After the Euro-American War there occurred first a century of minor
national conflicts, and then a century of strained peace, during which
America and China became more and more irksome to each other. At the
close of this period the great mass of men were in theory far more
cosmopolitan than nationalist, yet the inveterate tribal spirit lurked
within each mind and was ever ready to take possession. The planet was
now a delicately organized economic unit, and big business in all lands
was emphatically contemptuous of patriotism. Indeed the whole adult
generation of the period was consciously and without reserve
internationalist and pacifist. Yet this logically unassailable
conviction was undermined by a biological craving for adventurous
living. Prolonged peace and improved social conditions had greatly
reduced the danger and hardship of life, and there was no socially
harmless substitute to take the place of war in exercising the primitive
courage and anger of animals fashioned for the wild. Consciously men
desired peace, unconsciously they still needed some such gallantry as
war afforded. And this repressed combative disposition ever and again
expressed itself in explosions of irrational tribalism.
Inevitably a serious conflict at last occurred. As usual the cause was
both economic and sentimental. The economic cause was the demand for
fuel. A century earlier a very serious oil famine had so sobered the
race that the League of Nations had been able to impose a system of
cosmopolitan control upon the existing oil-fields, and even the coal
fields. It had also imposed strict regulations as to the use of these
invaluable materials. Oil in particular was only to be used for
enterprises in which no other source of power would serve. The
cosmopolitan control of fuel was perhaps the supreme achievement of the
League, and it remained a fixed policy of the race long after the League
had been superseded. Yet, by a choice irony of fate, this quite
unusually sane policy contributed largely to the downfall of
civilization. By means of it, as will later transpire, the end of coal
was postponed into the period when the intelligence of the race was so
deteriorated that it could no longer cope with such a crisis. Instead of
adjusting itself to the novel situation, it simply collapsed.
But at the time with which we are at present dealing, means had recently
been found of profitably working the huge deposits of fuel in
Antarctica. This vast supply unfortunately lay technically beyond the
jurisdiction of the World Fuel Control Board. America was first in the
field, and saw in Antarctic fuel a means for her advancement, and for
her self-imposed duty of Americanizing the planet. China, fearful of
Americanization, demanded that the new sources should be brought under
the jurisdiction of the Board. For some years feeling had become
increasingly violent on this point, and both peoples had by now relapsed
into the crude old nationalistic mood. War began to seem almost
inevitable.
The actual occasion of conflict, however, was, as usual, an accident. A
scandal was brought to light about child labour in certain Indian
factories. Boys and girls under twelve were being badly sweated, and in
their abject state their only adventure was precocious sex. The American
Government protested, and in terms which assumed that America was the
guardian of the world’s morals. India immediately held up the reform
which she had begun to impose, and replied to America as to a busy-body.
America threatened an expedition to set things right, ‘backed by the
approval of all the morally sensitive races of the earth’. China now
intervened to keep the peace between her rival and her partner, and
undertook to see that the evil should be abolished, if America would
withdraw her extravagant slanders against the Eastern conscience. But it
was too late. An American bank in China was raided, and its manager’s
severed head was kicked along the street. The tribes of men had once
more smelled blood. War was declared by the West upon the East.
Of the combatants, Asia, with North Africa, formed geographically the
more compact system, but America and her dependents were economically
more organized. At the outbreak of war neither side had any appreciable
armament, for war had long ago been ‘outlawed’. This fact, however, made
little difference; since the warfare of the period could be carried on
with great effect simply by the vast swarms of civil aircraft, loaded
with poison, high explosives, disease microbes, and the still more
lethal ‘hypo-biological’ organisms, which contemporary science sometimes
regarded as the simplest living matter, sometimes as the most complex
molecules.
The struggle began with violence, slackened, and dragged on for a
quarter of a century. At the close of this period, Africa was mostly in
the hands of America. But Egypt was an uninhabitable no-man’s land, for
the South Africans had very successfully poisoned the sources of the
Nile. Europe was under Chinese military rule. This was enforced by
armies of sturdy Central-Asians, who were already beginning to wonder
why they did not make themselves masters of China also. The Chinese
language, with European alphabet, was taught in all schools. In England,
however, there were no schools, and no population; for early in the war,
an American air-base had been established in Ireland, and England had
been repeatedly devastated. Airmen passing over what had been London,
could still make out the lines of Oxford Street and the Strand among the
green and grey tangle of ruins. Wild nature, once so jealously preserved
in national ‘beauty spots’ against the incursion of urban civilization,
now rioted over the whole island. At the other side of the world, the
Japanese islands had been similarly devastated in the vain American
effort to establish there an air-base from which to reach the heart of
the enemy. So far, however, neither China nor America had been very
seriously damaged; but recently the American biologists had devised a
new malignant germ, more infectious and irresistible than anything
hitherto known. Its work was to disintegrate the highest levels of the
nervous system, and therefore to render all who were even slightly
affected incapable of intelligent action; while a severe attack caused
paralysis and finally death. With this weapon the American military had
already turned one Chinese city into a bedlam; and wandering bacilli had
got into the brains of several high officials throughout the province,
rendering their behaviour incoherent. It was becoming the fashion to
attribute all one’s blunders to a touch of the new microbe. Hitherto no
effective means of resisting spread of this plague had been discovered.
And as in the early stages of the disease the patient became restlessly
active, undertaking interminable and objectless journeys on the
flimsiest pretexts, it seemed probable that the ‘American madness’ would
spread throughout China.
On the whole, then, the military advantage lay definitely with the
Americans; but economically they were perhaps the more damaged, for
their higher standard of prosperity depended largely on foreign
investment and foreign trade. Throughout the American continent there
was now real poverty and serious symptoms of class war, not indeed
between private workers and employers, but between workers and the
autocratic military governing caste which inevitably war had created.
Big business had at first succumbed to the patriotic fever, but had soon
remembered that war is folly and ruinous to trade. Indeed, upon both
sides the fervour of nationalism had lasted only a couple of years,
after which the lust of adventure had given place to mere dread of the
enemy. For on each side the populace had been nursed into the belief
that its foe was diabolic. When a quarter of a century had passed since
there had been free intercourse between the two peoples, the real mental
difference which had always existed between them appeared to many almost
as a difference of biological species. Thus in America the Church
preached that no Chinaman had a soul. Satan, it was said, had tampered
with evolution of the Chinese race when first it had emerged from the
prehuman animal. He had contrived that it should be cunning, but wholly
without tenderness. He had induced in it an insatiable sensuality, and
wilful blindness towards the divine, towards that superbly masterful
energy-for-energy’s sake which was the glory of America. Just as in a
prehistoric era the young race of mammals had swept away the sluggish,
brutish and demoded reptiles, so now, it was said, young soulful America
was destined to rid the planet of the reptilian Mongol. In China, on the
other hand, the official view was that the Americans were a typical case
of biological retrogression. Like all parasitic organisms, they had
thriven by specializing in one low-grade mode of behaviour at the
expense of their higher nature; and now, ‘tape-worms of the planet’,
they were starving out the higher capacities of the human race by their
frantic acquisitiveness.
Such were the official doctrines. But the strain of war had latterly
produced on each side a grave distrust of its own government, and an
emphatic will for peace at any price. The governments hated the peace
party even more than each other, since their existence now depended on
war. They even went so far as to inform one another of the clandestine
operations of the pacifists, discovered by their own secret service in
enemy territory.
Thus when at last big business and the workers on each side of the
Pacific had determined to stop the war by concerted action, it was very
difficult for their representatives to meet.