, I was informed that I was very near to the Valley of Lost Time, and I hastened towards it, that I might observe whatever was there, before it should be dark. I descended into the valley, and found myself surrounded by the sounds of innumerable clocks. These sounds did not proceed from any visible mechanism, but lived in the air like the other preserved clamours. They are the ghosts of minutes and hours that have perished. It was remarkable that in this confused clamour, every man knew his own time, and could distinguish the hours he had lost when he heard them struck; yet he knew not what it was that discovered them to him: all were alike in sound; only at the striking of particular hours, he was seized with a conviction that he heard his own time.

There were many persons in the valley, and I observed that some of them heard their own lost hours with great emotion. They turned pale, trembled, and were overpowered by the reproach. And not only could a man discern his own losses amongst these sounds, but knew what particular hour or minute of his past life he was listening to, which very much aggravated the rebuke. Men heard the striking of the very crisis which might have saved, enriched, or advanced them. In some men the emotion from these sounds continued a long time, others soon recovered themselves.

I saw two or three running about in chase of their time with a hat, as a boy follows a butterfly. The hours were very nimble, escaping by an irregular flight, and the pursuit was long continued in vain. At last one of these men succeeded in the capture of a portion of time, which he had followed with much perseverance. The chase being finished close to me, I heard the stifled hours striking under his hat. As he had been present in the room of lost spirits when I had shown the means of recovering mirth from the phial containing it, he had contracted a high opinion of my skill and invention in rendering available these regained prizes, and he now earnestly consulted me about the means of making the time under his hat serve the purpose which it ought to have been applied to before. He told me he was a London tradesman, and not very prosperous, through the misapplication of three particular days which he now had in captivity. A few years ago he had been in pursuit of a rich widow, from whom though he had extorted no promise, yet he had been convinced that she was waiting only till a decorous time had elapsed since her first husband. But this confidence ruined him: he was absent three days with some friends; and on returning to his vocation found the lady had so much resented his neglect of office as to supply his place with another candidate, whom soon after she married. "Now," he continued, "I have caught these three days, and here they are, but still I know not how to make them answer my purpose. However, since you, sir, could restore a lady her spirits out of a phial, perhaps you can restore me my widow from under a hat."

"I fear," said I, "your case is beyond my skill; for I know not how the noise under your hat can by any artifice prevent the widow from having been married as you remember. Whatever use you make of these sounds, I fear you must still have misemployed the three days and lost the widow. It appears to me, that the only way of retrieving lost time is to make better use of what remains; I therefore advise you to make diligent search for another rich widow, and when you have found one, remember you are not to have a respite of three days."

"So, then, I have come to the moon in vain," he said; "and I may as well let these three days go again, after I have taken so much trouble to catch them."

"No," I answered: "a contrivance occurs to me by which, perhaps, they may be useful."

"What is that?" he inquired eagerly.

"You may shut them up in a box," said I, "and always keep them by you, to remind you of former neglect, and enforce vigilance in case of another widow." He seemed to think this an ineffectual invention for correcting his former mistake; however he carried away his three days with a discontented face.

Another man, who had stood in dismay, and quite overcome by the striking of his lost hours, hearing what I said, declared he would try the same expedient, and keep his misemployed time in a box for the sake of prudence and industry in time to come; and immediately he betook himself to the chase.

I saw a pretty young woman in pursuit of some portion of time, which she seemed to consider a valuable opportunity. It led her up and down at her utmost speed: but at last, as I stood in its course, it was entangled in the skirts of my coat; I seized it before it could escape, and presented it to her. It was a single hour: she accepted it with joy; but I could not prevail upon her to tell me what advantage she had lost with this hour. This young woman, and some other persons, followed their time very earnestly with a confused notion of benefit from it, when it should be caught, though without any plan for applying it to a real purpose. The truth was, that most of those who heard the striking of their own hours, by awe and regret from the sound, were incapable of thinking accurately, and were driven by a desire of retrieving the past they knew not how.

Without any such reproach, it was impossible to stand in this valley, and hear the destruction of time all round, without sorrow for the waste of this commodity. There was a reasoning in the place not to be opposed. I considered that time and money being the two things most earnestly desired in our world, the ingenuity of men is chiefly exercised in devising arts for the waste of both. It appeared to me also that amongst all the errors in the plan of a human being, the most fatal is that the present moment should be so much the most plausible instant of our lives, and capable of persuading us to whatever it chooses. By universal agreement and practice, the present time is for ease and enjoyment, the future for abstinence, resolution, and insatiable industry; and since the present moment is only one, while our future moments, by the blessing of Providence, may be many, we judge that this distribution of time is greatly to the advantage of industry and virtue, and we seem to be treating ourselves with admirable severity, when we allot no portion of our lives to pleasure, except the present moment; but in this computation it is forgotten that life is made of present moments. The bargain, however, is concluded; and pleasure exacts the observance of it by still claiming the present moment, while industry, abstinence, and other virtues included in the agreement, stand waiting for their turn with helpless simplicity.

While I was engaged in these thoughts, I first heard the striking of my own lost hours, which impressed upon me a horror that I cannot describe. I knew each particular hour as I heard it, and remembered the abused opportunities which I had long before ceased to lament. I stood in the persuasion and despair of having lived in vain, and no more thought of inquiring into the grounds of this trouble and conviction, than we do in an anxious dream. Suddenly I was seized with a desire of recovering what I had thrown away: I reproached myself with wandering for amusement in the moon, and resolved to return without delay, in order to use my remaining hours with rigorous frugality. I instantly set out, and travelled with great zeal, nor did I lose the impression from the sound of my lost time till I had nearly completed the journey.

At last, however, the illusion left me, and I was able to regard time as the frivolous bauble which I have always considered it, except under the deception of this valley. For however scrupulously we may turn every moment to advantage, our most probable conclusion in every undertaking is, that we are labouring to provide ourselves with repentance; and to me it seems that a secure contempt of time, and an easy trifling with that portion of it called human life, is the only adequate remedy against the common lot of man, who, according to a celebrated author, "is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed."

Is it not a great folly that we, who know we are immortal beings, should always perplex ourselves about the hurry and use of time? For when we have before us such a supply as eternity, it is surely absurd to be sparing of hours and days.

I regret that by this groundless consternation my travels in the moon were so prematurely ended. I design another journey, and hope it may produce something more worthy of being read than this imperfect narrative.