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THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION
THE SALVAGING
OF CIVILIZATION
BY
H. G. WELLS
CASSELL AND COMPANY, LIMITED
London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
1921
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE PROBABLE FUTURE OF MANKIND 1
II. THE PROJECT OF A WORLD STATE 42
III. THE ENLARGEMENT OF PATRIOTISM TO A WORLD STATE 68
IV. THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION; PART ONE 95
V. THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION; PART TWO 118
VI. THE SCHOOLING OF THE WORLD 139
VII. COLLEGE, NEWSPAPER AND BOOK 166
VIII. THE ENVOY 193
INDEX 199
The Salvaging of Civilization
I
THE PROBABLE FUTURE OF MANKIND[A]
[A] First published in the _Review of Reviews_.
Sec. 1
The present outlook of human affairs is one that admits of broad
generalizations and that seems to require broad generalizations. We are
in one of those phases of experience which become cardinal in history. A
series of immense and tragic events have shattered the self-complacency
and challenged the will and intelligence of mankind. That easy general
forward movement of human affairs which for several generations had
seemed to justify the persuasion of a necessary and invincible progress,
progress towards greater powers, greater happiness, and a continual
enlargement of life, has been checked violently and perhaps arrested
altogether. The spectacular catastrophe of the Great War has revealed an
accumulation of destructive forces in our outwardly prosperous society,
of which few of us had dreamt; and it has also revealed a profound
incapacity to deal with and restrain these forces. The two years of
want, confusion, and indecision that have followed the Great War in
Europe and Asia, and the uncertainties that have disturbed life even in
the comparatively untouched American world, seem to many watchful minds
even more ominous to our social order than the war itself. What is
happening to our race? they ask. Did the prosperities and confident
hopes with which the twentieth century opened, mark nothing more than a
culmination of fortuitous good luck? Has the cycle of prosperity and
progress closed? To what will this staggering and blundering, the
hatreds and mischievous adventures of the present time, bring us? Is the
world in the opening of long centuries of confusion and disaster such as
ended the Western Roman Empire in Europe or the Han prosperity in China?
And if so, will the debacle extend to America? Or is the American (and
Pacific?) system still sufficiently removed and still sufficiently
autonomous to maintain a progressive movement of its own if the Old
World collapse?
Some sort of answer to these questions, vast and vague though they are,
we must each one of us have before we can take an intelligent interest
or cast an effective vote in foreign affairs. Even though a man
formulate no definite answer, he must still have an implicit persuasion
before he can act in these matters. If he have no clear conclusions
openly arrived at, then he must act upon subconscious conclusions
instinctively arrived at. Far better is it that he should bring them
into the open light of thought.
The suppression of war is generally regarded as central to the complex
of contemporary problems. But war is not a new thing in human
experience, and for scores of centuries mankind has managed to get along
in spite of its frequent recurrence. Most states and empires have been
intermittently at war throughout their periods of stability and
prosperity. But their warfare was not the warfare of the present time.
The thing that has brought the rush of progressive development of the
past century and a half to a sudden shock of arrest is not the old and
familiar warfare, but warfare strangely changed and exaggerated by novel
conditions. It is this change in conditions, therefore, and not war
itself, which is the reality we have to analyse in its bearing upon our
social and political ideas. In 1914 the European Great Powers resorted
to war, as they had resorted to war on many previous occasions, to
decide certain open issues. This war flamed out with an unexpected
rapidity until all the world was involved; and it developed a horror, a
monstrosity of destructiveness, and, above all, an inconclusiveness
quite unlike any preceding war. That unlikeness was the essence of the
matter. Whatever justifications could be found for its use in the past,
it became clear to many minds that under the new conditions war was no
longer a possible method of international dealing. The thing lay upon
the surface. The idea of a League of Nations sustaining a Supreme World
Court to supersede the arbitrament of war, did not so much arise at any
particular point as break out simultaneously wherever there were
intelligent men.
Now what was this change in conditions that had confronted mankind with
the perplexing necessity of abandoning war? For perplexing it certainly
is. War has been a ruling and constructive idea in all human societies
up to the present time; few will be found to deny it. Political
institutions have very largely developed in relation to the idea of war;
defence and aggression have shaped the outer form of every state in the
world, just as co-operation sustained by compulsion has shaped its inner
organization. And if abruptly man determines to give up the waging of
war, he may find that this determination involves the most extensive and
penetrating modifications of political and social conceptions that do
not at the first glance betray any direct connection with belligerent
activities at all.
It is to the general problem arising out of this consideration, that
this and the three following essays will be addressed; the question:
What else has to go if war is to go out of human life? and the problem
of what has to be done if it is to be banished and barred out for ever
from the future experiences of our race. For let us face the truth in
this matter; the abolition of war is no casting of ancient, barbaric,
and now obsolete traditions, no easy and natural progressive step; the
abolition of war, if it can be brought about, will be a reversal not
only of the general method of human life hitherto but of the general
method of nature, the method, that is, of conflict and survival. It will
be a new phase in the history of life, and not simply an incident in the
history of man. These brief essays will attempt to present something
like the true dimensions of the task before mankind if war is indeed to
be superseded, and to show that the project of abolishing war by the
occasional meeting of some Council of a League of Nations or the like,
is, in itself, about as likely to succeed as a proposal to abolish
thirst, hunger, and death by a short legislative act.
Let us first examine the change in the conditions of human life that has
altered war from a normal aspect of the conflict for existence of human
societies into a terror and a threat for the entire species. The change
is essentially a change in the amount of power available for human
purposes, and more particularly in the amount of material power that can
be controlled by one individual. Human society up to a couple of
centuries ago was essentially a man-power and horse-power system. There
was in addition a certain limited use of water power and wind power, but
that was not on a scale to affect the general truth of the proposition.
The first intimation of the great change began seven centuries ago with
the appearance of explosives. In the thirteenth century the Mongols made
a very effective military use of the Chinese discovery of gunpowder.
They conquered most of the known world, and their introduction of a
low-grade explosive in warfare rapidly destroyed the immunity of castles
and walled cities, abolished knighthood, and utterly wrecked and
devastated the irrigation system of Mesopotamia, which had been a
populous and civilized region since before the beginnings of history.
But the restricted metallurgical knowledge of the time set definite
limits to the size and range of cannon. It was only with the nineteenth
century that the large scale production of cast steel and the growth of
chemical knowledge made the military use of a variety of explosives
practicable. The systematic extension of human power began in the
eighteenth century with the utilization of steam and coal. That opened a
crescendo of invention and discovery which thrust rapidly increasing
quantities of material energy into men's hands. Even now that crescendo
may not have reached its climax.
We need not rehearse here the familiar story of the abolition of
distance that ensued; how the radiogram and the telegram have made every
event of importance a simultaneous event for the minds of everyone in
the world, how journeys which formerly took months or weeks now take
days or hours, nor how printing and paper have made possible a
universally informed community, and so forth. Nor will we describe the
effect of these things upon warfare. The point that concerns us here is
this, that before this age of discovery communities had fought and
struggled with each other much as naughty children might do in a crowded
nursery, _within the measure of their strength_. They had hurt and
impoverished each other, but they had rarely destroyed each other
completely. Their squabbles may have been distressing, but they were
tolerable. It is even possible to regard these former wars as healthy,
hardening and invigorating conflicts. But into this nursery has come
Science, and has put into the fists of these children razor blades with
poison on them, bombs of frightful explosive, corrosive fluids and the
like. The comparatively harmless conflicts of these infants are suddenly
fraught with quite terrific possibilities, and it is only a question of
sooner or later before the nursery becomes a heap of corpses or is blown
to smithereens. A real nursery invaded by a reckless person distributing
such gifts, would be promptly saved by the intervention of the nurse;
but humanity has no nurse but its own poor wisdom. And whether that poor
wisdom can rise to the pitch of effectual intervention is the most
fundamental problem in mundane affairs at the present time.
The deadly gifts continue. There was a steady increase in the
frightfulness and destructiveness of belligerence from 1914 up to the
beginning of 1918, when shortage of material and energy checked the
process; and since the armistice there has been an industrious
development of military science. The next well-organized war, we are
assured, will be far more swift and extensive in its destruction--more
particularly of the civilian population. Armies will advance no longer
along roads but extended in line, with heavy tank transport which will
plough up the entire surface of the land they traverse; aerial bombing,
with bombs each capable of destroying a small town, will be practicable
a thousand miles beyond the military front, and the seas will be swept
clear of shipping by mines and submarine activities. There will be no
distinction between combatants and non-combatants, because every
able-bodied citizen, male or female, is a potential producer of food and
munitions; and probably the safest, and certainly the best supplied
shelters in the universal cataclysm, will be the carefully buried,
sandbagged, and camouflaged general-headquarters of the contending
armies. There military gentlemen of limited outlook and high
professional training will, in comparative security, achieve destruction
beyond their understanding. The hard logic of war which gives victory
always to the most energetic and destructive combatant, will turn
warfare more and more from mere operations for loot or conquest or
predominance into operations for the conclusive destruction of the
antagonists. A relentless thrust towards strenuousness is a
characteristic of belligerent conditions. War is war, and vehemence is
in its nature. You must hit always as hard as you can. Offensive and
counter-offensive methods continue to prevail over merely defensive
ones. The victor in the next great war will be bombed from the air,
starved, and depleted almost as much as the loser. His victory will be
no easy one; it will be a triumph of the exhausted and dying over the
dead.
It has been argued that such highly organized and long prepared warfare
as the world saw in 1914-18 is not likely to recur again for a
considerable time because of the shock inflicted by it upon social
stability. There may be spasmodic wars with improvised and scanty
supplies, these superficially more hopeful critics admit, but there
remain no communities now so stable and so sure of their people as to
prepare and wage again a fully elaborated scientific war. But this view
implies no happier outlook for mankind. It amounts to this, that so long
as men remain disordered and impoverished they will not rise again to
the full height of scientific war. But manifestly this will only be for
so long as they remain disordered and impoverished. When they recover
they will recover to repeat again their former disaster with whatever
modern improvements and intensifications the ingenuity of the
intervening time may have devised. This new phase of disorder,
conflict, and social unravelling upon which we have entered, this phase
of decline due to the enhanced and increasing powers for waste and
destruction in mankind, is bound, therefore, to continue so long as the
divisions based upon ancient ideas of conflict remain; and if for a time
the decadence seems to be arrested, it will only be to accumulate under
the influence of those ideas a fresh war-storm sufficiently destructive
and disorganizing to restore the decadent process.
Unless mankind can readjust its political and social ideas to this
essential new fact of its enormously enlarged powers, unless it can
eliminate or control its pugnacity, no other prospect seems open to us
but decadence, at least to such a level of barbarism as to lose and
forget again all the scientific and industrial achievements of our
present age. Then, with its powers shrunken to their former puny scale,
our race may recover some sort of balance between the injuries and
advantages of conflict. Or, since our decadent species may have less
vitality and vigour than it had in its primitive phases, it may dwindle
and fade out altogether before some emboldened animal antagonist, or
through some world-wide disease brought to it perhaps by rats and dogs
and insects and what not, who may be destined to be heirs to the rusting
and mouldering ruins of the cities and ports and ways and bridges of
to-day.
Only one alternative to some such retrogression seems possible, and that
is the conscious, systematic reconstruction of human society to avert
it. The world has been brought into one community, and the human mind
and will may be able to recognize and adapt itself to this fact--in
time. Men, as a race, may succeed in turning their backs upon the method
of warfare and the methods of conflict and in embarking upon an immense
world-wide effort of co-operation and mutual toleration and salvage.
They may have the vigour to abandon their age-long attempt to live in
separate sovereign states, and to grapple with and master the now quite
destructive force that traditional hostility has become, and bring their
affairs together under one law and one peace. These new vast powers over
nature which have been given to them, and which will certainly be their
destruction if their purposes remain divergent and conflicting, will
then be the means by which they may set up a new order of as yet
scarcely imaginable interest and happiness and achievement. But is our
race capable of such an effort, such a complete reversal of its
instinctive and traditional impulses? Can we find premonitions of any
such bold and revolutionary adaptations as these, in the mental and
political life of to-day? How far are we, reader and writer, for
example, working for these large new securities? Do we even keep them
steadfastly in our minds? How is it with the people around us? Are not
we and they and all the race still just as much adrift in the current
of circumstances as we were before 1914? Without a great effort on our
part (or on someone's part) that current which swirled our kind into a
sunshine of hope and opportunity for a while will carry our race on
surely and inexorably to fresh wars, to shortages, hunger, miseries, and
social debacles, at last either to complete extinction or to a
degradation beyond our present understanding.
Sec.2
The urgent need for a great creative effort has become apparent in the
affairs of mankind. It is manifest that unless some unity of purpose can
be achieved in the world, unless the ever more violent and disastrous
incidence of war can be averted, unless some common control can be
imposed on the headlong waste of man's limited inheritance of coal, oil,
and moral energy that is now going on, the history of humanity must
presently culminate in some sort of disaster, repeating and exaggerating
the disaster of the great war, producing chaotic social conditions, and
going on thereafter in a degenerative process towards extinction. So
much all reasonable men seem now prepared to admit. But upon the
question of how and in what form a unity of purpose and a common control
of human affairs is to be established, there is still a great and
lamentable diversity of opinion and, as a consequence, an enfeeblement
and wasteful dispersal of will. At present nothing has been produced but
the manifestly quite inadequate League of Nations at Geneva, and a
number of generally very vague movements for a world law, world
disarmament, and the like, among the intellectuals of the various
civilized countries of the world.
The common failings of all these initiatives are a sort of genteel
timidity and a defective sense of the scale of the enterprise before us.
A neglect of the importance of scale is one of the gravest faults of
contemporary education. Because a world-wide political organ is needed,
it does not follow that a so-called League of Nations without
representative sanctions, military forces, or authority of any kind, a
League from which large sections of the world are excluded altogether,
is any contribution to that need. People have a way of saying it is
better than nothing. But it may be worse than nothing. It may create a
feeling of disillusionment about world-unifying efforts. If a mad
elephant were loose in one's garden, it would be an excellent thing to
give one's gardener a gun. But it would have to be an adequate gun, an
elephant gun. To give him a small rook-rifle and tell him it was better
than nothing, and encourage him to face the elephant with that in his
hand, would be the directest way of getting rid not of the elephant but
of the gardener.
It is, if people will but think steadfastly, inconceivable that there
should be any world control without a merger of sovereignty, but the
framers of these early tentatives towards world unity have lacked the
courage of frankness in this respect. They have been afraid of outbreaks
of bawling patriotism, and they have tried to believe, and to make
others believe, that they contemplate nothing more than a league of
nations, when in reality they contemplate a subordination of nations and
administrations to one common law and rule. The elementary necessity of
giving the council of any world-peace organization which is to be more
than a sentimental international gesture, not only a complete knowledge
but an effective control of all the military resources and organizations
in the world, appalled them. They did not even ask for such a control.
The frowning solidity of existing things was too much for them. They
wanted to change them, but when it came to laying hands on them--No!
They decided to leave them alone. They wanted a new world--and it is to
contain just the same things as the old.
But are these intellectuals right in their estimate of the common man?
Is he such a shallow and vehement fool as they seem to believe? Is he so
patriotic as they make out? If mankind is to be saved from destruction
there must be a world control; a world control means a world government,
it is only another name for it, and manifestly that government must have
a navy that will supersede the British navy, artillery that will
supersede the French artillery, air forces superseding all existing air
forces, and so forth. For many flags there must be one sovereign flag;
_orbis terrarum_. Unless a world control amounts to that it will be
ridiculous, just as a judge supported by two or three unarmed policemen,
a newspaper reporter and the court chaplain, proposing to enforce his
decisions in a court packed with the heavily armed friends of the
plaintiff and defendant would be ridiculous. But the common man is
supposed to be so blindly and incurably set upon his British navy or his
French army, or whatever his pet national instrument of violence may be,
that it is held to be impossible to supersede these beloved and adored
forces. If that is so, then a world law is impossible, and the wisest
course before us is to snatch such small happiness as we may hope to do
and leave the mad elephant to work its will in the garden.
But is it so? If the mass of common men are incurably patriotic and
belligerent why is there a note of querulous exhortation in nearly all
patriotic literature? Why, for instance, is Mr. Rudyard Kipling's
"History of England" so full of goading and scolding? And very
significant indeed to any student of the human outlook was the
world-response to President Wilson's advocacy of the League of Nations
idea, in its first phase in 1918, before the weakening off and
disillusionment of the Versailles Conference. Just for a little while it
seemed that President Wilson stood for a new order of things in the
world, that he had the wisdom and will and power to break the net of
hatreds and nationalisms and diplomacies in which the Old World was
entangled. And while he seemed to be capable of that, while he promised
most in the way of change and national control, then it was that he
found his utmost support in every country in the world. In the latter
half of 1918 there was scarcely a country anywhere in which one could
not have found men ready to die for President Wilson. A great
hopefulness was manifest in the world. It faded, it faded very rapidly
again. But that brief wave of enthusiasm, which set minds astir with the
same great idea of one peace of justice throughout the earth in China
and Bokhara and the Indian bazaars, in Iceland and Basutoland and
Ireland and Morocco, was indeed a fact perhaps more memorable in history
even than the great war itself. It displayed a possibility of the
simultaneous operation of the same general ideas throughout the world
quite beyond any previous experience. It demonstrated that the
generality of men are as capable of being cosmopolitan and pacifist as
they are of being patriotic and belligerent. Both moods are extensions
and exaltations beyond the everyday life, which itself is neither one
thing nor the other. And both are transitory moods, responses to
external suggestion.
It is to that first wave of popular feeling for a world law transcending
and moving counter to all contemporary diplomacies, and not to the timid
legalism of the framers of the first schemes for a League of Nations
that we must look, if we are to hope at all for the establishment of a
new order in human affairs. It is upon the spirit of that transitory
response to the transitory greatness of President Wilson that we have to
seize; we have to lay hold of that, to recall it and confirm it and
enlarge and strengthen it, to make it a flux of patriotisms and a
creator of new loyalties and devotions, and out of the dead dust of our
present institutions to build up for it and animate with it the body of
a true world state.
We have already stated the clear necessity, if mankind is not to perish
by the hypertrophy of warfare, for the establishment of an armed and
strong world law. Here in this spirit that has already gleamed upon the
world is the possible force to create and sustain such a world law. What
is it that intervenes between the universal human need and its
satisfaction? Why, since there are overwhelming reasons for it and a
widespread disposition for it, is there no world-wide creative effort
afoot now in which men and women by the million are participating--and
participating with all their hearts? Why is it that, except for the weak
gestures of the Geneva League of Nations and a little writing of books
and articles, a little pamphleteering, some scattered committee
activities on the part of people chiefly of the busybody class, an
occasional speech and a diminishing volume of talk and allusion, no
attempts are apparent to stay the plain drift of human society towards
new conflicts and the sluices of final disaster?
The answer to that Why, probes deep into the question of human motives.
It must be because we are all creatures of our immediate surroundings,
because our minds and energies are chiefly occupied by the affairs of
every day, because we are all chiefly living our own lives, and very few
of us, except by a kind of unconscious contribution, the life of
mankind. In moments of mental activity, in the study or in
contemplation, we may rise to a sense of the dangers and needs of human
destiny, but it is only a few minds and characters of prophetic quality
that, without elaborate artificial assistance, seem able to keep hold
upon and guide their lives by such relatively gigantic considerations.
The generality of men and women, so far as their natural disposition
goes, are scarcely more capable of apprehending and consciously serving
the human future than a van full of well-fed rabbits would be of
grasping the fact that their van was running smoothly and steadily down
an inclined plane into the sea. It is only as the result of considerable
educational effort and against considerable resistance that our minds
are brought to a broader view. In every age for many thousands of years
men of exceptional vision have spent their lives in passionate efforts
to bring us ordinary men into some relation of response and service to
the greater issues of life. It is these pioneers of vision who have
given the world its religions and its philosophical cults, its loyalties
and observances; and who have imposed ideas of greatness and duty on
their fellows. In every age the ordinary man has submitted reluctantly
to such teachings, has made his peculiar compromises with them, has
reduced them as far as possible to formula and formality, and got back
as rapidly as possible to the eating and drinking and desire, the
personal spites and rivalries and glories which constitute his reality.
The mass of men to-day do not seem to care, nor want to care, whither
the political and social institutions to which they are accustomed are
taking them. Such considerations overstrain us. And it is only by the
extremest effort of those who are capable of a sense of racial danger
and duty that the collective energies of men can ever be gathered
together and organized and orientated towards the common good. To nearly
all men and women, unless they are in the vein for it, such discussion
as this in these essays does not appeal as being right or wrong; it does
not really interest them, rather it worries them; and for the most part
they would be glad to disregard it as completely as a lecture on wheels
and gravitation and the physiological consequences of prolonged
submergence would be disregarded by those rabbits in the van.
But man is a creature very different in his nature from a rabbit, and if
he is less instinctively social, he is much more consciously social.
Chief among his differences must be the presence of those tendencies
which we call conscience, that haunting craving to be really right and
to do the really right thing which is the basis of the moral and perhaps
also of most of the religious life. In this lies our hope for mankind.
Man hates to be put right, and yet also he wants to be right. He is a
creature divided against himself, seeking both to preserve and to
overcome his egotism. It is upon the presence of the latter strand in
man's complex make-up that we must rest our hopes of a developing will
for the world state which will gradually gather together and direct into
a massive constructive effort the now quite dispersed chaotic and
traditional activities of men.
As we have examined this problem it has become clear that the task of
bringing about that consolidated world state which is necessary to
prevent the decline and decay of mankind is not primarily one for the
diplomatists and lawyers and politicians at all. It is an educational
one. It is a moral based on an intellectual reconstruction. The task
immediately before mankind is to find release from the contentious
loyalties and hostilities of the past which make collective world-wide
action impossible at the present time, in a world-wide common vision of
the history and destinies of the race. On that as a basis, and on that
alone, can a world control be organized and maintained. The effort
demanded from mankind, therefore, is primarily and essentially a bold
reconstruction of the outlook upon life of hundreds of millions of
minds. The idea of a world commonweal has to be established as the
criterion of political institutions, and also as the criterion of
general conduct in hundreds of millions of brains. It has to dominate
education everywhere in the world. When that end is achieved, then the
world state will be achieved, and it can be achieved in no other way.
And unless that world state can be achieved, it would seem that the
outlook before mankind is a continuance of disorder and of more and more
destructive and wasteful conflicts, a steady process of violence,
decadence, and misery towards extinction, or towards modifications of
our type altogether beyond our present understanding and sympathy.
Sec. 3
In framing an estimate of the human future two leading facts are
dominant. The first is the plain necessity for a political
reorganization of the world as a unity, to save our race from the social
disintegration and complete physical destruction which war, under modern
conditions, must ultimately entail, and the second is the manifest
absence of any sufficient will in the general mass of mankind at the
present time to make such a reorganization possible. There appear to be
the factors of such a will in men, but they are for the most part
unawakened, or they are unorganized and ineffective. And there is a
very curious incapacity to grasp the reality of the human situation, a
real resistance to seeing things as they are--for man is an
effort-shirking animal--which greatly impedes the development of such a
will. Failing the operation of such a sufficient will, human affairs are
being directed by use and wont, by tradition and accidental deflections.
Mankind, after the tragic concussion of the great war, seems now to be
drifting again towards new and probably more disastrous concussions.
The catastrophe of the Great War did more or less completely awaken a
certain limited number of intelligent people to the need of some general
control replacing this ancient traditional driftage of events. But they
shrank from the great implications of such a world control. The only
practicable way to achieve a general control in the face of existing
governments, institutions and prejudices, interested obstruction and the
common disregard, is by extending this awakening to great masses of
people. This means an unprecedented educational effort, an appeal to
men's intelligence and men's imagination such as the world has never
seen before. Is it possible to rationalize the at present chaotic will
of mankind? That possibility, if it is a possibility, is the most
important thing in contemporary human affairs.
We are asking here for an immense thing, for a change of ideas, a vast
enlargement of ideas, and for something very like a change of heart in
hundreds of millions of human beings. But then we are dealing with the
fate of the entire species. We are discussing the prevention of wars,
disorders, shortages, famines and miseries for centuries ahead. The
initial capital we have to go upon is as yet no more than the aroused
understanding and conscience of a few thousands, at most of a few score
thousands of people. Can so little a leaven leaven so great a lump? Is a
response to this appeal latent in the masses of mankind? Is there
anything in history to justify hope for so gigantic a mental turnover in
our race?
A consideration of the spread of Christianity in the first four
centuries A.D. or of the spread of Islam in the seventh century will, we
believe, support a reasonable hope that such a change in the minds of
men, whatever else it may be, is a practicable change, that it can be
done and that it may even probably be done. Consider our two instances.
The propagandas of those two great religions changed and changed for
ever the political and social outlook over vast areas of the world's
surface. Yet while the stir for world unity begins now simultaneously in
many countries and many groups of people, those two propagandas each
radiated from a single centre and were in the first instance the
teachings of single individuals; and while to-day we can deal with great
reading populations and can reach them by press and printed matter, by a
universal distribution of books, by great lecturing organizations and
the like, those earlier great changes in human thought were achieved
mainly by word of mouth and by crabbed manuscripts, painfully copied and
passed slowly from hand to hand. So far it is only the trader who has
made any effectual use of the vast facilities the modern world has
produced for conveying a statement simultaneously to great numbers of
people at a distance. The world of thought still hesitates to use the
means of power that now exist for it. History and political philosophy
in the modern world are like bashful dons at a dinner party; they
crumble their bread and talk in undertones and clever allusions to their
nearest neighbour, abashed at the thought of addressing the whole table.
But in a world where Mars can reach out in a single night and smite a
city a thousand miles away, we cannot suffer wisdom to hesitate in an
inaudible gentility. The knowledge and vision that is good enough for
the best of us is good enough for all. This gospel of human brotherhood
and a common law and rule for all mankind, the attempt to meet this
urgent necessity of a common control of human affairs, which indeed is
no new religion but only an attempt to realize practically the common
teaching of all the established religions of the world, has to speak
with dominating voice everywhere between the poles and round about the
world.
And it must become part of the universal education. It must speak
through the school and university. It is too often forgotten, in
America, perhaps, even more than in Europe, that education exists for
the community, and for the individual only so far as it makes him a
sufficient member of the community. The chief end of education is to
subjugate and sublimate for the collective purposes of our kind the
savage egotism we inherit. Every school, every college, teaches directly
and still more by implication, relationship to a community and devotion
to a community. In too many cases that community we let our schools and
colleges teach to our children is an extremely narrow one; it is the
community of a sect, of a class, or of an intolerant, greedy and
unrighteous nationalism. Schools have increased greatly in numbers
throughout the world during the last century, but there has been little
or no growth in the conception of education in schools. Education has
been extended, but it has not been developed. If man is to be saved from
self-destruction by the organization of a world community, there must be
a broadening of the reference of the teaching in the schools of all the
world to that community of the world. World-wide educational development
and reform are the necessary preparations for and the necessary
accompaniments of a political reconstruction of the world. The two are
the right and left hands of the same thing. Neither can effect much
without the other.
Now it is manifest that this reorganization of the world's affairs and
of the world's education which we hold to be imperatively dictated by
the change in warfare, communications and other conditions of human
life brought about by scientific discovery during the last hundred
years, carries with it a practical repudiation of the claims of every
existing sovereign government in the world to be final and sovereign, to
be anything more than provisional and replaceable. There is the
difficulty that has checked hundreds of men after their first step
towards this work for a universal peace. It involves, it cannot but
involve, a revision of their habitual allegiances. At best existing
governments are to be regarded as local trustees and caretakers for the
coming human commonweal.
If they are not that, then they are necessarily obstructive and
antagonistic. But few rulers, few governments, few officials, will have
the greatness of mind to recognize and admit this plain reality. By a
kind of necessity they force upon their subjects and publics a conflict
of loyalties. The feeble driftage of human affairs from one base or
greedy arrangement or cowardly evasion to another, since the Armistice
of 1918, is very largely due to the obstinate determination of those who
are in positions of authority and responsibility to ignore the plain
teachings of the great war and its sequelae. They are resisting
adjustments; their minds are fighting against the sacrifices of pride
and authority that a full recognition of their subordination to the
world commonweal will involve. They are prepared, it would seem, to
fight against the work of human salvation basely and persistently,
whenever their accustomed importance is threatened.
Even in the schools and in the world of thought the established thing
will make its unrighteous fight for life. The dull and the dishonest in
high places will suppress these greater ideas when they can, and ignore
when they dare not suppress. It seems too much to hope for that there
should be any willingness on the part of any established authority to
admit its obsolescence and prepare the way for its merger in a world
authority. It is not creative minds that produce revolutions, but the
obstinate conservatism of established authority. It is the blank refusal
to accept the idea of an orderly evolution towards new things that gives
a revolutionary quality to every constructive proposal. The huge task of
political and educational reconstruction which is needed to arrest the
present drift of human affairs towards catastrophe, must be achieved, if
it is to be achieved at all, mainly by voluntary and unofficial effort;
and for the most part in the teeth of official opposition.
There are one or two existing states to which men have looked for some
open recognition of their duty to mankind as a whole, and of the
necessarily provisional nature of their contemporary constitutions. The
United States of America constitute a political system, profoundly
different in its origin and in its spirit, from any old-world state; it
was felt that here at least might be an evolutionary state; and in the
palmy days of President Wilson it did seem for a brief interval as if
the New World was indeed coming to the rescue of the old, as if America
was to play the role of a propagandist continent, bringing its ideas of
equality and freedom, and extending the spirit of its union to all the
nations of the earth. From that expectation, the world opinion is now in
a state of excessive and unreasonable recoil. President Wilson fell away
from his first intimations of that world-wide federal embrace; his mind
and will were submerged by the clamour of contending patriotisms and the
subtle expedients of old-world diplomacy in Paris; but American
accessibility to the idea of a federalized world neither began with him
nor will it end with his failure. America is still a hopeful laboratory
of world-unifying thought. A long string of arbitration treaties stands
to the credit of America, and a series of developing Pan-American
projects, pointing clearly to at least a continental synthesis within a
measurable time. There has been, and there still is, a better
understanding of, and a greater receptivity to, ideas of international
synthesis in America than in any European state.
And the British Empire, which according to many of its liberal
apologists is already a league of nations linked together in a mutually
advantageous peace, to that too men have looked for some movement of
adaptation to this greater synthesis which is the world's pre-eminent
need. But so far the British Empire has failed to respond to such
expectations. The war has left it strained and bruised and with its
affairs very much in the grip of the military class, the most illiterate
and dangerous class in the community. They have done, perhaps,
irreparable mischief to the peace of the empire in Ireland, India and
Egypt, and they have made the claim of the British system to be an
exemplary unification of dissimilar peoples seem now to many people
incurably absurd. It is a great misfortune for mankind that the British
Empire, which played so sturdy and central a part in the great war,
could at its close achieve no splendid and helpful gesture towards a
generous reconstruction.
Since the armistice there has been an extraordinary opportunity for the
British monarchy to have displayed a sense of the new occasions before
the world, and to have led the way towards the efforts and renunciations
of an international renascence. It could have taken up a lead that the
President of the United States had initiated and relinquished; it could
have used its peculiar position to make an unexampled appeal to the
whole world. It could have created a new epoch in history. The Prince of
Wales has been touring the world-wide dominions of which, some day, he
is to be the crowned head. He has received addresses, visited sights,
been entertained, shaken hands with scores of thousands of people and
submitted himself to the eager, yet unpenetrating gaze of vast
multitudes. His smallest acts have been observed with premeditated
admiration, his lightest words recorded. He is not now a boy; he saw
something of the great war, even if his exalted position denied him any
large share of its severer hardships and dangers; he cannot be blind to
the general posture of the world's affairs. Here, surely, was a chance
of saying something that would be heard from end to end of the earth,
something kingly and great-minded. Here was the occasion for a fine
restatement of the obligations and duties of empire. But from first to
last the prince has said nothing to quicken the imaginations of the
multitude of his future subjects to the gigantic possibilities of these
times, nothing to reassure the foreign observer that the British Empire
embodies anything more than the colossal national egotism and
impenetrable self-satisfaction of the British peoples. "Here we are,"
said the old order in those demonstrations, "and here we mean to stick.
Just as we have been, so we remain. British!--we are Bourbons." These
smiling tours of the Prince of Wales in these years of shortage, stress,
and insecurity, constitute a propaganda of inanity unparalleled in the
world's history.
* * * * *
Nor do we find in the nominal rulers and official representatives of
other countries any clear admission of the necessity for a great and
fundamental change in the scope and spirit of government. These official
and ruling people, more than any other people, are under the sway of
that life of use and wont which dominates us all. They are often
trained to their positions, or they have won their way to their
positions of authority through a career of political activities which
amounts to a training. And that training is not a training in enterprise
and change; it is a training in sticking tight and getting back to
precedent. We can expect nothing from them. We shall be lucky if the
resistance of the administrative side of existing states to the
conception of a world commonweal is merely passive. There is little or
no prospect of any existing governing system, unless it be such a
federal system as Switzerland or the United States, passing directly and
without extensive internal changes into combination with other sovereign
powers as part of a sovereign world system. At some point the
independent states will as systems resist, and unless an overwhelming
world conscience for the world state has been brought into being and
surrounds them with an understanding watchfulness, and invades the
consciences of their supporters and so weakens their resisting power,
they will resist violently and disastrously. But it will be an
incoherent resistance because the very nature of the sovereign states of
to-day is incoherence. There can be no world-wide combination of
sovereign states to resist the world state, because that would be to
create the world state in the attempt to defeat it.
Sec. 4
In the three preceding essays an attempt has been made to state the pass
at which mankind has arrived, the dangers and mischiefs that threaten
our race, and the need there is and the opportunities there are for a
strenuous attempt to end the age-long bickerings of nations and empires
and establish one community of law and effort throughout the whole
world. Stress has been laid chiefly upon the monstrous evils and
disasters a continuation of our present divisions, our nationalisms and
imperialisms and the like, will certainly entail. These considerations
of evil however are only the negative argument for this creative effort;
they have been thrust forward because war, disorder, insufficiency, and
the ill health, the partings, deprivations, boredom and unhappiness that
arise out of these things are well within our experience and entirely
credible; the positive argument for a world order demands at once more
faith and imagination.
Given a world law and world security, a release from the net of
bickering frontiers, world-wide freedom of movement, and world-wide
fellowship, a thousand good things that are now beyond hope or dreaming
would come into the ordinary life. The whole world would be our
habitation, and the energies of men, released from their preoccupation
with contention, would go more and more abundantly into the
accumulation and application of scientific knowledge, that is to say
into the increase of mental and bodily health, of human power, of
interest and happiness. Even to-day the most delightful possibilities
stand waiting, inaccessible to nearly all of us because of the general
insecurity, distrust and anger. Flying, in a world safely united in
peace, could take us now to the ends of the earth smoothly, securely
through the sweet upper air, in five or six days. In two or three years
there could again be abundance of food and pleasant clothing for
everyone throughout the whole world. Men could be destroying their slums
and pestilential habitations and rebuilding spacious and beautiful
cities. Given only peace and confidence and union we could double our
yearly production of all that makes life desirable and still double our
leisure for thought and growth. We could live in a universal palace and
make the whole globe our garden and playground.