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[Illustration: FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK]
THE
FUTURE IN AMERICA
A SEARCH AFTER REALITIES
BY
H.G. WELLS
AUTHOR OF
"ANTICIPATIONS" "THE WAR OF THE WORLDS"
"THIRTY STRANGE STORIES" ETC.
ILLUSTRATED
[Illustration]
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
1906
Copyright, 1906, by Harper & Brothers.
_All rights reserved._
Published November, 1906.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. The Prophetic Habit of Mind 1
II. Material Progress 21
III. New York 35
IV. Growth Invincible 49
V. The Economic Process 68
VI. Some Aspects of American Wealth 88
VII. Certain Workers 104
VIII. Corruption 116
IX. The Immigrant 133
X. State-Blindness 152
XI. Two Studies in Disappointment 167
XII. The Tragedy of Color 185
XIII. The Mind of a Modern State 203
XIV. Culture 223
XV. At Washington 236
The Envoy 254
ILLUSTRATIONS
FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK _Frontispiece_
ENTRANCE TO BROOKLYN BRIDGE _Facing p._ 38
STATE STREET, CHICAGO " 62
WESTERN FARMERS STILL OWN THEIR FARMS " 82
PLUMP AND PRETTY PUPILS OF EXTRAVAGANCE " 90
NEW YORK'S CROWDED, LITTERED EAST SIDE " 106
BREAKER BOYS AT A PENNSYLVANIA COLLIERY " 112
INTERIOR OF A NEW YORK OFFICE BUILDING " 124
WHERE IMMIGRANT CHILDREN ARE AMERICANIZED " 148
HARVARD HALL AND THE JOHNSON GATE, CAMBRIDGE " 214
A BIT OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY " 216
IN THE CONGRESSIONAL LIBRARY " 238
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
CHAPTER I
THE PROPHETIC HABIT OF MIND
(_At a writing-desk in Sandgate_)
I
The Question
"Are you a Polygamist?"
"Are you an Anarchist?"
The questions seem impertinent. They are part of a long paper of
interrogations I must answer satisfactorily if I am to be regarded as
a desirable alien to enter the United States of America. I want very
much to pass that great statue of Liberty illuminating the World (from
a central position in New York Harbor), in order to see things in its
light, to talk to certain people, to appreciate certain atmospheres,
and so I resist the provocation to answer impertinently. I do not
even volunteer that I do not smoke and am a total abstainer; on which
points it would seem the States as a whole still keep an open mind.
I am full of curiosity about America, I am possessed by a problem I
feel I cannot adequately discuss even with myself except over there,
and I must go even at the price of coming to a decision upon the
theoretically open questions these two inquiries raise.
My problem I know will seem ridiculous and monstrous when I give it in
all its stark disproportions--attacked by me with my equipment it will
call up an image of an elephant assailed by an ant who has not even
mastered Jiu-jitsu--but at any rate I've come to it in a natural sort
of way and it is one I must, for my own peace of mind, make some kind
of attempt upon, even if at last it means no more than the ant crawling
in an exploratory way hither and thither over that vast unconscious
carcass and finally getting down and going away. That may be rather
good for the ant, and the experience may be of interest to other ants,
however infinitesimal from the point of view of the elephant, the final
value of his investigation may be. And this tremendous problem in my
case and now in this--simply; What is going to happen to the United
States of America in the next thirty years or so?
I do not know if the reader has ever happened upon any books or
writings of mine before, but if, what is highly probable, he has not,
he may be curious to know how it is that any human being should be
running about in so colossally an interrogative state of mind. (For
even the present inquiry is by no means my maximum limit). And the
explanation is to be found a little in a mental idiosyncrasy perhaps,
but much more in the development of a special way of thinking, of a
habit of mind.
That habit of mind may be indicated by a proposition that, with a fine
air of discovery, I threw out some years ago, in a happy ignorance that
I had been anticipated by no less a person than Heraclitus. "There is
no Being but Becoming," that was what appeared to my unscholarly mind
to be almost triumphantly new. I have since then informed myself more
fully about Heraclitus, there are moments now when I more than half
suspect that all the thinking I shall ever do will simply serve to
illuminate my understanding of him, but at any rate that apothegm of
his does exactly convey the intellectual attitude into which I fall. I
am curiously not interested in things, and curiously interested in the
consequences of things. I wouldn't for the world go to see the United
States for what they are--if I had sound reason for supposing that the
entire western hemisphere was to be destroyed next Christmas, I should
not, I think, be among the multitude that would rush for one last look
at that great spectacle,--from which it follows naturally that I don't
propose to see Niagara. I should much more probably turn an inquiring
visage eastward, with the west so certainly provided for. I have come
to be, I am afraid, even a little insensitive to fine immediate things
through this anticipatory habit.
This habit of mind confronts and perplexes my sense of things that
simply _are_, with my brooding preoccupation with how they will
shape presently, what they will lead to, what seed they will sow
and how they will wear. At times, I can assure the reader, this
quality approaches otherworldliness, in its constant reference to an
all-important here-after. There are times indeed when it makes life
seem so transparent and flimsy, seem so dissolving, so passing on
to an equally transitory series of consequences, that the enhanced
sense of instability becomes restlessness and distress; but on the
other hand nothing that exists, nothing whatever, remains altogether
vulgar or dull and dead or hopeless in its light. But the interest
is shifted. The pomp and splendor of established order, the braying
triumphs, ceremonies, consummations, one sees these glittering shows
for what they are--through their threadbare grandeur shine the little
significant things that will make the future....
And now that I am associating myself with great names, let me discover
that I find this characteristic turn of mind of mine, not only in
Heraclitus, the most fragmentary of philosophers, but for one fine
passage at any rate, in Mr. Henry James, the least fragmentary
of novelists. In his recent impressions of America I find him
apostrophizing the great mansions of Fifth Avenue, in words quite after
my heart;--
"It's all very well," he writes, "for you to look as if, since you've
had no past, you're going in, as the next best thing, for a magnificent
compensatory future. What are you going to make your future _of_, for
all your airs, we want to know? What elements of a future, as futures
have gone in the great world, are at all assured to you?"
I had already when I read that, figured myself as addressing if not
these particular last triumphs of the fine Transatlantic art of
architecture, then at least America in general in some such words. It
is not unpleasant to be anticipated by the chief Master of one's craft,
it is indeed, when one reflects upon his peculiar intimacy with this
problem, enormously reassuring, and so I have very gladly annexed his
phrasing and put it here to honor and adorn and in a manner to explain
my own enterprise. I have already studied some of these fine buildings
through the mediation of an illustrated magazine--they appear solid,
they appear wonderful and well done to the highest pitch--and before
many days now I shall, I hope, reconstruct that particular moment,
stand--the latest admirer from England--regarding these portentous
magnificences, from the same sidewalk--will they call it?--as my
illustrious predecessor, and with his question ringing in my mind
all the louder for their proximity, and the universally acknowledged
invigoration of the American atmosphere. "What are you going to make
your future _of_, for all your airs?"
And then I suppose I shall return to crane my neck at the Flat-Iron
Building or the _Times_ sky-scraper, and ask all that too, an identical
question.
II
Philosophical
Certain phases in the development of these prophetic exercises one may
perhaps be permitted to trace.
To begin with, I remember that to me in my boyhood speculation about
the Future was a monstrous joke. Like most people of my generation I
was launched into life with millennial assumptions. This present sort
of thing, I believed, was going on for a time, interesting personally
perhaps but as a whole inconsecutive, and then--it might be in my
lifetime or a little after it--there would be trumpets and shoutings
and celestial phenomena, a battle of Armageddon and the Judgment.
As I saw it, it was to be a strictly protestant and individualistic
judgment, each soul upon its personal merits. To talk about the Man of
the Year Million was of course in the face of this great conviction, a
whimsical play of fancy. The Year Million was just as impossible, just
as gayly nonsensical as fairy-land....
I was a student of biology before I realized that this, my finite and
conclusive End, at least in the material and chronological form, had
somehow vanished from the scheme of things. In the place of it had come
a blackness and a vagueness about the endless vista of years ahead,
that was tremendous--that terrified. That is a phase in which lots of
educated people remain to this day. "All this scheme of things, life,
force, destiny which began not six thousand years, mark you, but an
infinity ago, that has developed out of such strange weird shapes and
incredible first intentions, out of gaseous nebulæ, carboniferous
swamps, saurian giantry and arboreal apes, is by the same tokens to
continue, developing--into what?" That was the overwhelming riddle that
came to me, with that realization of an End averted, that has come now
to most of our world.
The phase that followed the first helpless stare of the mind was a wild
effort to express one's sudden apprehension of unlimited possibility.
One made fantastic exaggerations, fantastic inversions of all
recognized things. Anything of this sort might come, anything of any
sort. The books about the future that followed the first stimulus of
the world's realization of the implications of Darwinian science, have
all something of the monstrous experimental imaginings of children. I
myself, in my microcosmic way, duplicated the times. Almost the first
thing I ever wrote--it survives in an altered form as one of a bookful
of essays,--was of this type; "The Man of the Year Million," was
presented as a sort of pantomime head and a shrivelled body, and years
after that, the _Time Machine_, my first published book, ran in the
same vein. At that point, at a brief astonished stare down the vistas
of time-to-come, at something between wonder and amazed, incredulous,
defeated laughter, most people, I think, stop. But those who are doomed
to the prophetic habit of mind go on.
The next phase, the third phase, is to shorten the range of the
outlook, to attempt something a little more proximate than the final
destiny of man. One becomes more systematic, one sets to work to trace
the great changes of the last century or so, and one produces these
in a straight line and according to the rule of three. If the maximum
velocity of land travel in 1800 was twelve miles an hour and in 1900
(let us say) sixty miles an hour, then one concludes that in 2000 A.D.
it will be three hundred miles an hour. If the population of America in
1800--but I refrain from this second instance. In that fashion one got
out a sort of gigantesque caricature of the existing world, everything
swollen to vast proportions and massive beyond measure. In my case that
phase produced a book, _When the Sleeper Wakes_, in which, I am told,
by competent New-Yorkers, that I, starting with London, an unbiassed
mind, this rule-of-three method and my otherwise unaided imagination,
produced something more like Chicago than any other place wherein
righteous men are likely to be found. That I shall verify in due
course, but my present point is merely that to write such a book is to
discover how thoroughly wrong this all too obvious method of enlarging
the present is.
One goes on therefore--if one is to succumb altogether to the
prophetic habit--to a really "scientific" attack upon the future.
The "scientific" phase is not final, but it is far more abundantly
fruitful than its predecessors. One attempts a rude wide analysis
of contemporary history, one seeks to clear and detach operating
causes and to work them out, and so, combining this necessary set of
consequences with that, to achieve a synthetic forecast in terms just
as broad and general and vague as the causes considered are few. I
made, it happens, an experiment in this scientific sort of prophecy
in a book called _Anticipations_, and I gave an altogether excessive
exposition and defence of it, I went altogether too far in this
direction, in a lecture to the Royal Institution, "The Discovery of
the Future," that survives in odd corners as a pamphlet, and is to be
found, like a scrap of old newspaper in the roof gutter of a museum, in
_Nature_ (vol. LXV., p. 326) and in the Smithsonian Report (for 1902).
Within certain limits, however, I still believe this scientific method
is sound. It gives sound results in many cases, results at any rate as
sound as those one gets from the "laws" of political economy; one can
claim it really does effect a sort of prophecy on the material side of
life.
For example, it was quite obvious about 1899 that invention and
enterprise were very busy with the means of locomotion, and one could
deduce from that certain practically inevitable consequences in the
distribution of urban populations. With easier, quicker means of
getting about there were endless reasons, hygienic, social, economic,
why people should move from the town centres towards their peripheries,
and very few why they should not. The towns one inferred therefore,
would get slacker, more diffused, the countryside more urban. From
that, from the spatial widening of personal interests that ensued,
one could infer certain changes in the spirits of local politics,
and so one went on to a number of fairly valid adumbrations. Then
again starting from the practical supersession in the long run of
all unskilled labor by machinery one can work out with a pretty fair
certainty many coming social developments, and the broad trend of
one group of influences at least from the moral attitude of the mass
of common people. In industry, in domestic life again, one foresees
a steady development of complex appliances, demanding, and indeed
in an epoch of frequently changing methods _forcing_, a flexible
understanding, versatility of effort, a universal rising standard of
education. So too a study of military methods and apparatus convinces
one of the necessary transfer of power in the coming century from
the ignorant and enthusiastic masses who made the revolutions of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and won Napoleon his wars,
to any more deliberate, more intelligent and more disciplined class
that may possess an organized purpose. But where will one find that
class? There comes a question that goes outside science, that takes
one at once into a field beyond the range of the "scientific" method
altogether.
So long as one adopts the assumptions of the old political economist
and assumes men without idiosyncrasy, without prejudices, without, as
people say, wills of their own, so long as one imagines a perfectly
acquiescent humanity that will always in the long run under pressure
liquefy and stream along the line of least resistance to its own
material advantage, the business of prophecy is easy. But from the
first I felt distrust for that facility in prophesying, I perceived
that always there lurked something, an incalculable opposition to these
mechanically conceived forces, in law, in usage and prejudice, in the
poiëtic power of exceptional individual men. I discovered for myself
over again, the inseparable nature of the two functions of the prophet.
In my _Anticipations_, for example, I had intended simply to work out
and foretell, and before I had finished I was in a fine full blast of
exhortation....
That by an easy transition brought me to the last stage in the life
history of the prophetic mind, as it is at present known to me. One
comes out on the other side of the "scientific" method, into the large
temperance, the valiant inconclusiveness, the released creativeness of
philosophy. Much may be foretold as certain, much more as possible,
but the last decisions and the greatest decisions, lie in the hearts
and wills of unique incalculable men. With them we have to deal as
our ultimate reality in all these matters, and our methods have to
be not "scientific" at all for all the greater issues, the humanly
important issues, but critical, literary, even if you will--artistic.
Here insight is of more account than induction and the perception of
fine tones than the counting of heads. Science deals with necessity and
necessity is here but the firm ground on which our freedom goes. One
passes from affairs of predestination to affairs of free will.
This discovery spread at once beyond the field of prophesying. The
end, the aim, the test of science, as a model man understands the
word, is foretelling by means of "laws," and my error in attempting a
complete "scientific" forecast of human affairs arose in too careless
an assent to the ideas about me, and from accepting uncritically such
claims as that history should be "scientific," and that economics and
sociology (for example) are "sciences." Directly one gauges the fuller
implications of that uniqueness of individuals Darwin's work has so
permanently illuminated, one passes beyond that. The ripened prophet
realizes Schopenhauer--as indeed I find Professor Münsterberg saying.
"The deepest sense of human affairs is reached," he writes, "when we
consider them not as appearances but as decisions." There one has the
same thing coming to meet one from the psychological side....
But my present business isn't to go into this shadowy, metaphysical
foundation world on which our thinking rests, but to the brightly lit
overworld of America. This philosophical excursion is set here just to
prepare the reader quite frankly for speculations and to disabuse his
mind of the idea that in writing of the Future in America I'm going to
write of houses a hundred stories high and flying-machines in warfare
and things like that. I am not going to America to work a pretentious
horoscope, to discover a Destiny, but to find out what I can of what
must needs make that Destiny,--a great nation's Will.
III
The Will of America
The material factors in a nation's future are subordinate factors,
they present advantages, such as the easy access of the English to
coal and the sea, or disadvantages, such as the ice-bound seaboard of
the Russians, but these are the circumstances and not necessarily the
rulers of its fate. The essential factor in the destiny of a nation,
as of a man and of mankind, lies in the form of its will and in the
quality and quantity of its will. The drama of a nation's future, as
of a man's, lies in this conflict of its will with what would else be
"scientifically" predictable, materially inevitable. If the man, if the
nation was an automaton fitted with good average motives, so and so,
one could say exactly, would be done. It's just where the thing isn't
automatic that our present interest comes in.
I might perhaps reverse the order of the three aspects of will I have
named, for manifestly where the quantity of will is small, it matters
nothing what the form or quality. The man or the people that wills
feebly is the sport of every circumstance, and there if anywhere the
scientific method holds truest or even altogether true. Do geographical
positions or mineral resources make for riches? Then such a people will
grow insecurely and disastrously rich. Is an abundant prolific life at
a low level indicated? They will pullulate and suffer. If circumstances
make for a choice between comfort and reproduction, your feeble people
will dwindle and pass; if war, if conquest tempt them then they will
turn from all preoccupations and follow the drums. Little things
provoke their unstable equilibrium, to hostility, to forgiveness....
And be it noted that the quantity of will in a nation is not
necessarily determined by adding up the wills of all its people. I am
told, and I am disposed to believe it, that the Americans of the United
States are a people of great individual force of will, the clear strong
faces of many young Americans, something almost Roman in the faces of
their statesmen and politicians, a distinctive quality I detect in such
Americans as I have met, a quality of sharply cut determination even
though it be only about details and secondary things, that one must
rouse one's self to meet, inclines me to give a provisional credit
to that, but how far does all this possible will-force aggregate to
a great national purpose?--what algebraically does it add up to when
this and that have cancelled each other? That may be a different thing
altogether.
And next to this net quantity of will a nation or people may possess,
come the questions of its quality, its flexibility, its consciousness
and intellectuality. A nation may be full of will and yet inflexibly
and disastrously stupid in the expression of that will. There was
probably more will-power, mere haughty and determined self-assertion
in the young bull that charged the railway engine than in several
regiments of men, but it was after all a low quality of will with no
method but a violent and injudicious directness, and in the end it
was suicidal and futile. There again is the substance for ramifying
Enquiries. How subtle, how collected and patient, how far capable of a
long plan, is this American nation? Suppose it has a will so powerful
and with such resources that whatever simple end may be attained by
rushing upon it is America's for the asking, there still remains the
far more important question of the ends that are not obvious, that are
intricate and complex and not to be won by booms and cataclysms of
effort.
An Englishman comes to think that most of the permanent and precious
things for which a nation's effort goes are like that, and here too I
have an open mind and unsatisfied curiosities.
And lastly there is the form of the nation's purpose. I have been
reading what I can find about that in books for some time, and now
I want to cross over the Atlantic, more particularly for that, to
question more or less openly certain Americans, not only men and women,
but the mute expressive presences of house and appliance, of statue,
flag and public building, and the large collective visages of crowds,
what it is all up to, what it thinks it is all after, how far it means
to escape or improve upon its purely material destinies? I want over
there to find whatever consciousness or vague consciousness of a common
purpose there may be, what is their Vision, their American Utopia,
how much will there is shaping to attain it, how much capacity goes
with the will--what, in short, there is in America, over and above the
mere mechanical consequences of scattering multitudes of energetic
Europeans athwart a vast healthy, productive and practically empty
continent in the temperate zone. There you have the terms of reference
of an enquiry, that is I admit (as Mr. Morgan Richards the eminent
advertisement agent would say), "mammoth in character."
The American reader may very reasonably inquire at this point why an
Englishman does not begin with the future of his own country. The
answer is that this particular one has done so, and that in many ways
he has found his intimacy and proximity a disadvantage. One knows too
much of the things that seem to matter and that ultimately don't, one
is full of misleading individual instances intensely seen, one can't
see the wood for the trees. One comes to America at last, not only with
the idea of seeing America, but with something more than an incidental
hope of getting one's own England there in the distance and as a whole,
for the first time in one's life. And the problem of America, from
this side anyhow, has an air of being simpler. For all the Philippine
adventure her future still seems to lie on the whole compactly in one
continent, and not as ours is, dispersed round and about the habitable
globe, strangely entangled with India, with Japan, with Africa and with
the great antagonism the Germans force upon us at our doors. Moreover
one cannot look ten years ahead in England, without glancing across the
Atlantic. "There they are," we say to one another, "those Americans!
They speak our language, read our books, give us books, share our mind.
What we think still goes into their heads in a measure, and their
thoughts run through our brains. What will they be up to?"
Our future is extraordinarily bound up in America's and in a sense
dependent upon it. It is not that we dream very much of political
reunions of Anglo Saxondom and the like. So long as we British retain
our wide and accidental sprawl of empire about the earth we cannot
expect or desire the Americans to share our stresses and entanglements.
Our Empire has its own adventurous and perilous outlook. But our
civilization is a different thing from our Empire, a thing that
reaches out further into the future, that will be going on changed
beyond recognition. Because of our common language, of our common
traditions, Americans are a part of our community, are becoming indeed
the larger part of our community of thought and feeling and outlook--in
a sense far more intimate than any link we have with Hindoo or Copt or
Cingalese. A common Englishman has an almost pathetic pride and sense
of proprietorship in the States; he is fatally ready to fall in with
the idea that two nations that share their past, that still, a little
restively, share one language, may even contrive to share an infinitely
more interesting future. Even if he does not chance to be an American
now, his grandson may be. America is his inheritance, his reserved
accumulating investment. In that sense indeed America belongs to the
whole western world; all Europe owns her promise, but to the Englishman
the sense of participation is intense. "_We_ did it," he will tell of
the most American of achievements, of the settlement of the middle west
for example, and this is so far justifiable that numberless men, myself
included, are Englishmen, Australian, New-Zealanders, Canadians,
instead of being Americans, by the merest accidents of life. My father
still possesses the stout oak box he had had made to emigrate withal,
everything was arranged that would have got me and my brothers born
across the ocean, and only the coincidence of a business opportunity
and an illness of my mother's, arrested that. It was so near a thing
as that with me, which prevents my blood from boiling with patriotic
indignation instead of patriotic solicitude at the frequent sight
of red-coats as I see them from my study window going to and fro to
Shorncliffe camp.
Well I learn from Professor Münsterberg how vain my sense of
proprietorship is, but still this much of it obstinately remains, that
I will at any rate _look_ at the American future.
By the accidents that delayed that box it comes about that if I want
to see what America is up to, I have among other things to buy a
Baedeker and a steamer ticket and fill up the inquiring blanks in
this remarkable document before me, the long string of questions that
begins:--
"Are you a Polygamist?"
"Are you an Anarchist?"
Here I gather is one little indication of the great will I am going to
study. It would seem that the United States of America regard Anarchy
and Polygamy with aversion, regard indeed Anarchists and Polygamists as
creatures unfit to mingle with the already very various eighty million
of citizens who constitute their sovereign powers, and on the other
hand hold these creatures so inflexibly honorable as certainly to tell
these damning truths about themselves in this matter....
It's a little odd. One has a second or so of doubt about the quality of
that particular manifestation of will.