A YEAR OF PROPHESYING
_MR. WELLS has also written the following novels_:
THE WHEELS OF CHANCE.
LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM.
KIPPS.
TONO-BUNGAY.
ANN VERONICA.
MR. POLLY.
THE NEW MACHIAVELLI.
MARRIAGE.
THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS.
THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN.
BEALBY.
THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT.
MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH.
THE SOUL OF A BISHOP.
JOAN AND PETER.
THE UNDYING FIRE.
THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART.
SARGON, KING OF KINGS. (CHRISTINA ALBERTA’S FATHER.)
_The following fantastic and imaginative romances_:
THE TIME MACHINE.
THE WONDERFUL VISIT.
THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU.
THE INVISIBLE MAN.
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS.
THE SLEEPER AWAKES.
THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON.
THE SEA LADY.
THE FOOD OF THE GODS.
IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET.
THE WAR IN THE AIR.
THE WORLD SET FREE.
MEN LIKE GODS.
THE DREAM.
_Numerous short stories collected under the following titles_:
THE STOLEN BACILLUS.
THE PLATTNER STORY.
TALES OF SPACE AND TIME.
TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM.
_A series of books on social, religious, and political questions_:
ANTICIPATIONS (1900).
A MODERN UTOPIA.
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA.
NEW WORLDS FOR OLD.
FIRST AND LAST THINGS.
GOD THE INVISIBLE KING.
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY.
RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS.
THE SALVAGING OF CIVILISATION.
WASHINGTON AND THE HOPE OF PEACE.
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD.
THE STORY OF A GREAT SCHOOLMASTER.
_And two little books about children’s play, called_:
FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS.
The uniform Atlantic Edition of Mr. Wells’ works (limited in America to
eight hundred sets) is published by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
A YEAR
OF PROPHESYING
BY
H. G. WELLS
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1925
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1925,
BY H. G. WELLS.
Set up and printed.
Published January, 1925.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FOREWORD
This book consists of a year of journalistic writing, fifty-five
articles altogether, and all that ought to be said in the preface will
be found in the concluding article.
H. G. W.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS AND THE FEDERATION OF MANKIND 3
II. THE BEAUTY OF FLYING 10
III. THE TRIUMPH OF FRANCE 15
IV. THE SINGAPORE ARSENAL 21
V. THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS AGAIN 27
VI. THE AVIATION OF THE HALF-CIVILISED 34
VII. WILL GERMANY BREAK INTO PIECES? 41
VIII. THE FUTURE OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE 47
IX. WINSTON 63
X. THE OTHER SIDE IN FRANCE 69
XI. THE LAST OF THE VICTORIANS 75
XII. POLITICS AS A PUBLIC NUISANCE 81
XIII. THE RE-EMERGENCE OF MR. LLOYD GEORGE 87
XIV. SPAIN AND ITALY WHISPER TOGETHER 93
XV. LATIN AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE 99
XVI. COSMOPOLITAN AND INTERNATIONAL 105
XVII. THE PARLIAMENTARY TRIANGLE 111
XVIII. MODERN GOVERNMENT: PARLIAMENT AND REAL ELECTORAL REFORM 117
XIX. SCRAPPING THE GOLD STANDARD 123
XX. THE HUB OF EUROPE: CZECHO-SLOVAKIA AND FRANCE 130
XXI. THE MANDARINS AT THE GATE: THE REVIVAL OF THE OLD LEARNING 136
XXII. LENIN: PRIVATE CAPITALISM AGAINST COMMUNISM 142
XXIII. THE FANTASIES OF MR. BELLOC AND THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD 148
XXIV. A CREATIVE EDUCATIONAL SCHEME FOR BRITAIN: A TENTATIVE
FORECAST 156
XXV. PORTUGAL AND PROSPERITY: THE BLESSEDNESS OF BEING A LITTLE
NATION 164
XXVI. RECONSTRUCTION OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS: THE PRACTICAL
PROBLEM 170
XXVII. THE LABOUR PARTY ON TRIAL: THE FOLLY OF THE FIVE CRUISERS 177
XXVIII. DICTATORS OR POLITICIANS? THE DILEMMA OF CIVILISATION 184
XXIX. YOUTH AND THE VOTE: THE REJUVENESCENCE OF THE WORLD 190
XXX. OLIVE BRANCHES OF STEEL: SHOULD THE ANGELS OF PEACE CARRY
BOMBS? 197
XXXI. THE CASE OF UNAMUNO: THE FEEBLE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS 204
XXXII. AN OPEN LETTER TO ANATOLE FRANCE ON HIS EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY 210
XXXIII. THE EUROPEAN KALEIDOSCOPE: THE GERMAN WILL IN DEFAULT 214
XXXIV. CHINA: THE LAND OUT OF THE LIMELIGHT 220
XXXV. AIR ARMAMENT: THE SUPREMACY OF QUALITY 226
XXXVI. LABOUR POLITICIANS: THE EVAPORATION OF THE INTELLIGENZIA 232
XXXVII. CONSTRUCTIVE IDEAS AND THEIR RELATION TO CURRENT POLITICS 239
XXXVIII. THE WEMBLEY EMPIRE: AN EXHIBITION OF LOST OPPORTUNITIES 245
XXXIX. THE EXTINCTION OF PARTY GOVERNMENT 251
XL. THE SERFDOM OF IGNORANCE: THE RIGHT OF WOMEN TO KNOWLEDGE 257
XLI. BLINKERS FOR FREE YOUTH: YOUNG AMERICA ASKS TO HEAR AND SEE 262
XLII. THE LAWLESSNESS OF AMERICA AND THE WAY TO ORDER 268
XLIII. THE SHABBY SCHOOLS OF THE PIOUS: DRAINS AND THE ODOUR OF
SANCTITY 273
XLIV. THE INCOMPATIBILITY IN INDIA: DIVORCE OR LEGAL SEPARATION 278
XLV. THE SPIRIT OF FASCISM: IS THERE ANY GOOD IN IT AT ALL? 285
XLVI. THE RACE CONFLICT: IS IT UNAVOIDABLE? 291
XLVII. THE SCHOOLS OF A NEW AGE: A FORECAST 298
XLVIII. THE IMPUDENCE OF FLAGS: OUR POWER RESOURCES AND MY ELEPHANTS,
WHALES, AND GORILLAS 303
XLIX. HAS COMMUNISM A FUTURE? THE POSSIBILITY OF A SOCIALIST
RENASCENCE 310
L. THE LITTLE HOUSE: AS IT WAS, IS NOW, AND APPARENTLY EVER WILL
BE 317
LI. THE TRIVIALITY OF DEMOCRACY AND THE FEMININE INFLUENCE IN
POLITICS 323
LII. SEX ANTAGONISM: AN UNAVOIDABLE AND INCREASING FACTOR IN MODERN
LIFE 329
LIII. LIVING THROUGH: THE TRUTH ABOUT AN INTERVIEW 334
LIV. THE CREATIVE PASSION 341
LV. AFTER A YEAR OF JOURNALISM: AN OUTBREAK OF AUTO-OBITUARY 347
A YEAR OF PROPHESYING
I
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS AND THE FEDERATION OF MANKIND
22.9.23
I am one of those people who believe that if human affairs are to go on
without decay and catastrophe, there must be an end to the organisation
of war. I believe that the power to prepare for war and make war must
be withdrawn from separate States, as already it has been withdrawn
from separate cities and from districts and from private individuals,
and that ultimately there must be a Confederation of all mankind to
keep one peace throughout the world.
The United States of America is but the first instance of a federating
process which will, I believe, extend at last to the whole world.
Since 1917 I have given much more of my waking life to that vision of
a confederated mankind than I have given to any other single interest
or subject. And yet I am not a supporter of the League of Nations in
its present form, and I do not think that the League of Nations at
Geneva is ever likely to develop into an effective World Confederation.
It is much more likely to develop into a serious obstacle to such a
Confederation. The sooner now that it is scrapped and broken up the
better, I think, for mankind. I am hostile to the present League of
Nations _because_ I desire the Confederation of Mankind.
I do not think that the obstructive possibilities of the existing
League of Nations are sufficiently understood by liberal-minded people
throughout the world. I do not think they realise how effectively it
may be used as a consumer and waster of the creative energy that would
otherwise carry us forward toward World Confederation.
The League of Nations that we saw in our visions in those distressful
and yet creative years, 1917-18, was to have been a real step forward
in human affairs. It was to have been a repetition on a gigantic scale
of that magnificent turning-point in the history of America when it
was decided that the conferring representatives of the liberated
colonies should talk no longer of the people of Virginia, the people
of Georgia, and the people of Massachusetts, but instead of the people
of the United States. So in a wider stride we were to begin to forget
the particular interests of the people of Germany and of the people of
France and of the people of England in a new realisation of the common
needs and dangers and sacrifices of the people of the world. So we
hoped. So we still try to hope.
But that was far too wide a stride for humanity to take all at once.
The League we desired was to have been the first loose conference that
would have ended in a federal government for the whole earth. It was
to have controlled war establishments from the start, constricted or
abolished all private armament firms, created and maintained a world
standard of currency, of labour legislation, of health and education,
watched the world production of staple articles for the common good,
restricted malignant tariff hostilities, negotiated and regulated the
migrations of populations, and made the ways of the world, the high
seas, and the international land routes alike open and safe for all
decent men. So we saw it as a new, brave assertion of human sanity and
of the right of all men to a certain fullness of life, against old
hates, old prejudices, old debts and claims and limitations.
And there seemed to some of us to be sufficient will in the world then
for so bold and great a beginning. I wonder--empty speculation though
it is now--if we were indeed so wrong in thinking that--if some man or
group of men of supreme genius might not have achieved a real world
peace even in 1919. All over the world there were millions of people,
prepared by immense sufferings and fears for so drastic a change. There
were great masses of people everywhere mentally ready for that League.
For many months President Wilson, simply because he had said “League
of Nations” plainly and clearly, was the greatest man on earth. He
overshadowed Kings and Emperors.
Most of us can still recall that false dawn, that phase of hope. When
the first great gathering to inaugurate the English League of Nations
Union met in Westminster, people were turned away from the dangerously
packed hall, not by the hundred but by the thousand. But it is easier
to assemble crowds of enthusiastic people than to give them faithful
leaders and capable Ministers. The First Crusade might have taught
us that. The new movement had no leaders worth considering, and into
the vacuum poured all the eager stuff of the old order. I remember
how my heart sank that day when I saw the brightest bishops and the
best-advertised Nonconformist leaders, politicians needing a new line
of goods, the rising Bar and the social collectors, Mrs. Asquith and
her set, all the much-photographed and the much-talked-about, swarming
up upon the Westminster platform, pushing well into the limelight,
nodding and gesticulating to each other, as gay as if they were at a
fashionable wedding, before dear Lord Grey, that dignified image of
British statesmanship, read out the platitudes he had prepared for the
occasion. The common folk of the earth might want a new organisation
of peace in the world, but these people of all people I realised would
never give it them.
Things come not so swiftly to suffering mankind. The order has indeed
gone forth, men know their need, but the master artisan that will
fulfil it has still to learn his business and make his tools. Perhaps
he has still to be born. And, meanwhile, in the light of this false
dawn, a League of Nations, that hardly pretended even to look like
what we desired, was planned in Paris hurriedly and cheaply, and run
up at Geneva. It has provided a job for Sir Eric Drummond, a British
Foreign Office official unknown to the generality of mankind, and Lord
Robert Cecil, hitherto prominent chiefly as the inveterate enemy of
unsectarian education in England, secured political resuscitation as
its leading advocate. With the permission of France and Great Britain
this League has negotiated one or two minor settlements that were
not too deeply entangled in the policy of these Great Powers, and it
has afforded a number of Spanish-American politicians agreeable, if
expensive, holidays in Europe. And whenever one wants to talk of the
Confederation of Mankind now, it gets in the way.
We had thought that the League of Nations would abolish diplomacy. We
found it had merely added another piece, and a very ineffective piece
at that, to the already crowded diplomatic game upon the European board.
That great Confederation of Mankind that we desire, that great peace
with variety round and about the earth, cannot arise out of such a
beginning. This League of Nations at Geneva is not even the germ of
such a thing. Rather it is the instinctive effort of the old European
order to stifle this creative idea on its birth by encysting it in
a tradition of futility and diplomatic methods. The way to human
confederation is by a longer route, and the end is not to be attained
by any such hasty constitution as that of the League. The Confederation
of Man is a task for generations. Tens of thousands of leaderly men
and women must serve that idea and live and die for it before it
can approach realisation. Millions must respond to the service of
their leadership. The idea must become the fundamental political
idea of hundreds of millions, ousting kings and flags from men’s
imaginations. Then we can begin to get together an effective ruling
body. A stupendous task, you say, but not an impossible one. A day
will come, I believe, when this great dream will be realised, when all
the paraphernalia of war or of national sovereignty--it is the same
thing--will have followed the stone gods and human sacrifices to limbo,
and when a new phase of human experience will begin.
So far there has been no real civilisation of the world; civilisation
is still only an occasional incident, a passing gleam of promise in
the lives of a handful of people here and there. But civilisation will
come at last for all. It is about that coming of a world confederation
and of the world civilisation it will make possible, that I shall be
writing chiefly in this series of weekly articles. Now and then I
shall diverge to other topics, but that will be my main theme, the
realisation of civilisation. I shall consider scientific progress,
educational and social work, political happenings, and the general
trend of current events, and almost always I shall consider them in
direct relation to that new age that lies before mankind. I shall write
about the signs of the times and about typical men and women just as
they seem to be making or marring these creative hopes. I do not expect
my readers to agree with me always. I shall write about contentious
things, and my last thought will be of pleasing or propitiating. At
times I shall certainly irritate. But I hope to interest. And some few
of my younger readers, at least, I hope to infect with that same idea
of creative service for the new civilisation which possesses my own
life.
II
THE BEAUTY OF FLYING
29.9.23
This last summer I had a number of aeroplane journeys about Europe. I
had flights in several of the big omnibus aeroplanes that fly on the
more or less regular European services, and also I flew as the single
passenger in smaller open machines. There is a delight and wonder in
the latter sort of flying altogether lost in the boxed-in aeroplane.
International jealousies, commercial rivalries, and the meanness
of outlook universally prevalent in Europe at the present time are
muddling away most of the possible freedom and happiness of air travel.
I flew from London to Amsterdam, but I had to get my money back for the
rest of the journey to Berlin, and take a night train, because of some
hitch in the German arrangements, and similarly the Franco-Rumanian
service from Vienna via Prague and Strassburg to Paris, so triumphantly
inaugurated a little while ago, was in a state of dislocation, and
I had to make that journey round by way of Holland to avoid the
inconveniences and delays due to the fooleries of French “policy” upon
the Rhine. But I flew, when there was a machine to fly in and no
patriotic idiocy to prevent it, and I have renewed and strengthened
my sense of the sweetness and beauty of air travel--in the small open
machine.
As I hung in the crystalline air above the mountains of Slovakia, far
above the wooded hills and deep green gorges, with the culminating
masses of the Little Carpathians heaped up to the right of me and
the line of the White Carpathians away to the left, and ahead of me,
still dim and distant, the striped fields and villages of the plain of
Bratislava; and as I turned about and looked at the blue Moravian lands
behind me, with every stream and pool picked out in molten silver by
the afternoon sun, I was as near the summit of felicity as I have been
in all my very pleasant life. Ever and again we overtook some little
puff of cloud. There were little troops of bright white cloudlets that
raced with us eastward, swift and noiseless; their shadows raced our
own little shadow up the slopes and across the forest crests below, and
their whiteness and their transitory cool embrace as we passed through
them, enhanced by contrast the sunlit clearness and brightness of the
outspread world.
For the first part of my flight that day I was accompanied by three
other Czech machines. They were fighting aeroplanes. They came up
abreast of me in the liquid air, and their aviators signalled to me,
and then, suddenly, they dived and swept over in a loop and fell down
like dead leaves for a thousand feet or so and righted themselves and
flew home again to Prague. I have seen such manœuvres before from the
ground, but they are far more graceful and lovely when one floats above
them and watches the aeroplane drop down like a falling kite, almost,
it seems, to the spires and tree-tops.
At last we began to descend, and circled down to Nitra, a place I had
never heard of before, a wonderfully beautiful and, I should think, a
very prosperous town, with a great church and many spires, and from the
aerodrome at Nitra I started again two days later to return to Prague.
The weather was unsettled, and the most hopeful time for flying was the
early morning. I left Topolcany, where I had been staying, at dawn,
therefore, with a full moon shining brightly in a rain-washed sky, and
after a little misadventure and a cut head in a ditch, for automobiles
are much less safe than aeroplanes, and the roads that morning were wet
mire, reached Nitra at sunrise and rose with the red blaze of the sun
above the hills.
Sun and aeroplane seemed to soar up together. Never before had I been
up in the air so early in the morning. All the little trees below were
blobs and dots, but they cast shadows hundreds of feet long, and in
the deep blue nooks and crannies of the gold-lit hills the white mists
huddled.
The wind rose against us as we returned and blew a gale. We took four
hours to make a journey that the other way, before the wind, had taken
little more than two. Between Brunn and Prague the aeroplane swayed
and danced like a kite on its string, and ever and again found an air
pocket and dropped a few score feet. But though I am but a moderate
sailor, I do not get air-sick; and to sit loose and lax and unafraid,
strapped into an open aeroplane, drenched in sweet air, is altogether
different from being enclosed in an air omnibus. I had rather be four
hours in an open aeroplane in a high wind than two in an automobile on
a bad road or one in a Channel steamboat on a rough day.
Those two flights in Slovakia are among the very happiest experiences I
have ever had in my life. And it irks me to think that, because of the
incoherent muddle of human affairs, things go so slowly that I shall
probably never be able to go round the world in the same delightful
fashion, and fly over the deserts of Arabia and the plains of India,
and down the gorges of the Yang-tse-Kiang. All these things I might do
in a saner world. The places exist, the discoveries have been made, but
a magic net of rivalries, obstructions, and vile preoccupations, delays
the consummation of these bright possibilities. A happier generation
will have all these pleasures within its reach. Such an aeroplane as
the one I flew in need not cost more than a Ford car, even now, and it
is almost as easy to fly as it is to drive an automobile.
But, of course, all such things must wait, and civilisation must wait,
until M. Poincaré has collected the claims of France upon Germany or
smashed up Europe. It is so much more important, you understand, to
collect these legendary, impossible debts, that one little scrap of
Europe has figured up against another little scrap of Europe, than
to get on with living. The Germans must not be allowed to develop
their air services; that would never do for the politicians; and,
indeed, every European country must do all it can to restrain the air
development of every other country. We must all get in each other’s
way; that is the “common sense” of national “policy.” Why else are
we all boxed up in little separate sovereign States? And so you and
I, Dear Reader, will never get more than such brief samples and
intimations of the happiness we might have in the air, and most people
now alive in the world will never get to flying at all. They will die
and never know. They will grub along the earth’s surface and die with
this great delight almost within their reach, taunting them by its
humming passage across their sky.
III
THE TRIUMPH OF FRANCE
6.10.23
The long-spun-out passive resistance in the Ruhr is over, and the
controlled, instructed, and disciplined French Press, and the more than
French Press which serves the national interests of France in Great
Britain and Holland and other European countries, is cock-a-hoop with
the clamour of this empty victory. Let us consider what it means for
civilisation and the world at large.
Men’s memories are short, and it may be well to remind them of the
broad facts that have led up to this outrageous, pitiful struggle of
the Ruhr. In November 1918 the German people, after an unexampled
struggle of four years, surrendered to the Allied Powers arrayed
against them. They surrendered on the promises held out to them by the
Fourteen Points of President Wilson and by the British propaganda of
Crewe House. They surrendered, and they were disarmed and placed in a
position in which it was impossible for them to resume resistance. The
Americans and British, at any rate, were bound in honour to see that
the virtual pact of the surrender was observed, and they did not do
so. A peace was put over the German peoples having no relation to the
clear understanding of the virtual pact of the surrender, and the bill
for damages and reparations was figured up against them utterly beyond
their capacity to pay. The Germans signed the Peace Treaty only after
the most strenuous protests and because they were then powerless to do
anything else. The Treaty was not a bargain to which they agreed, it
was a monstrous and impossible obligation rammed down their throats.
There can be only two judgments about this over-charge. Either it
was made out of sheer ignorance and levity, or it was made with the
deliberate intention of keeping Germany henceforth in arrears and in
the wrong, so that at any sign of economic or political revival she
could be at once claimed against and stricken down again. Possibly
ignorance and levity mingled with foreseeing malignity in the counsels
at Versailles. But the temptations created by the situation have proved
irresistible. Throughout the years immediately following this Treaty
France has never faltered from her conception that the new peace was
only the continuation and completion of her ages-long feud against
Germany. She has been quietly and steadfastly strangling Germany
in the name of her debt. At Washington she refused to discuss the
question of land disarmament--some of us can still recall M. Briand’s
preposterous speech about the concealed arms and hidden armies of
Germany--and across the amiable, foolish face of the Geneva League of
Nations she has woven a net of armed alliances, heaping guns and dull
and overwhelming expense upon the insolvent peasant States of Eastern
Europe, and dissipating the money she owes to Britain and America upon
fresh military adventures. She is now indisputably in military control
of Europe. Great Britain has displayed no such fixity of intention
as France, and, particularly since the downfall of Mr. Lloyd George,
has just rolled about in an uneasy, protesting manner. America has
withdrawn in a state of virtuous indignation from the mess she helped
so carelessly and generously to make.
Until the spring of this year Germany continued to make very
considerable but insufficient payments to her conquerors. There seemed,
indeed, a possibility that she might presently muddle back to a
tolerable and honourable position in European affairs. France perceived
that the hour had come for effective action; and Mr. Lloyd George being
by that time out of her way, she occupied the Ruhr, the industrial
heart of Germany. She occupied it without the consent of her Allies,
and so illegally; and with an utter disregard of the interests of
Britain, who came to her rescue when she was faint with terror in 1914.
She occupied it with every circumstance of petty insolence. Most of us
have seen photographs and kinema films of the French troops strutting
through the disarmed, defenceless German towns, and the French officers
hitting off the hats and smacking the faces of any bystanders who did
not display sufficient reverence for their intrusive flag.
I cannot imagine what black murder would not spring up in the hearts of
an American or British population treated as the Germans were treated
this spring. The behaviour of the Germans has indeed been amazingly
patient. The rest of Germany has wrecked itself financially in a
desperate attempt to sustain the Ruhr workers in an attitude of passive
resistance, and now at last these overwhelming payments have to cease.
For the better part of a year the trade and industry of Central Europe
has been dislocated. A year of human life and human production has
been frittered away in this struggle. The great economic machine of
Western Germany is now like some complex piece of apparatus that has
been fought for by infuriated children. How deep the physical and moral
wounds inflicted on the war-exhausted, depleted being of Germany may be
we can as yet only speculate.
But France has achieved a great victory in this new war, for war
it is, against an unarmed antagonist. She is victorious, and the
tricolour triumphs over Europe. The passive resistance of the Ruhr
has been abandoned and the German Government has been unable to get
any conditions from France in exchange for this surrender. The debt
looms as large as ever, the possibility of effective payments is
much remoter than it has been before, and France is in a stronger
position argumentatively than she has even been. She can still go on
counting her steadily accumulating claim. She can proceed, whenever she
wishes to do so, to fresh seizures, further occupations, and further
humiliations for her defeated enemy. There is no boundary set, by
anything that has happened, to the systematic disintegration of the
great civilisation of Germany. Germans may be found vile enough and
foolish enough to assist in the political fragmentation of their own
people. Presently we may see Germany broken up into half a dozen nasty
little retrogressive States, all played off against each other to their
mutual enfeeblement by France.
Then, except for an ambiguous Italy, there will be nothing left upon
the Continent of Europe but a victorious France and her smashed and
broken antagonists and her servile and uncertain allied peasant
States, Europe Balkanised from the Rhine to the Black Sea. It will be
a realisation of the great dreams of Napoleon I, a hundred and twenty
years later. True, Russia will loom rather dark and rather neglected in
the background of the French millennium, but the French think that from
a military or political point of view Russia is to be counted out for
the next fifty years. And, as the happy achievement of “security” in
Europe becomes more certain, France will be able to turn her attention
to her old rival and temporary ally across the Channel. French ideas of
trade and economics have always been nationalist and monopolistic, and
at last she will be in a position to apply to Britain with real effect
that system of exclusion from the markets of Europe, the Continental
system, which failed when Napoleon I first devised and tried it a
century or more ago. Moreover, she will be at last able to reopen the
discussion of the proper ownership of the vast natural resources of
Central Africa, at present largely shared by the British. The victory
of the Ruhr is a considerable victory, a great hungry victory, but it
is only one in a sustained campaign in the realisation of a policy
centuries old, the policy of French predominance in the European world.
France has had revolutions and reverses, but her nationalism is the
intensest of all nationalism, and her conception of international
policy has been the same under Bourbon, Bonaparte, or Republic. She
seems to be incapable of any such ideas as co-operation, coalescence,
union, pooling, reconciliation, reconstruction on a broader basis,
brotherhood of nations or the like. There is no stopping her. She will
thrust her fluttering tricolour, her brave little men in horizon blue
and steel helmets, her intrigues and her claims, farther and farther
over a suffering, disorganised world--until she becomes by common
consent impossible.
The Ruhr is a great victory for France, and it has won her nothing.
What next will she do after the Ruhr?
IV
THE SINGAPORE ARSENAL
13.10.23
It is proposed that Great Britain, which is too shabbily poor to give
the mass of its own children more than half an elementary education,
which cannot house its workers with comfort or decency, which has over
a million unemployed, shall spend great sums of money upon a naval
establishment at Singapore. This undertaking is just not within the
positive prohibitions of the Washington Agreement. It is a few hundred
miles west of the area involved in that Agreement. But it is flatly
contrary to the spirit of the Washington gathering. It is a frank
provocation to crippled and devastated Japan; it dominates the route
of the French to Tonkin; it is a contemptuous gesture at any American
notions about the “freedom of the seas.”
Provided cruisers and battleships are to play a part in the “next
war,” it is an admirably chosen position. Let the reader look it up
in any atlas and see how its submarines will be able to radiate over
the adjacent seas and how all India supports it. It is fairly well
placed for air war also. On the supposition that the world is still
to go on divided among aggressive sovereign States, with phases of war
preparation called peace and acute phases of more and more destructive
war, it is quite a good move in the game. On the supposition that the
world is growing up to any age of reason and that a world civilisation
is attainable, it is a monstrously stupid crime.
When I was at the Washington Conference upon the Limitation of
Armaments I denounced the French with what many people thought was an
extreme bitterness for their reliance upon submarines and Senegalese
troops. This British feat at Singapore deserves an equal denunciation.
These preparations of the French and British are equally acts of war
against the general peace of mankind. It is no good treating the French
as though they alone were outraging the unity of mankind with their
great armies and equipments. Great Britain, we now see by this crime
at Singapore, is just as mischievously and criminally disposed. Both
Powers are disturbers of the peace and destroyers of human hope.
But when the thing is done by one’s own country and by people we know,
one sees more of it and more of the humanity of it than when it happens
abroad; and I find a particular figure floating before my mind now
whenever I hear or read the word Singapore. He will serve as my type
specimen for this aggressive and troublesome British imperialism,
and very probably the essential wickedness of French policy finds its
embodiment in some quite similar personalities.
In which case we are not up against wickedness, but against--what shall
I say?--a retardation of mental development.
My type specimen is the First Lord of the Admiralty in the present[1]
British Government, Mr. Amery. He is a pleasantly smiling, short,
thick-set lad of fifteen. He was born in 1873, but in 1889, when he
should have become sixteen, he was living the life of an exceptionally
clever boy at Harrow, and somehow just became fifteen again, and
he has remained fifteen ever since. Every year his birthday comes
round without the slightest effect upon him. He may be a little
more substantial, but his bland, clean-shaven face is the same that
confronted the Harrow masters. He has just the same smile. He went on
to a brilliant career at Balliol College, Oxford, always famous for
its retardation of adolescence, and emerged a devotee of the British
Empire and of the games of Foreign Policy and War. Kipling was new to
men then, and that generation was drunken with him. Cecil Rhodes was a
great inspiration in the land. He could not have preached salvation by
Anglo-Saxons more earnestly if he had been Mr. Lothrop Stoddard. Mr.
Amery, under these influences and by a natural inclination, dedicated
his life to the British Empire, any British Empire apparently and
whatever it did, and he has been so busy serving it ever since that he
has never had time to think what it is at all.
[1] October 1923.
He is one of a group of interesting youths of fifteen who focussed upon
Balliol College. But most of the others have become portly or bald, or
they have grown whiskers or such-like disguises; none of them still
show their fifteen-ness as engagingly as Mr. Amery.
Now the mind of a boy of fifteen is a very interesting sort of mind.
Imagination is awake and lively, but it is still a narrow imagination.
Many of the emotions and social devotions are still undeveloped. A boy
of fifteen is still capable of making a volcano in the garden with all
the available explosives; he likes mixing chemicals to see what will
happen; he thinks the loveliest possession in the world is a gun. If
you give him a toy railway system he will take great pains to arrange
for a really smashing collision. Towards women he is a Spartan--a Red
Indian. Something of fifteen still lingers in my own composition,
though most of me is a little older, and before the war I used to
play a great war-game on my barn floor with lead soldiers, realistic
scenery and guns that hit, with other boys, actually and sometimes even
chronologically fifteen. Unflinching fellows those lead soldiers were;
they left no widows and orphans, and if one got disabled there was no
pension. You melted him down.
Now both Mr. Amery and I would like to play soldiers with the world.
But while Mr. Amery has remained fifteen through and through, large
parts of me have gone on growing older. This older section of me can
see men as something more than lead soldiers, and realise war in terms
of spilled human life and utter waste and as a stupid massacre of boys
and young men. Even that war-game we used to play in our barn left
the floor in a weary-looking muddle, and was a bore to put away. But
the highest expression of Mr. Amery’s being is, I perceive, to play
soldiers and battleships with mankind.
And the amazing thing is that we let him!
We are disposed to let this man with the soul of a fifteen-year-old kid
spend money for which our schools are being starved, upon this solemn
childishness at Singapore. And there may be thousands of us doomed to
wounds and blood and tears under the plump hands and knees of Mr. Amery
and his little friends and their antagonists as they crawl about their
game on the floor of the world.
But if I can see Mr. Amery, not as a black devotee of blood-lust but
as an innocent perennial juvenile, then I am bound if I can to see the
same thing in France. Those people over there who are opening new boxes
of African soldiers and setting them down in Germany, and who are so
secret and busy with their submarines, are probably just such innocents
as Mr. Amery--just as solemnly fifteen. They have not yet learnt to see
the world in terms of life. And, if so, the cure for war is not so
much for the world to grow better as for the world to grow up.
Mr. Amery is not a bit terrible personally, but it is terrible that
he should have any sort of control of the serious things of life. I
think he ought to be kept out of mischief--just as I think another
lad of the same age, Mr. Winston Churchill, ought to be kept out of
mischief, in some sort of institution where he can play Kriegspiel
for the rest of his existence without endangering human life. And I
ask reasonable adult men in France whether the time is not ripe for
a similar segregation of puerility from their Foreign Office and War
Office out of the reach of mischief. Perhaps the 1924 electors will
do something in that direction. If these lads presently get a game of
war going between France and England we shall have the whole fabric of
civilisation so entirely in ruins before it is over that I doubt if it
will be reconstructed for many centuries.
V
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS AGAIN
20.10.23
I opened this series of articles with an attack on the existing
League of Nations at Geneva. This attack provoked a very considerable
correspondence in reply. Hardly anyone was disposed to defend the
League as perfect or satisfactory, but it was urged that it was a
beginning, a germ, a young thing that might accumulate power and
prestige, that its intentions were admirable, that it embodied
and sustained an ideal, and that if it were destroyed there would
be nothing to stand between the nations at all. I was reproached
because--after an advocacy of world unity for a quarter of a century--I
refused to recognise this poor diplomatic changeling as the birth of my
desires.
It is perhaps desirable that I should answer these criticisms and state
a little more explicitly why I think this affair at Geneva is worse
than no league of mankind at all. I do not think it can ever develop
into a serviceable organ for world civilisation, because I think that
it was planned from the outset upon the wrong lines; and that it is
as reasonable to support it in the hope of its growing to meet the
world’s needs as it would be to buy a broken-down perambulator in the
hope that it would presently develop into a much needed automobile.
The Geneva League of Nations is a start, I admit, but it is a start
in the wrong direction; and before we can get upon the way to any
real collective organisation of world affairs we have to retrace our
steps to the starting-point before there was any League. The League is
malformed in such a way that it can never hope to grow straight and
strong.
One primary fault in the structure of this existing League is its
complete abandonment to the idea of national sovereignty in its
intensest and most mischievous form. Any little bundle of human beings,
however small, illiterate, and unimportant, provided only that it was a
law unto itself and waved a flag about and insisted upon a cantankerous
independence, was regarded as a possible unit by the pedants who
devised the League. Any body of people, however numerous, intelligent,
and significant in human affairs, provided it had grouped itself into
any other larger political aggregation, ceased, on the other hand,
to be anything but a merged participator in the League’s affairs. So
Abyssinia, in which there are probably not two hundred people capable
of understanding the rudiments of world politics, could be considered
seriously as a member of this absurd association, while Scotland,
the best educated country in Europe, was not to appear except as a
button or collar-stud, so to speak, upon the figure of the British
representative.
The manifest consequences of such a preposterous recognition of
separatism, the inevitable feebleness and disingenuousness of a
League based upon such ideas, were pointed out as early as May 1918
in a memorandum issued by the official propaganda organisation of
the British Government at Crewe House. Crewe House was rather a
thorn in the side of the dear old British Foreign Office; in 1918
it was asking for a definition of Allied war aims and all sorts of
inconvenient, honest questions. The memorandum was treated according to
the best diplomatic precedents. Although we were making it the basis
of extravagant promises to Germany, it was never communicated, as it
should have been, to the French and Italians. At the end of the war
the promises of Crewe House dropped out of the victorious picture. The
reasoning and the warnings of this memorandum were entirely ignored by
the hasty gentlemen at Versailles who threw together the Geneva League
of Nations.
These gentlemen seem to have been profoundly influenced by an infantile
analogy between a sovereign State and an individual man. This is the
age of democracy; and the League, most marvellous formula! was “to
make the world safe for democracy.” Modern democracy is taken to mean
so much political equality between adult and adult as may be achieved
by giving each individual a vote. What more easy or--if you think it
out--more fallacious than to transfer this idea to sovereign States and
give each of them a vote in a wonderful congress of mankind? But one
sovereign State is not like another sovereign State, as one individual
man is like another; the difference between this sovereign State and
that is far profounder even than the difference between animals of
different classes. The difference in structure, complexity, function,
and destiny, for example, between the organisation known as the United
States of America and that known as Nicaragua is a difference as wide
as that between the whole plant of a great industrial district and
a small domestic mangle. But in the original Covenant of the League
both were treated as individuals differing only a little in size and
importance. Liberia, Belgium, France, Hayti, and the Hedjaz were all
to be--and they are!--citizens in this marvellous republic of States.
It is like treating a jar of pickles, an opera house, a battleship, a
bundle of sugar-cane, and a small travelling bag as equivalent things.
Any old thing with a flag on it--that is the rule.
Can you expect the debates and divisions of a body so constituted to
have any restraining influence upon the policies and practices of the
Great Powers? It is treated with open contempt in France and Italy, and
if there is a sort of support for it in Great Britain it is largely
because there is a feeling that with Lord Balfour and Lord Robert Cecil
to the fore and with its British Foreign Office Secretary and so forth
its procedure can be manipulated in the interests of the--I won’t say
British, for that is too good a word to use--the “Anglican” Empire.
Now my case is that this constitution of the League is for the reasons
I have stated bad beyond all patching. There is, I hold, no need at all
to base the thing we need upon a sham Parliament of a miscellany of
sovereign States, big or little, civilised or savage. What civilisation
needs are open, efficient, and authoritative controls of certain
universal interests, controls representing the great mass of civilised
people and their common world interests. For all practical ends it
would be infinitely better to let Liberia, Hayti, the Hedjaz, and the
like go hang. Such little, such parochial States ought to learn to
combine up with kindred organisations--or hold their peace in world
affairs. Not one of them contains as many people educated up to ideas
of world policy as, let us say, any outlying suburb of Amsterdam. If
half a dozen of the bigger political systems of the world, or even two
or three, could get together to sustain a common monetary standard, a
common transport control, a common law court, a tariff union, a mutual
defence system, and a common guarantee of disarmament, they would
achieve something beyond the uttermost possibilities of this Geneva
affair.
So much political coalescence on the part--to take an example
boldly--of the United States, the British system, Holland, and the
Scandinavian countries would form a nucleus so large and influential
that upon it the rest of the world, however fiercely nationalist at
heart, would in the end be obliged to crystallise. I believe all these
countries I have named, and Latin America and Spain and Portugal to
boot, could pool their foreign policies--for that is what any genuine
League of Nations means--without encountering insuperable difficulties.
The worst barrier would be tariffs, but I do not believe that would
be an invincible barrier. Such a club of civilised peoples would very
speedily have all the rest of the world on its waiting list. And I
do not see why its achievement should be any more difficult than, or
indeed nearly as difficult as, bolstering up this ineffective pretence,
the present League of Nations. I contend that instead of there being no
alternative to the League of Nations the way would open quite naturally
to such alternatives, directly it was cleared out of the way. It would,
for instance--if only on account of the United States--be much easier
to set up a great International Court of Justice with proper sanctions
without the League than with it.
It is not as though the present League had accumulated any honour
or prestige during its four years of life in Geneva. In the case of
the Polish attack on Russia, in the case of the Greek aggressions
on Turkey, in regard to the occupation of the Ruhr, the murderous
bombardment of Corfu, and the stealing of the Greek deposit by the
Council of Ambassadors to bring the Italians to evacuate Corfu,
it has shown itself trivial, useless, and ridiculous. It is either
silent before such outrages or it speaks with a quavering voice and
nobody listens. It is a blind alley for good intentions, it is a
weedy dump for all the weaknesses of European liberalism. Its past is
contemptible, and the briefer the future of its present constitution
the better for mankind.
VI
THE AVIATION OF THE HALF-CIVILISED
27.10.23
It is probable that the first adequate and successful inauguration of
air transport will be in North and South America, but it is in Europe
that the needs and possibilities are greatest; and were it not for the
short-sightedness and petty competitiveness of the Europeans it is
in Europe that flying might first become the usual method of travel
for distances of over three hundred miles. Europe is so cut up by
channels, sands, bays, Zuyder Zees, Adriatics and Baltic Seas and the
like, she has so clumsy and ill-planned a railway network, planned upon
national lines to restrict too ready movements across frontiers, that
she calls aloud for the aeroplane to soar over these wet obstacles and
tangled confusions. But the chief intent and occupation of European
administrators nowadays lies in spoiling the efforts of and making
life insupportable for other Europeans, and naturally flying presents
itself to them chiefly as a provocation to international sabotage. Most
of the air services we hear about in Europe are hopelessly inadequate
to the needs of civilised people who want to travel conveniently
and beautifully. They are uncomfortable, unpunctual, dangerous,
ridiculous, and--in view of what might be--pitiful.
It is as absurd to think of an air tour of Western Europe as it would
be to think of an automobile tour of the Balkans and Asia Minor. The
countries concerned are not sufficiently civilised to allow of such
methods of transport.
Occasionally one sees maps in the newspapers showing the most wonderful
network of air routes all over Europe: London to Moscow, Manchester
to Constantinople, and the like. Any travel bureau will hand the
credulous inquirer neat little handbills of air services, showing how
he may breakfast in London and dine in Berlin, and so forth. Let the
credulous inquirer try these services. He will find a few tired and
badly overhauled machines run by companies with entirely insufficient
supplies, plying in a mood of hectic uncertainty over some of these
routes. On others the only thing he will find soaring will be soaring
promises. And he will find very little hope in the future of any better
services.
I tried an air tour of Europe this summer. I did not warn any of the
new companies concerned that I meant to write about them. I went as an
ordinary passenger. Let me tell my experiences very briefly.