China and a freed and reconstructed India and of many other states which
can claim to be of a civilized quality, such as Egypt, gradually winning
their way from a non-participating to a participating level. The
relationship of China to Japan in a developing Association of Nations
will be something rather analogous to the relationship of a Territory to
a State in the Constitution of the United States of America.
Unless there is a strong, well organized collective mentality in a
nation or state, I do not see how there can be anything but a sham
representation of it upon an Association of Nations, nor how it can be
anything but a responsibility and weakness to such an Association.
And outside the system of participating states, and non-participating
states, there are great regions of the earth—tropical Africa is the most
typical case—which must necessarily have a sort of order imposed upon
them from without and for which a joint control by interested associated
nations is probably the best method of government at the present time.
That, I think, is the vision of the political future of mankind that is
opening out before us; a great system of associated states, locked and
interlocked together by fourfold and sixfold and tenfold treaties, open
treaties, of peace and co-operation, ruling jointly the still barbaric
regions of the earth and pledged to respect and to keep and at last to
welcome to their own ranks the now politically enfeebled regions of old
civilization. Such an Association must necessarily supersede the
“empires” of the nineteenth century and put an end forever to the
imperialistic idea. Of such an Association the fourfold treaty may be
the foundation stone. And within the security of such an edifice of
peace mankind will be able to go on to achievements such as we at
present can scarcely imagine.
XXIX
WHAT A STABLY ORGANIZED WORLD PEACE MEANS FOR MANKIND
I have now come to the last paper I shall write about the Washington
Conference. I have tried to give the reader some idea of the nature of
that gathering and a broad view of the issues involved. I have tried to
prevent the sharp discussions of the foreground, the dramatic moments
and eloquent passages, from blinding us to the dark and darkening
background of Old World affairs. I have tried to show that even the
horrors of war are not the whole or the main disaster which results from
human disunion and disorder in the presence of increasing mechanical
power. I have stressed the theme of economic and social dissolution.
Necessarily, I have had to write much of dangers impending and miseries
which gather and increase, and of hates, suspicions and failures to
comprehend. And on the other hand, when one has turned to the
possibilities and methods of escape from the present conflicts and
apprehensions, necessarily one has been very largely in the thin and
unattractive atmosphere of unrealized projects. I have written of the
defects of the League of Nations scheme, its premature explicitness, its
thinly theoretical and imitative forms, its frequent mere camouflage, as
in the mandatory system, of existing wrongs, and I have brought into
contrast with it this newer and I think more natural and hopeful project
of successive Conferences, throwing off Committees, embodying their
results in treaties and Standing Commissions, and growing at last not so
much into a World Parliament, which I perceive more and more clearly is
an improbable dream, as into a living, growing, organic network of World
Government.
But now in conclusion I will ask the reader to turn his mind from this
necessary discussion of political devices and administrative
contrivances, these bleak inventions that may form the ladder of escape
from the divisions and bitterness of the present time, and to join in an
attempt to realize what the world may become if men do struggle through
these tiresome and perplexing problems to a working solution, if our
race really does get from these wearisome yet hopeful wranglings and
dealings to an organized world peace, to a disarmed world, to a steady
reduction of racial and national antipathies and distrusts, to a growing
confidence in the permanence of peace and the prevalence of good will
throughout our planet, to a comprehensive system of world controls of
the common interests of mankind. Suppose that after these present
darknesses of famine and almost universal insecurity, these confused and
often conflicting efforts we are making; suppose that in ten, or twenty,
or thirty years we shall begin to realize that the thing is, after all,
getting done, that we are indeed pushing through, moving towards the
light, that human affairs are on the up-grade again and on new and
greater and safer lines; let us suppose that and then let us ask what
sort of world it will be for our kind that we shall be moving towards?
Let us go back to one fundamental fact in the present break-up in human
affairs. That break-up is not a result of debility; _it is a result of
ill-regulated power_. It is important to bear that in mind.
Disproportionate development of energy and overstrain are the immediate
causes of our present troubles; the scale of modern economic enterprise
has outgrown the little boundaries of the European States; science and
invention have made war so monstrously destructive and disintegrative
that victory is swallowed up in disaster; we are in a world of little
nations wielding world-wide powers to the general destruction. And it
follows that if, after all, we do struggle out of our old-fashioned and
now altogether disastrous rivalries and hatreds before they destroy us,
we shall still have all this science and power, which are things that
seem now to increase by a sort of inner necessity, on our hands. So that
getting through to an organized world peace does not mean simply
avoiding death and destruction and getting back to “as you were.” It
means getting hold of power by the right end instead of the wrong end
and going right ahead. We are not struggling simply to escape, we are
struggling for the opportunity to achieve.
Personally, I do not think I would have bothered to come to Washington
or to interest myself in this peace business, and to work and blunder
and feel incompetent and be worried and distressed here, if it meant
working for just peace, flat, empty, simple peace. I do not see why the
killing of a few score millions of human beings a few years before they
would naturally and ingloriously die, or the smashing up of a lot of
ordinary, rather ugly, rather uncomfortable towns, or, if it comes to
that sort of thing, the complete depopulation of the earth, or the
prospect of being killed myself presently by a bomb or a shot or a
pestilence, should move me to any great exertions. Why bother to
exchange suffering for flatness? The worst, least endurable of miseries
is boredom. One must die somewhere; few deaths are as painful as a
first-class toothache or as depressing as a severe fit of indigestion;
you can suffer more on a comfortable death bed than on a battlefield;
and meanwhile, there is a very good chance of sunshine and snatched
happiness here or there. But what does stir me is my invincible belief
that the life I lead and the human life about me are not anything like
the good thing that could be and might be. I am not so much frightened
and distressed by these wars and national clashes and all the rest of
this silly flag-wagging, bragging, shoving business as bored and
irritated by these things. I have had some vision of what science and
education can do for life and I am haunted by the fine uses that might
be made of men and of our splendid possibilities. I do not think of war
as a tragic necessity but as a blood-stained mess. When I think of my
Europe now, I do not feel like a weakling whose world has been invaded
by stupendous and cruel powers; I feel like a man whose promising garden
has been invaded by hogs. There is the pacificism of love, the
pacificism of pity, the pacificism of commercialism, but also there is
the pacificism of utter contempt. This is not a doomed world we live in
or anything so tragically dignified; it is a world idiotically spoilt.
Do any of us fully realize the promise of that garden, the promise that
can still be rescued from the trampling dullness of old animosities and
rivalries which is wrecking it? Given unity of purpose throughout the
world, given a surcease of mutual thwarting and destruction, do we
realize what science has made possible now and here for mankind?
I shall not indulge in any imaginative anticipations of things still
undiscovered in the scientific realm, I will only suppose that things
already known and tested are systematically used all over the world,
that the good knowledge we have already stored in our laboratories and
libraries is really applied with some thoroughness and with some
community of purpose to the needs and enlargement of life.
And first let us deal with the commoner material aspects of life in
which there have been great changes and improvements in recent times and
in which, therefore, it is easiest to imagine still further betterment,
given only an assuagement of strife and blind struggle and a spreading
out of generosity and the feeling of community from international to
social affairs.
Take transport, that very fundamental social concern. It is ripe for
great advances. There is all the labor needed in the world, all the
skill and knowledge needed, and all the material needed, for these
advances. There is everything needed but peace and the recognition of a
common purpose. At present, there are railways only over a part of the
inhabited world; there are vast areas of Asia and Africa and South
America with no railway nor road communication at all and with enormous
natural resources scarcely tapped, in consequence. Roads are as yet not
nearly so widespread as railways, abundant good roads are founded indeed
only in Western Europe and the better developed regions of the United
States; there are a few good main roads in such countries as India,
South Africa, and so forth. And in many parts of Europe now, and
especially in Russia roads and railways are going out of use. Large
parts of the world are still only to be reached by a specially equipped
expedition; they are as inaccessible to ordinary travelling people as
the other side of the moon. And if you will probe into the reasons why
road and rail transport fails to develop and is even over wide areas
undergoing degradation, you will come in nearly every case upon a
political bar, a national or an imperial rivalry. These are the things
that close half our world to us and may presently close most of the
world to us. And consider even the railroads and roads we have; even
those of America or Britain, how poor and uncomfortable they are in
comparison with what we know they might be.
And then take housing. I have been motoring about a little in Maryland
and Virginia and I am astounded at the many miserable wood houses I see,
hovels rather than houses, the abodes very often of white men. I am
astounded at the wretched fences about the ill-kept patches of
cultivation and by the extreme illiteracy of many of the poorer folk,
white as well as colored, with whom I have had a chance of talking. I
have to remind myself that I am in what is now the greatest, richest,
most powerful country in the world. But with this country now as with
every country, army, navy, contentious service, war debt charges and the
rest of the legacy of past wars consume the national revenue. America is
not spending a tithe of what she ought to be spending upon schools, upon
the maintenance of a housing standard and upon roads and transport. She
improves in all these things, but at no great pace, because of the
disunion of the world and the threat of war. England and France, which
were once far ahead of her in these respects of housing, transport and
popular education, are now on the whole declining, through the excessive
fiscal burthens they are under to pay for the late war and prepare for
fresh ones. But I ask you to think what would happen to a world from
which that burthen of preparedness was lifted. The first result of that
relief would be a diversion of the huge maintenance allowance of the
war-God to just these starved and neglected things.
Stanch that waste throughout the earth, and the saved wealth and energy
will begin at once to flow in the direction of better houses, towards a
steady increase in the order and graciousness of our unkempt and
slovenly countrysides, to making better roads throughout the globe,
until the globe is accessible, and to a huge enrichment and invigoration
of education.
How fair and lovely such countries as France and Germany and Italy might
be today if the dark threat of war that keeps them so gaunt and
poverty-struck could be lifted from them. Think of the abundant and
various loveliness of France and the wit and charm of its varied
peoples, now turned sour by the toil and trouble, the fears and bitter
suspicions the threat of further war holds over them. Think of France,
fearless and at last showing the world what France can do and be. And
Italy at last Italy, and Japan, Japan. Think of the green hills of
Virginia, covered with stately homes and cheerful houses. Think of a
world in which travel is once more free and in which every country in
absolute security has been able to resume its own peace-time development
of its architecture, its music and all its arts in its own atmosphere
upon the foundations of its own past. Because world unity does not mean
uniformity; it means security to be different. It is war that forces all
men into the same khaki and iron-clad moulds.
But all this recovery of the visible idiosyncracies of nations, all this
confident activity and progressive enrichment which will inevitably
ensue upon the diversion of human attention from war and death and
conflict and mutual thwarting to peace and development, will be but the
outer indication of much profounder changes. Relieved of our war
burthens, it will be possible to take hold of education as educationists
have been longing to do for many years.
They tell us now that every one could be educated up to sixteen or
seventeen and that most people may be kept learning and growing mentally
all their lives, that no country in the world has enough schools, or
properly equipped schools, nor enough properly educated teachers in the
schools we have. The supply of university resources is still more
meager. There is hardly anyone alive who has not a sense of things that
he could know but cannot attain and of powers he can never develop. The
number of fully educated and properly nurtured people in the world,
people who can be said to have come reasonably near to realizing their
full birth possibilities, is almost infinitesimal. The rest of mankind
are either physically or mentally stunted, or both. This insolvent,
slovenly old world has begotten them, and starved them. Our lives, in
strength, in realized capacity, in achievement and happiness are perhaps
20% or 30% of what they ought to be. But if only we could sweep aside
these everlasting contentions, these hates and disputes that waste our
earth, and get to work upon this educational proposition as a big
business man gets to work upon a mineral deposit or the development of
an invention, instead of a 20% result we might clamber to an 80% or a
90% result in educated efficiency. I ask you to go through the crowded
streets of a town and note the many under-grown and ill-grown, the
under-sized, the ill-behaved; to note the appeals to childish,
prejudiced and misshapen minds in the shop windows, in the
advertisements, in the newspaper headlines at the street corners, and
then to try and think of what might be there even now in the place of
that street and that crowd.
The wealth and energy were there to make schools and give physical and
mental training to all these people, and they have gone to burst shells
and smash up the work of men, the organizing power has been wasted upon
barren disputes; the science was there and it has been cramped and
misused; even the will was there, but it was not organized to effective
application. And scarcely a man in the crowd who begets a child, or a
woman who bears one, but will dream of its growing to something better
than the thwarted hope it will become.
Have you ever examined an aeroplane or a submarine, and realized the
thousand beautiful adjustments and devices that have produced its
wonderful perfection? Have you ever looked at a street corner loafer and
thought of the ten thousand opportunities that have been cast away of
saving him from what he has become?
When we follow this line of thought, it becomes clear that our first
vision of a world-wide net of fine roads, great steady trains on renewed
and broader tracks, long distance aeroplane flights of the securest
sort, splendid and beautiful towns, a parklike countryside, studded with
delightful homes, was merely the scene and frame for a population of
well-grown, well-trained, fully adult human beings. All the world will
be accessible to them, mountains to climb, deserts to be alone in,
tropics to explore in wonder, beautiful places for rest. And they will
be healthy, and happy in the way that only health makes possible. For
surely it is no news to any one that a score of horrible tints and
diseases that weaken and cripple us, a number of infections, a multitude
of ill-nourished and under-nourished states of body, can be completely
controlled and banished from life, they and all the misery they
entail—given only a common effort, given only human co-operation instead
of discussion. The largest visible material harvest of peace is the
least harvest of peace. The great harvest will be health and human
vigor.
And happiness! Think of the mornings that will some day come, when men
will wake to read in the papers of something better than the great 5–5–3
wrangle, of the starvation and disorder of half the world, of the stupid
sexual crimes and greedy dishonesties committed by the adults with the
undeveloped intelligence of vicious children, of suggestions of horrible
plots and designs against our threadbare security, of the dreary
necessity for “preparedness.” Think of a morning when the newspaper has
mainly _good_ news, of things discovered, of fine things done; think of
the common day of a common citizen in a world where debt is no longer a
universal burthen, where there is constant progress and no
retrogression, where it is the normal thing to walk out of a beautiful
house into a clean and splendid street, to pass and meet happy and
interesting adults instead of aged children obsessed by neglected spites
and jealousies and mean anxieties, to go to some honorable occupation
that helps the world forward to a still greater and finer life. You may
say that a world may be prosperous and men and women healthy and free
and yet there will still be spites and jealousies and all the bitterness
of disputation, but that is no more true than that there will still be
toothache. A mind educated and cared for, quite as well as a body, can
be healed and kept clean and sweet and free from these maddening
humiliations and suppressions that now fester in so many souls. There is
no real necessity about either physical or mental miserableness in human
life. Given, that is, a sufficient release of human energy to bring a
proper care within the reach of all. And consider the quality of
interest in such a world. Think of the mental quality of a world in
which each day the thought and research of a great host of intelligences
turns more and more the opaque and confused riddles of yesteryear into
transparent lucidity. Think of the forces of personal and national
idiosyncracy, of patriotic and racial assertion, seeking and finding
their expression not in vile mutual thwarting and a brutish
destructiveness, but in the distinctive architecture of cities, in the
cultivated and intensified beauty of the countryside, in a hundred forms
of art, in costume and custom. Think of the freedom, the abundance, the
harmonious differences of such a world!
This is not idle prophecy, this is no dream. Such a world is ours
today—if we could but turn the minds of men to realize that it is here
for the having. These things can be done, this finer world is within
reach. I can write that as confidently today as I wrote in 1900 that men
could fly. But whether we are to stop this foolery of international
struggle, this moral and mental childishness of patriotic aggressions,
this continual bloodshed and squalor, and start out for a world of adult
sanity in ten years, or in twenty years, or a hundred years, or never,
is more than I can say. In Washington, I have met and seen hopes that
seemed invincible, and stupidities and habits and prejudices that seemed
insurmountable; I have lived for six weeks in a tangled conflict of
great phrases, mean ends, inspiration, illogicality, forgetfulness,
flashes of greatness and flashes of grossness. I am no moral accountant
to cast a balance and estimate a date. My moods have fluctuated between
hope and despair.
But I know that I believe so firmly in this great World at Peace that
lies so close to our own, ready to come into being as our wills turn
towards it, that I must needs go about this present world of disorder
and darkness like an exile doing such feeble things as I can towards the
world of my desire, now hopefully, now bitterly, as the moods may
happen, until I die.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
¶ Mr. WELLS has also written the following novels:
LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM
KIPPS
MR. POLLY
THE WHEELS OF CHANCE
THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
ANN VERONICA
TONO BUNGAY
MARRIAGE
BEALBY
THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMON
THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH
THE SOUL OF A BISHOP
JOAN AND PETER
THE UNDYING FIRE
¶ The following fantastic and imaginative romances:
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
THE TIME MACHINE
THE WONDERFUL VISIT
THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU
THE SEA LADY
THE SLEEPER AWAKES
THE FOOD OF THE GODS
THE WAR IN THE AIR
THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET
THE WORLD SET FREE
And numerous Short Stories now collected in One Volume under the
title of
THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
¶ A Series of books on Social, Religious, and Political questions:
ANTICIPATIONS (1900)
MANKIND IN THE MAKING
FIRST AND LAST THINGS
NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
A MODERN UTOPIA
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD
WHAT IS COMING?
WAR AND THE FUTURE
IN THE FOURTH YEAR
GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
¶ And two little books about children’s play, called:
FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Added table of Contents.
2. Moved ads from before the title page to the end.
3. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
4. Retained anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as
printed.
5. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.