'The Open Conspiracy': H.G. Wells Plots The World Empire

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Re: 'The Open Conspiracy': H.G. Wells Plots The World Empire

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Part 1 of 2

The Idea of a League of Nations: "What has happened is essentially this, that the natural limitations upon warfare which have existed hitherto appear to have broken down."
by Herbert George Wells
The Atlantic
January, 1919

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The 10th annual session of the League of Nations meets in Geneva, Switzerland, on January 15, 1930.AP

H. G. WELLS, Chairman

H. WICKHAM STEED, VISCOUNT GREY, GILBERT MURRAY, LIONEL CURTIS, J. A. SPENDER, WILLIAM ARCHER, Secretary, A. E. ZIMMERN, VISCOUNT BRYCE

I.

Unification of human affairs, to the extent at least of a cessation of war and a worldwide rule of international law, is no new idea; it can be traced through many centuries of history. It is found as an acceptable commonplace in a fragment, De Republica, of Cicero. It has, indeed, appeared and passed out of the foreground of thought, and reapeared there, again and again.

Hitherto, however, if only on account of the limitations of geographical knowledge, the project has rarely been truly world-wide, though in some instances it has comprehended practically all the known world. Almost always there has been an excluded fringe of barbarians and races esteemed as less than men.

The Roman Empire realized the idea in a limited sphere and in a mechanical, despotic fashion. It was inherent in the propaganda of Islam—excluding the unbeliever. It may be said that the political unity of Christendom overriding states and nations was the orthodox and typical doctrine of the Middle Ages. The individual states were regarded as being, in the nature of things, members of one great body politic, presided over by the Pope, or the Emperor, or both. It was the idea of the world supremacy of the Empire which inspired Dante's De Monarchia; but, as Lord Bryce has remarked, 'Dante's book was an epilogue instead of a prophecy.'

It cannot be claimed that history shows any continuously progressive movement of human affairs from a dispersed to a unified condition. Rather it tells a story of the oscillating action of separatist and unifying forces. And the process of civilization itself, if we use the word in its narrower and older sense of the elaboration of citizenship in a political and social organization, and exclude mechanical and scientific progress from it, has on the whole been rather on the side of fragmentation. It was, for example, much easier for loosely organized tribes and village communities scattered over wide areas to coalesce into vague and often very extensive 'nations,' like the Scythians and Thracians, or to cooperate in 'amplictyonics,' or federations, like the small peoples of central Greece, than for highly developed city-states or fully organized monarchies, possessing a distinctive culture and religion and definite frontiers, to sink these things in any larger union. For such higher forms of political organization, enlargement occurred mainly through conquest., which created unstable empire systems of subject and subordinate peoples under the sway—which might of course be the assimilative sway—of a dominant nation, rather than real unifications.

The Renaissance presents a phase in history in which a large vague unification (Christendom) is seen to be breaking up simultaneously with the appearance of a higher grade of national organization. Machiavelli, with his aspiration toward a united Italy, involving a distintegration of the Empire, opened the phase of the national state in Europe, which reached its fullest development in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Before the Renaissance Europe was far more of a unity than it was at the close of the reign of Queen Victoria, when it consisted mainly of a group of nations, with their national edges sharpened and hardened almost to a maximum, each aspiring to empire and each acutely suspicious of and hostile to its neighbors. The idea of international organization for peace seemed far more Utopian to the normal European intelligence in 1900 than it would have done eight hundred years before.

But while those political and social developments which constitute civilization in the narrower sense of the word were tending to make human societies, as they became more elaborately organized, more heterogeneous and mutually unsympathetic, there were also coming into play throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for the first time, upon a quite unprecedented scale, another series of forces diametrically opposed to human separations. They worked, however, mutely, because the world of thought was unprepared for them. Unprecedented advances in technical and scientific knowledge were occurring, and human cooperation and the reaction of man upon man, not only in material but also in mental things, was being made enormously more effective than it had ever been before. But the phrases of international relationship were not altering to correspond. Phrases usually follow after rather than anticipate reality, and so it was that at the outbreak of the Great War in August, 1914, Europe and the world awoke out of a dream of intensified nationality to a new system of realities which were entirely antagonistic to the continuance of national separations.

It is necessary to state very plainly the nature of these new forces. Upon them rests the whole case for the League of Nations as it is here presented. It is a new case. It is argued here that these forces give us powers novel in history and bring mankind face to face with dangers such as it has never confronted before. It is maintained that, on the one hand, they render possible such a reasoned coordination of human affairs as has never hitherto been conceivable, and that, on the other, they so enlarge and intensify the scope and evil of war and of international hostility as to give what was formerly a generous aspiration more and more of the aspect of an imperative necessity. Under the lurid illumination of the world war, the idea of world-unification has passed rapidly from the sphere of the literary idealist into that of the methodical, practical man, and the task of an examination of its problems and possibilities, upon the scale which the near probability of an actual experiment demands, is thrust upon the world.

All political and social institutions, all matters of human relationship, are dependent upon the means by which mind may react upon mind and life upon life, that is to say upon the intensity, rapidity, and reach of mental and physical communication. In the history of mankind, the great phases seem all to be marked by the appearance of some new invention which facilitates trade or intercourse, and may be regarded as the operating cause of the new phase. The invention of writing, of the wheel and the road, of the ship, of money, of printing, of letters of exchange, of joint-stock undertakings and limited liability, mark distinct steps in the enlargement of human intercourse and cooperation from its original limitation within the verbal and traditional range of the family or tribe.

A large part of the expansion of the Roman Empire, apart from its overseas development, may be considered, for example, as a process of road-making and bridge-building. Even its trans-Mediterranean development was a matter of road-making combined with ship-building. The Roman Empire, like the Chinese, expanded on land to an extremity determined by the new method of road-communication; and sought to wall itself in at last at the limits of its range from its centres of strength. The new chapter of the human story again, which began with the entry of America and the Oceanic lands upon the stage of history, was the direct outcome of that bold sailing out upon the oceans which the mariner's compass, and the supersession of the galley by the development of sails and rigging, rendered possible. The art of printing from movable types released new powers of suggestion, documentation, and criticism, which shattered the old religious organization of Christendom, made the systematic investigations and records of modern science possible, and created the vast newspaper-reading democracies of to-day. The whole of history could, indeed, be written as a drama of human nature reacting to invention.

And we live to-day in a time of accelerated inventiveness and innovation, when a decade modifies the material of inter-communication far more extensively than did any century before, in range, swiftness, and intensity alike. Within the present century, since 1900, there have been far more extensive changes in these things than occurred in the ten centuries before Christ. Instead of regarding Around the World in Eighty Days as an amazing feat of hurry, we can now regard a flight about the globe in fifteen or sixteen days as a reasonable and moderate performance. The teaching of history compels us to recognize in these new facilities factors which will necessarily work out into equally revolutionary social and political consequences. It is the most obvious wisdom to set ourselves to anticipate as far as we can, so as to mitigate and control, the inevitable collisions and repercussions of mankind that are coming upon us. Even if we were to suppose that this rush of novel accelerating contrivances would be presently checked,—and there is little justification for any such supposition,—it would still behoove us to work out the influence which the things already achieved will have upon our kind.

And it is not simply an increase of range and swiftness that we have to consider here, though these are the aspects that leap immediately to the eye. There has also been, for example, a very great increase in the possible vividness of mental impact. In education and in the agencies of journalism and propaganda, there has been an increase of power at present incalculable, owing to vast strides in the printing of pictures, and to the cinematograph, the gramaphone, and similar means of intense world-wide information and suggestion.

II.

While all these things, on the one hand, point plainly now to such possibilities of human unification and world unanimity as no one could have dreamed of a hundred years ago, there has been, on the other hand, a change, an intensification, of the destructive processes of war which opens up a black alternative to this pacific settlement of human affairs. The case as it is commonly stated in the propaganda literature for a League of Nations is a choice between, on the one hand, a general agreement on the part of mankind to organize a permanent peace, and on the other, a progressive development of the preparation for war and the means of conducting war which must ultimately eat up human freedom and all human effort, and, as the phrase goes, destroy civilization. We shall find as we proceed that these simple oppositions do not by any means state all the possibilities of the case; but for a moment or so it will be convenient to confine our attention to this enhancement of the cost, burden, and destructiveness of belligerence which scientific and technical progress has made inevitable.

What has happened is essentially this, that the natural limitations upon warfare which have existed hitherto appear to have broken down. Hitherto there has been a certain proportion between the utmost exertion of a nation at war and the rest of its activities. The art and methods of war have had a measurable relation to the resources of the community as a whole, so that it has been possible for nations to be well armed by the standards of the time and yet to remain vigorous and healthy communities, and to wage successful wars without exhaustion.

To take a primitive example, it was possible for the Zulu people, under King Chaka, to carry warfare as it was then understood in South Africa—a business of spearmen fighting on foot—to its utmost perfection, and to remain prosperous and happy themselves, whatever might be the fate they inflicted upon their neighbors. And even the armies of Continental Europe, as they existed before the Great War, were manifestly bearable burdens, because they were borne. But the outbreak of that struggle forced upon the belligerents, in spite of the natural conservatism of all professional soldiers, a rapid and logical utilization of the still largely neglected resources of mechanical and chemical science; they were compelled to take up every device that offered, however costly it might be; they could not resist the drive toward scientific war which they had themselves released. In warfare the law of the utmost immediate exertion rules; the combatant who does not put in all his possible energy is lost. In four brief years, therefore, Europe was compelled to develop a warfare monstrously out of proportion to any conceivable good which the completest victory could possibly achieve for either side.

We may take as a typical instance of this logical and necessary exaggeration which warfare has undergone the case of the 'tank.' The idea of a land ironclad was an old and very obvious one, which had been disliked and resisted by military people for many years. The substantial basis of the European armies of 1914 was still a comparatively inexpensive infantry, assisted by machineguns and field-guns and cavalry. By 1918 the infantry line is sustained by enormous batteries of guns of every calibre, firing away an incredible wealth of ammunition; its structure includes the most complicated system of machine-gun nests and strong posts conceivable, and every important advance is preceded by lines of aeroplanes and sustained by fleets of these new and still developing weapons, the tanks. Every battle sees scores of these latter monsters put out of action. Now, even the primitive tank of 1917 costs, quite apart from the very high running expenses, something between seven and ten thousand pounds. At that stage it was still an expedient on trial and in the rough. But its obvious corollary in movable big-gun forts with ammunition tenders—forts which will probably be made in parts and built up near to the point of use, however costly they may be—is practically dictated if war is to continue. So too is a production of light and swift types of tank that will serve many of the purposes of cavalry.

If war is to continue as a human possibility, this elaboration of the tank in scale and species follows inevitably. A mere peace of the old type is likely to accelerate rather than check this elaboration. Only a peace that will abolish the probability of war from human affairs can release the nations from the manifest necessity of cultivating the tank, multiplying the tank, and maintaining a great manufacture and store of tanks, over and above all the other belligerent plants which they had to keep going before 1914. And these tanks will supersede nothing—unless perhaps, to a certain extent, cavalry. The tank, growing greater and greater and more numerous and various, is manifestly, therefore, one new burden—one of many new burdens—which must rest upon the shoulders of mankind henceforth, until the prospect of war can be shut off from international affairs. It is foolish to ignore these grimly budding possibilities of the tank. There they are, and they cannot be avoided if war is to go on.

But the tank is only one of quite a multitude of developments, which are bound to be followed up if the modern war-process continues. There is no help for it. In every direction there is the same story to be told—if war is still to be contemplated as a possibility—of an unavoidable elaboration of the means of war beyond the scale of any conceivable war end.

As a second instance, let us take the growth in size, range, and destructiveness of the air war. Few people realize fully what a vast thing the air-service has become. A big aeroplane of the raider type may cost anything up to twenty thousand pounds; the smallest costs not much less than a thousand. The pilot and the observer are of the very flower of the youth of the country; they have probably cost society many thousands of pounds' worth of upbringing and education, and they have made little or no productive contribution to human resources. And these costs units have been multiplied enormously. From a poor hundred or so of aerial planes at the outset of the war, Great Britain alone has expanded her air forces until she has an output of thousands of new machines a month, aerodromes abound throughout the country, and there is scarcely a corner of England where the hum of the passing aeroplane is not to be heard. Now all this vast plant of aeroplane factories and instruction aerodromes must be kept up, once it has been started, war or no war, until war is practically impossible. It may be argued, perhaps, that during a peace-spell some portion of this material may be applied to civil air-transport; but the manufacturers have made it abundantly clear that this project does not strike them as reasonable or desirable; their industry has been created as an armament industry and an armament industry they wish it to remain. And besides this opposition of the interested profiteer, we have to remember that the aeroplane has imported into warfare possibilities of surprise hitherto undreamed of. So long as a sudden declaration of war, or an attack preceding a declaration of war, is possible, it is imperative now, not only that the air force of a country should be kept always in striking condition, but that the whole vast organization of coastal and frontier anti-aircraft defenses should be equally ready. Tens of thousands of men, most of them economically very valuable, must keep watch day and night, prepared at any moment to flash into warfare again.

The same story of a tremendous permanent expansion of war-equipment could be repeated in a score of parallel instances drawn from the land war and sea war. Enormous new organizations of anti-submarine flotillas, of minefield material and its production, of poison-gas manufacture and the like, have been called into existence, and must now remain as going concerns so long as war is likely to be renewed.

But enough examples have been cited here to establish the reality of this present unrestricted, illimitable, disproportionate growth of the war-process in comparison with all other human processes. Mars has become the young cuckoo in the nest of human possibilities, and it is—to state the extreme alternatives—a choice before mankind, whether we will drift on toward a catastrophe due to that overgrowth, or so organize the world as effectually to restrain and reduce warfare.

It is not impossible to adumbrate the general nature of the catastrophe which threatens mankind if war-making goes on. Modern warfare is not congenial to the working masses anywhere. No doubt the primitive form of warfare, a murderous bickering with adjacent tribes, is natural enough to uneducated men; but modern warfare, and still more the preparation for it, involves distresses, strains, and a continuity of base and narrow purpose quite beyond the patience and interest of the millions of ordinary men who find no other profit in it but suffering. The natural man is more apt for chaotic local fighting than for large-scale systematic fighting. Hatred campaigns and a sustained propaganda are needed to keep up the combatant spirit in a large modern state, even during actual hostilities; and in the case of Russia we have a striking example of the distaste a whole population may develop for the war-strain, even during the war and with the enemy at its gates.

What is likely to happen, then, when the working masses of Central and Western Europe, being no longer sustained by the immediate excitement of actual war, find themselves still obliged to go on, year after year, producing vast masses of war-material, pledged to carry a heavy burden of war loan rentiers on their backs, and subjected to an exacerbated conscription? Possibly, so far as the rentier burden on the worker goes, a great rise in prices and wages will relieve the worker to some extent, but only at the cost of acute disappointment and distress at another social level. There is a dangerously narrowing limit now to the confidence of the common man in the intelligence and good faith of those who direct his affairs; and the probability of a cruel confused class-war throughout Europe, roughly parallel in its methods to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and released by a similar loss of faith in leaders and government, appears at the end of the vista of waste of directive energy and natural resources, completing that waste of energy and resources into which the belligerent systems of Europe, the German Empire being the chief and foremost, have led mankind. Systematic force, overstrained and exhausted, will then give place to chaotic force, and general disorganization will ensue. Thereafter the world may welter in confusion for many generations, through such ruinous and impoverished centuries as close the Roman imperial story, before it develops the vitality for an effective reorganization.

Such, roughly, is the idea of the phrase 'downfall of civilization' as used in discussions like these. It is a vision of the world as a social system collapsing chaotically, not under the assault of outer barbarians, but beneath the pressure of this inevitable hypertrophy of war.

III.

Let us now look a little more closely between the two extremes of possibility we have stated in the preceding section, between a world-unanimity for peace, on the one hand,—Everyman's World League of Nations,—and a world-collapse under the overgrowth of war-organization and material, on the other.

The affairs of the world are now in a posture which enables us to dismiss the idea of a world hegemony for Germany, or for any other single power, as a fantastic vanity.

We have to consider, however, the much greater probability of a group of the more powerful states, including perhaps a chastened Germany, agreeing among themselves to organize and enforce peace in the world for ever. This would give us still a third type of league which we may call the League of the Senior States. It is perhaps the most probable of all the possibilities.

And, on the other hand, we have assumed, quite crudely, in the first section that the forces of popular insurrection are altogether destructive of organization, whereas there may be as yet unmeasured constructive and organizing power in the popular mind. There is a middle way between a superstitious belief in unguided democracy and a frantic hatred of it. Concurrently, for example, with the earlier phases of Bolshevik anarchy in Petrograd and Moscow, there seems to have been for a time a considerable development of cooperative production and distribution throughout European and Asiatic Russia. Mingled with much merely destructive and vindictive insurrectionism, there may be a popular will to order, reaching out to cooperate with all the sound and liberal forces of the old system of things. We can only guess as yet at the possibilities of a collective will in these peasant and labor masses of Europe which now read and write and have new-born ideas of class-action and responsibility. They will be ill-informed, they may be emotional, but they may have vast reserves of common sense. Much may depend upon the unforeseeable accident of great leaders. Nearly every socialist and democratic organization in the world, it is to be noted, now demands the League of Nations in some form, and men may arise who will be able to give that stir quite vague demand force and creative definition. A failure to achieve a world guaranty of peace on the part of the diplomatists at a peace conference may lead, indeed, to a type of insurrection and revolution not merely destructive but preparatory. It is conceivable. The deliberate organization of peace, as distinguished from a mere silly clamor for peace, may break out at almost any social level, and in the form either of a constructive, an adaptive, or a revolutionary project.

We have not, therefore, here, a case of a clear cut choice of two ways; there is a multitude of roads which may converge upon the permanent organization of world peace, and an infinitude of thwarting and delaying digressions may occur. Complicating and mitigating circumstances may, and probably will, make this antagonism of war and peace a lengthy and tortuous drama. There may be many halts and setbacks in the inevitable development of war; belligerence may pause and take breath on several occasions before its ultimate death flurry.

Such delays, such backwater phases and secondary aspects, must not confuse the issue and hide from us the essential fact of the disappearance of any real limitation upon the overgrowth of war in human life. That unlimited overgrowth is the probability which is driving more and more men to study and advocate this project of a League of Nations, because they are convinced that only through counter-organization of the peace-will in mankind can the world be saved from a great cycle of disasters, disorder, and retrogression.

And it does not follow, because the origins and motives of the will for such a world-league are various, that they involve a conflict over essentials, as to the character of the final result. It is the declared belief of many of the promoters of the world-league movement that a careful analysis of the main factors of its problems, a scientific examination of what is possible, what is impossible, what is necessary, and what is dangerous, must lead the mass of reasonable men in the world, whatever their class, origins, traditions, and prejudices, to a practical agreement upon the main lines of this scheme for the salvation of mankind. It is believed that the clear, deliberate, and methodical working out of the broad problems and riddles of the world-league idea will beve a sufficient compelling force to bring it within the realm of practical possibility.

IV.

But at this point it is advisable to take up and dispose of a group of suggestions which contradict our fundamental thesis, which is, that war is by its nature illimitable. War is, we hold here, a cessation of law, and in war therefore, it is impossible to prevent permanently the use of every possible device for injury, killing, and compulsion which human ingenuity can devise or science produce. Our main argument for a League of Nations rests on that. But there are people who do not accept as a fact the illimitable nature of war. They fall back upon the theory that the horrors of the Great War are due to a sort of accidental relapse into savagery on the part of the German people, and that future wars can and will be conducted under restrictions imposed by humanity and chivalry. They believe that war can become a conventional Ordeal by Battle, in which the nations shall deliberately refrain from putting forth their full strength, and shall agree to abide by the decision of a struggle between limited armies, operating, like the champions in a tournament or a prize-fight, under an accepted code of rules.

This is, we hold, a delusion. Our case is that the nations can agree far more easily to abolish war than to restrict war.

It is true that in the Great War Germany has carried her theories of ruthlessness to self-defeating extremes. She has done many deeds which recoiled upon herself—deeds inspired by a sort of ferocious pedantry which inflicted very small material damage upon the Allies, but hardened their resolution and brought thousands, nay, millions of recruits to their ranks. None the less must we face the fact that, individual stupidities apart, the German theory of war is the only logical one.

If it be said that, in past times, nations fought with comparatively small armies, and often accepted defeat without having thrown anything like their full strength into the struggle—the objection is met by a twofold answer. Firstly, the logic of war, the law—as we have termed it elsewhere—of the utmost effort, had not yet been thoroughly thought out. Primitive peoples in general—and the same applies to all but the most civilized and sophisticated of modern states—are guided in matters of war and peace more by their emotions than by their reason. They are lazy, as peoples, and muddle-headed. They fight because they are angry; they stop because they are tired; they cease pursuing the enemy because they want to attend to the harvest. It is the mark of a highly organized and intellectualized government to subordinate national emotions to the remorseless logic of the case. And the logic of war was reserved for Napoleon to express in practice and Clausewitz to formulate in theory.

But the second answer goes more to the root of the matter: namely, that the strength which a nation can put into the field is limited by many conditions both material and psychological, and that, if we examine into these conditions, we shall often find that what may seem to us, on the face of it, an insignificant effort, was in very truth the greatest of which, at the given moment, the nation was capable. It is a quite new social fact, a creation of the last fifty years, to have a central government supplied with exact information about all its resources in men, money, and material, and with means of organization and control which enable it, at the cost of some delay and friction, to exploit those resources to the last inch. When Babylon was captured by the Medes, we are told, there were parts of the city itself which were unaware of the fact for several days; and there must have been vast islands of population in the country which, so far as their personal experience went, never knew. But that sort of thing has passed.

If we look into the history of warfare, we find that it has completed a cycle and is now returning to its starting-point. A nomadic horde of the barbarous ages was 'a nation in arms' in the full sense of the word. Having no fixed place of abode, it had no civil—as distinct from military—population. The whole people—old men, women, and children included—took part in the toils and perils of war. There were no places of security in which the weak and the defenseless could take refuge. Everyone's life was forfeit in case of disaster; therefore everyone took part in the common defense. Modern warfare, with its air fleets, its submarines, and its 'big Berthas,' is more and more restricting the area of immunity from military peril and reverting to these primitive conditions.

Agricultural life and city settlements brought with them the distinction between combatants and non-combatants; but still, in the normal state, every able-bodied citizen was a soldier. The citizen took his place as a matter of course in the militia of his country, leaving to old men and women, or to slaves and captives, the guardianship of field and vineyard, flock and herd. Only when wealth and luxury had reached a certain pitch did the habit of employing denationalized mercenaries creep in. Then came the time when the mercenaries encountered nomadic or thoroughly mobilized 'nations in arms,' and civilization went to the wall.

In the Middle Ages, the feudal chief, the dominant, soldierly, often predatory personality, gathered his vassals around him for purposes of offense and defense, while the cultivation of the soil devolved on the villains or serfs. Thus war became the special function of a military caste, and, as in the Wars of the Roses, campaigns were often carried on with comparatively little disturbance to the normal life of the country. When the royal power crushed or absorbed that of the barons, the centralized monarchy everywhere recruited a standing army, often consisting largely of foreign mercenaries, as the bulwark of its security and the instrument of its will. It was quite natural that dynastic wars, and wars in which the common people of the contending nations had little or no interest, should be fought out on a restricted scale by these specialized military machines. Frederick the Great employed a mercenary army as the nucleus for a national militia; and so lately as the beginning of the last century, this system was celebrated as ideal by the noted military authority who was the immediate predecessor of Clausewitz.

With Napoleon came the Nation in Arms; and the military history of the intervening years has consisted of the ever completer concentration upon warlike purposes of the whole powers and resources of the great European peoples.

If it be asked why this logical evolution of the idea of war has taken so many centuries to work itself out, the main reason—among many others—may be stated in two words: munitions and transport. Before the age of machines, it was impossible to arm and clothe immense multitudes of men; before the days of McAdam and Stephenson, it was impossible to move such multitudes and, still more, to keep them supplied with food and munitions. Again we find ourselves insisting upon the vital importance of transit methods in this, as in nearly all questions of human interaction. The size of armies has steadily grown with the growth of means of communication. The German wars of 1863-70 were the first in which railways played any considerable part, and the scale of operations in 1870-71 was quite unprecedented.

What is the chief new factor since the days of St. Privat and Sedan? The aeroplane, most people would reply; possibly it may become so, but thus far a less picturesque invention has been of even greater influence—the motor-lorry. No one can go anywhere near the Western Front without realizing that the gigantic scale of this struggle is almost wholly dependent upon motor-traction. Had not the internal-combustion engine been invented, the war would probably have been over long ago; and at all events millions of men would still be alive and well who now lie dead or crawl mutilated over the face of the earth.

Seen in this light, the invention of the motor may appear to have been due to a special interference of Satan in human affairs. But that is an unphilosophical view to take. Our race must perfect its power over matter before it can wisely select the ends to which it will apply that power. The idea of war had to work itself out to the full and demonstrate its own immpossibility, before man could find the insight and the energy to put it behind him and have done with it. Thanks to Prussian ambition and Prussian philosophy, the demonstration has now been completed. The idea of war has revealed itself in its full hideousness. All the world has come to look upon it as a sort of mythological monster which, if left to itself, will periodically reemerge from hell, to devour the whole youth and the whole wealth of civilized mankind. It is useless to dream of clipping the wings or paring the claws of the dragon. It must be slain outright if it is not to plan unthinkable havoc with civilization; and to that end the intelligence and the moral enthusiasm of the world are now, as we see, addressing themselves.
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Re: 'The Open Conspiracy': H.G. Wells Plots The World Empire

Postby admin » Sun Oct 13, 2019 8:07 am

Part 2 of 2

I (Part Two)

Any people have said to themselves like Jeannette in the touching old ballad, —

If I were King of France, or, still better, Pope of Rome.
I’d have no fighting men abroad, no weeping maids at home;
All the world should be at peace, or, if kings must show their might,
Then let those who make the quarrels be the only men to fight.


But even Jeannette evidently realized that the idea of making the fate of a tribe or a nation depend upon the fortunes of one or two selected champions was but a pious aspiration, which not even the King of France or the Pope of Rome could translate into practical politics.

There is one theory, indeed, which, if we accept its initial postulate, would make limited warfare logical. If battle be regarded as the trial of a cause before the judgment-seat of God, there is no sound reason for pouring huge armies into it. It is manifest that God can deliver his verdict in the result of a duel of one against one, quite as well as in the result of a war between whole nations in arms. On this theory, war would be an extension to politics of the ‘wager of battle’ between individuals — a method of obtaining a supernatural ruling, indistinguishable in principle from the drawing of lots or tossing of a coin. But although men have always talked, and still talk, of ’appealing to the God of Battles,′ they have never shown any disposition to accept, save at the last gasp, a judgment which ran counter to their passions or their cupidities. Whatever may have been their professions, their practical belief has always been that ’God is on the side of the big battalions,′ or, in other words, that war is a part of the natural order of things, the immeasurable network of cause and effect, and no more subject to special interventions of Providenec than commerce, or navigation, or any other form of human activity. Nor is there any reason to suppose that they will ever believe otherwise. If it be difficult to conceive them, in their disputes, abiding by the awards of impartial reason, it is a hundred times more difficult to conceive them accepting the wholly unreasonable awards of artificially and arbitrarily restricted violence.

These truths are so obvious that it may seem idle to insist upon them. Nobody, it may be said, proposes that Paris and Berlin should in future settle their disputes, like Rome and Alba Longa, by selecting three champions apiece and setting them to cut each others’ throats. In this crude and elementary form, indeed, the proposal does not appear; but disguised applications of the same principle are constantly commended in the writings of those who, holding war to be eternally inevitable, seeks refuge from sheer despair in the belief that it is possible to subject it to rule and limit, and say to it, ’Thus far shalt thou go and no further.′ They cannot or will not see that any conventional limitation is foreign to its very essence. It is perfectly possible, and consonant with human nature that nations should agree not to appeal to force, and should hold to that agreement even when one or the other believes itself to have suffered injustice. But it is utterly impossible and inconsistent with human nature that, having appealed to force, they should agree to exercise it only within limits, and accept impoverishment, humiliation, servitude, — in a word, defeat, — rather than transgress the stipulated boundaries.

It may be objected that codes of law have in fact been devised for the partial humanization of war, and that not until the present time has any civilized belligerent made a practice of disregarding them. But these so-called laws of war have always been conventions of mutual advantage — rules which all parties held it to be, on the whole, to their own interest to observe. The German WarBook quite frankly places the chief sanction of such trammels upon military action not in humanity, but in the fear of reprisals. We do not deny that man is an emotional being, and even in the midst of his fiercest fighting there are horrors from which the decent man, and even the decent multitude, instinctively recoils. Decent men do not, as a rule want to hurt their wounded prisoners, they rather like to pet them; and they regard people who do otherwise as blackguards. And no doubt it is largely these emotional mercies and generosities which have brought about those rules of chivalry or scruples of religion which form the supposed ‘redeeming features’ of war. But the necessities of war completely override all such weaknesses as soon as these begin to endanger actual military interests. And the logic of war tolerates them only as cheap concessions to a foolish popular psychology. It must be remembered that undisguised atrocities on a stupendous scale — such, for instance as the massacre in cold blood of whole regiments of helpless prisoners would be too strong for the stomach of even the most brutalized people, and would tend to bring war into discredit with all but its monomaniac votaries. If we look closely enough, we shall find that all Geneva Conventions and such palliative ordinances, though excellent in intention and good in their immediate effects, make ultimately for the persistence of war as an institution. They are sops to humanity, devices for rendering war barely tolerable to civilized mankind, and so staving off the inevitable rebellion against its abominations.

II

Criticisms of the project of a League of Nations have consisted hitherto largely of the statement of difficulties and impediments, rather than of reasons for rejection of the project. All such criticisms are helpful in so far as they enable us to map out the task before us, but none are adequate as conclusive objections. Few of the advocates of an organized world-peace fail to recognize the magnitude of the task to which they invite men to set themselves. But their main contention is that there is really no alternative to the attempt but resignation to long years of human suffering and disaster, and therefore that, however difficult the enterprise may be, it has to be faced. The recital of the difficulties is, they say, a stimulus to thought and exertion rather than a deterrent.

And there are certain objections to the undertaking as such that must be taken up and dealt with in a preliminary discussion.

There is, first, an objection which it will be convenient to speak of as the ’Biological Objection.′ It is stated in various forms, and it peeps out and manifests itself in the expressed thoughts and activities of quite a number of people who do not seem to have formulated it completely. But what many of these objectors think and what still more feel may be expressed in some such phraseology as this: —

Life is conflict and is begotten of conflict. All the good qualities of life are the result of the tragic necessities of survival. Life, stripped down to its fundamental fact, is the vehement urgency of individuals or groups of individuals to survive, and to reproduce and multiply their kind. The pressure of individual upon individual and of species upon species sharpens the face of life and is the continuing impetus and interest in life. The conception of life without war is a collection, therefore, not simply utopian but millennial. It is a proposal that every kind and sort and type of humanity should expand and increase without limit in a small world of restricted resources. It is, in fact, absurd. It is an impossible attempt to arrest and stereotype a transient phase of human life. It is inviting paralysis as a cure for epilepsy. It is a dream of fatigued minds. Terrible as the scope and nature of human warfare have become, it has to be faced. The more destructive it is, the more rapid the hardening and evolution of the species life and history move cyclically from phase to phase, and perhaps such an apparent retrogression as we mean when we talk of the breakdown of civilization, may be only part of a great rhythm in the development of the species. Let us gather together with our own kind, and discipline and harden ourselves, in a heroic resolve to survive in the unavoidable centuries of harsh conflict ahead of us.

Now, here is a system of objection not lightly to be brushed aside. True, the element of mutual conflict in life is often grossly overstated and the element of mutual help suppressed. But, although overstated, there are valid criticisms here of any merely negative league of nations project, any mere proposal to end war without replacing it by some other collective process. There do seem to be some advocates of the league whose advocacy is little more than a cry of terror at the disappearance of established wealth, the loss of wasted leisure, and the crumbling of accepted dignities. Those who have faith in the possibility of a world league are bound — just as the Socialist is bound — to produce some assurances of a control over the blind pressure of population, that may otherwise swamp the world with prolific low grade races. They are bound to show that their schemes are compatible with a series of progressive readjustments, and not an attempt to restore and stereotype the boundaries, the futile institutions, and the manifest injustices of the world of 1914, with only armaments abolished. They are bound to show that exceptional ability and energy will have, not merely scope, but fuller scope for expression, achievement, and perpetuation, in the new world to which they point us, than in the old. In the years to come, as in the whole past history of life, individual must compete against individual, type against type.

But having made these admissions, we may then go on to point out two fundamental misconceptions which entirely vitiate the biological argument as an argument for the continuation of war as a method of human selection. It is falsely assumed, first, that modern war is a discriminatory process, selecting certain types as against certain other types; whereas it is largely a catastrophic and indiscriminate process and secondly, that belligerent states are in the nature of biological units super-individuals, which either triumph or are destroyed; whereas they are systems of political entanglement of the most fluid, confused, and transitory description. They neither reproduce their kind nor die; they change indefinitely: the children of the defeated state of to-day may become the dominant citizens of its victorious competitor in a generation or so. They do not even embody traditions or ideas: France, which went into the Revolutionary wars at the end of the eighteenth century to establish the Republican idea throughout Europe, emerged as an empire; and the defeat of the Russian by the German imperialism led to Lenin’s ’dictatorship of the proletariat.′

The essence of success in the biological struggle for existence is preferential reproduction; whereas the modern war process takes all the sturdier males to kill and be killed haphazard, while it sends all the more intelligent and energetic girls into munition factories, substitute work, and suchlike sterilizing occupations. If it prefers any type for prosperity and multiplication, it is the alert shirker, the able tax-dodger, and the war profiteer; if it breeds anything it breeds parasites. The vital statistics of Germany, which is certainly the most perfect as a belligerent of all the belligerent states engaged, show already tremendous biological injuries. Germany in the first four years of the war had lost by the fall in her birth-rate alone nearly 2,600,000 lives, approximately 40,000 per million of the population; Hungary, in the same period, lost 1,500,000 (about 70,000 per million), the United Kingdom 500,000 (or about 10,000 per million). Add to this loss of lives the under-nutrition of the millions that were born and their impoverished upbringing. These things strike at the victors as well as at the vanquished. They are entirely indiscriminate as among good types and bad, while on the whole the battlefield destroys rather the good than the ’unfit for service,′ who remain at home to breed.

The whole process which, on a vaster scale, has brought Europe to its present plight may be seen in miniature among the tribes of the Indian frontier. Go up the Khyber Pass and stand on the ridge above Ali Masjid. In front lies a desolate valley, flanked by barren mountains under a blistering sun. On the slopes to right and left, at intervals of about a thousand yards, are oblong inclosures each with brown walls and a little loop-holed tower at one corner. These inclosures are the villages of the Pathan tribes which inhabit the valley, and in the towers are men with rifles, waiting their chance to shoot man or boy who may rashly expose himself outside a neighboring village. For all or nearly all of them are at feud with each other, and though the causes of their warfare are forgotten, it is a point of honor and pride with them never to become reconciled. There have been, roughly, three stages in the history of these feuds. In the first, men fought with knives, daggers, and other primitive weapons, and the result may have been, as a German would argue, ’biologically good.′ The fittest survived, the population was kept from increasing beyond the number which an inhospitable soil would support, the arts of peace, such as they were, could be pursued without serious interruption.

The second stage was reached when the flint-lock rifle came on the scene and took the place of knife and dagger. With this the vendetta necessarily became more of a national industry; but the weapon was short of range and irregular in its killing power, and there was still a fair chance of survival, and a certain presumption that the better or more skillful man would escape. But before the end of the nineteenth century the village marksmen had possessed themselves of the Martini-Henry and other long range, high-velocity rifles, brought from Europe by the gunrunners of the Persian Gulf. At this, the third stage, the biological merits of village warfare manifestly began to disappear. The village marksman in his mud-tower now makes the whole valley his zone of fire. Cultivation becomes impossible in the no-man’s land between village and village: only behind the cover of the village wall can men sow or plough or reap, tether their cattle, or graze their sheep. Every village must be provided with a communication-trench, so that its inhabitants may pass under cover to the sanctuary — guaranteed twice in the week — of the government-protected road which runs down the centre of the valley. The question now is, not whether the vendetta is biologically good, but whether the tribes can at all survive under it; and weary officials, at a loss to solve the vexed problem which they offer to the government of India, have been heard to suggest that if a few machine guns could be conveyed to the village marksmen and installed in the mudtowers, there would soon be no frontier problem at all.

The question which the civilized world has now to consider is, whether it can survive, or its life be more tolerable than that of these tribesmen under a vendetta of high explosives.

So that when the biological critics says, ’Life is conflict,′ we reply, without traversing his premises, that war has ceased to be conflict and has become indiscriminate catastrophe, and that the selective processes that enlarge and enrich life can go on far more freely and effectively in a world from which this blundering, disastrous, non-selective, and even possibly dysgenic form of wastage is banished. But we have to bear in mind that this reply puts upon those who are preparing schemes for a League of Nations the onus of providing for progress, competition, and liberty under the restraints of such a scheme.

III

It may be worth while to take up and consider here a group of facts that are sometimes appealed to as a justification of war. It is alleged that there has been an extraordinarily rapid development of mechanical, chemical, and medical science since 1914, and a vast and valuable accumulation of experience in social and industrial organization. There has been great mental stimulation everywhere; people have been forced out of grooves and idle and dull ways of living into energetic exertion; there has been, in particular, a great release and invigoration of feminine spirit and effort. The barriers set up by the monopolization of land and material by private owners for selfish ends have been broken down in many cases.

There can be no denying the substantial truth in these allegations. Indisputably there has been such a release and stimulation. But this is a question of proportion between benefits and losses. And all this stir, we argue, has been bought at too great a cost. It is like accelerating the speed of a ship by burning its cargo and timbers as fuel. At best, it is the feverish and wasteful reaping of a long accumulated harvest.

We must remember that a process may be evil as a whole, while in part it is beneficial. It would be stupid to deny that for countless minds the Great War has provided an enlightening excitcment that could have been provided in no other way. To deny that, would be to assert the absolute aimlessness and incoherence of being. But while this harvest of beneficial by-products of the war is undeniable, there is no evidence of any fresh sowing, or, if the process of belligerence and warlike preparation is to continue, of any possibility of an adequate fresh sowing of further achievements. The root from which all the shining triumphs of technical and social science spring, we must remember, is the quiet and steadfast pursuit of pure science and philosophy and literature by those best endowed for these employments. And if the greedy expansion of the war-process is to continue, — and we have shown that without an organized world-peace it must continue, — there is nothing to reassure us of the cotinuance of that supply of free and vigorous educated intelligence, in which alone that root can flourish. On the contrary, it is one of the most obvious and most alarming aspects of the war-process that university education has practically ceased in Europe; Europe is now producing only schoolboys, and the very schools are understaffed and depleted. The laboratories of the English public schools are no longer making the scientific men of the future, they are making munitions. It is all very well for the scientific man of fifty to say that at last he has got his opportunity; but that is only a momentary triumph for science. Where now is the great scientific man for the year 1930? Smashed to pieces in an aeroplane, acting as a stretcher-bearer, or digging a trench. And what, unless we can secure the peace of the world, will become of the potential scientific men of 1950? Suppose it to be possible to carry on this a present top-heavy militarist system for so long a period as that, what will have happened then to our potential Faradays, Newtons, and Darwins? They will be, at best, half educated; they will be highly trained soldiers, robbed of their intellectual inheritance and incapable of rendering their gifts to the world. The progress of knowledge will be slowing down toward stagnation.

IV

A considerable amount of opposition to the League of Nations movement may be classified under the heading of Objections from precedent and prepossession. The mind is already occupied by the idea of attachment to some political sytem which stands in the way of a world-league. These objections vary very much in intellectual quality. Nevertheless, even the most unintelligent demand some attention, because numerically these antatgonists form considerable masses. Collectively, in their unorganized way, they produce a general discouragement and hostility far more formidable than any soundly reasoned case against an organized world-peace.

The objection from prepossession is necessarily protean; it takes various forms because men’s prepossessions are various: but ’There never has been a League of Nations, and there never will be,′ may be regarded as the underlying idea of most of these forms. And the objector relapses upon his pre-possession as the only possible thing. A few years ago people were saying ’Men have never succeeded in flying, and they never will.′ And we are told, particularly by people who have obviously never given human nature ten minutes thought in their lives, that world-unity is ’against human nature.′ To substantiate these sweeping negatives, the objector will adduce a heterogeneous collection of instances to show the confusions and contradictions of the human will, and a thousand cases of successful mass-cooperations will be ignored: we are moved to doubt at last whether human beings did ever suppress piracy, develop a railway system, or teach a whole population to read and write. If the individual objector is carefully examined, it will be found at times that he is under the sway of some narrow and intense mental inhibition, based on personal habits or experiences. Some of these inhibitions, if they are traced to their source, will be found to be even absurdly narrow. The objector dislikes the idea of a World-League of Nations because it is ’international,′ or, worse, ’cosmopolitan,′ and he has got into the habit of associating these words with shady finance or anarchist outrages or the white-slave traffic. Or he has had uncomfortable experiences in hotels abroad, or he has suffered in his business from foreign competition. Many of the objections that phrase themselves in some such formulas as ’People will never stand it,′ or ’You do not understand the intensity of feeling,′ are indeed rather cases for Jung and Freud than for serious dialectics. But from such levels of unreasoned hostility we can ascend to much more reasoned and acceptable forms of prepossessions which must be met with a greater respect.

Most human beings are ’patriotic.′ They have a pride, quite passionate in quality, in the race or nation to which they belong: an affection identical in nature with, and sometimes as intense as, that which they feel for family and home, for a certain atmosphere of thought and behavior, for a certain familiar landscape and atmosphere, for certain qualities none the less real because they are often exquisitely indefinable. And they are jealous for this ‘national’ quality of theirs — at times almost as men are jealous for their wives. Now, how far does this group of feelings stand in the way of a League of Nations project? A number of vigorous speakers and writers do certainly play upon this jealousy. They point out that the League of Nations project, as it develops, involves controls, not merely of military, but of economic concerns — controls by councils or committees upon which every country will see a majority of ’foreigners,′ and they exaggerate and intensify to the utmost the suggestion of unlimited interference on the part of these same ’foreigners,′ with the most intimate and sacred things.

One eloquent writer, for example (Mr. Belloc), declares that the League of Nations would place us all ‘at the mercy of a world-police’; and another (Mr. I. D. Colvin) declares that the council of a League of Nations would own all our property as the British now ‘own’ the empire; an unfortunate parallel, if we consider the amount of ownership exercised by the British Government over the life and affairs of a New Zealander or a Hindu.

Perhaps the most effective answer to this sort of thing is to be found in current instances. One might imagine from these critics that at present every government in the world was a national government; but in spite of such instances as Sweden and France, national governments are the exception rather than the rule. There are very few nationalities in the world now which are embodied in a sovereign government. There is no sovereign state of England, for example. The English, the Scotch, and the Welsh, all strongly marked and contrasted nationalities, live in an atmosphere of mutual criticism and cordial cooperation. (Consider again the numerous nations in the British Empire, which act in unison through the Imperial Government, imperfect and unrepresentative as it is; consider the dissolving nationalities in the American melting-pot; consider the Prussians and Saxons in the German Empire. What is there in common between an Australian native, a London freethinker, a Bengali villager, a Uganda gentleman, a Rand negro, an Egyptian merchant, and a Singapore Chinaman, that they should all be capable of living as they do under one rule and one peace, and with a common collective policy, and yet be incapable of a slightly larger cooperation with a Frenchman, a New Englander, or a Russian? The Welshman is perhaps the best instance of all, to show how completely participation in a great political synthesis is compatible with intense national peculiarity and self-respect.

But if one looks closely into the objections of these ‘anti-foreign’ alarmists, it will usually become clear that the real prejudice is not a genuine patriotism at all: the objection is not to interference with the realities of national life, but to interference with national aggression and competition, which is quite a different thing. The ‘British’ ultra-patriot, who begins by warning us against the impossibilitv of having ‘foreigners’ interfering in our national life, is presently warning us against the interference of ‘foreigners’ with ’our ′ empire or ‘our’ predominant over-seas trade.

It is curious to see in how many instances certain conventional ideas never properly analyzed, dominate the minds of the critics of the League of Nations project. Many publicists, it becomes evident, think of international relations in terms of ’Powers,′ mysterious entities of a value entirely romantic and diplomatic. International politics are for them only thinkable as a competition of those powers; they see the lives of states as primarily systems of conflict. A ‘power’ to them means the sort of thing which was brought to perfection in Europe in the eighteenth century, in the courts of Versailles, Potsdam, St. Petersburg, and at St. James’s, and it means nothing else in the world to them. It is, in fact, a conspiracy against other and competing powers, centering round an aggressive Foreign Office and availing itself of nationalist prejudice rather than of national self-respect. Patriotism is, indeed, not something that the power represents: it is something upon which the power trades. To this power idea the political life of the last two centuries has schooled many otherwise highly intelligent men and by it their minds are now invincibly circumscribed and fixed. They can disregard the fact that the great majority of men in the world live out of relation to any such government with astonishing ease. The United States, Canada, China, India, Australia, South America, for example, show us masses of mankind whose affairs are not incorporated in any ’power,′ as the word is understood in diplomatic jargon; and quite recently the people of Russia have violently broken away from such an idea of the state, and show small disposition to revert to it. These objectors are in fact thinking still in terms of the seventeenth and eighteenth century in Europe — a very special phase in history. But the fixity of their minds upon this old and almost entirely European idea of international politics as an affair of competitive foreign offices has its value for those who are convinced of the need of a new order of human relationships, because it opens up so clearly the incompatibility with the pressing needs of the present time of the European conceptions of a foreign office and of diplomacy as a secretive chaffering for advantages.

Upon this point we cannot be too clear: it is not nationality that is threatened by the League of Nations, it is this ‘power’ obsession, which used national feeling in an entirely Machiavellian spirit. And this power idea carries with it much more mischief than the threat of sudden war and the attendant necessities of armament. It is about the nuclei of these European power systems that the current conceptions of economic warfare and territorial exploitation have grown. It is to them that we owe the conception of peace as a phase of military preparation during which there is a systematic attempt to put rivals at an economic disadvantage. And it will be clear that an abandonment of the idea of the world as a conflict of powers involves not merely the abandonment of ideas essentially militarist, but also the abandonment of the idea of the world as a conflict of economic systems.

So, as we penetrate these common prepossessions of an age which is now drawing to a close, the positive as compared with the negative side of the League of Nations proposal opens out. Behind the primarily negative project of ’no war upon earth,′ appears as a necessary corollary a new economic phase in history, in which there will be a collective regard for the common weal of mankind. The examination and elaboration of the possibilities of economic world-control, already immensely foreshadowed by the gigantic poolings that have been forced upon the powers allied against Germany, is one of the most rapidly expanding chapters in the study of the League of Nations project.

V

Another considerable body of criticism hostile to the League of Nations proposal is grouped about certain moral facts. Before concluding these introductory remarks, it is advisable to discuss this, not merely in order to answer so much of it as amounts to an argument against the world-league project, but also because it opens out before us the real scope of the League of Nations proposal. There seems to be a disposition in certain quarters to underestimate the scale upon which a League of Nations project can be planned. It is dealt with as if it were a little legal scheme detached from the main body of human life. It seems to be assumed that some little group of ’jurists,′ sitting together in a permanent conference at The Hague or in New York, will be able to divert the whole process of humanity into new channels, to overcome the massive, multitudinous, and tremendous forces that make for armed conflict and warfare among men, and to inaugurate a new era of peace throughout the world.

The change we contemplate here is not to be so easily achieved. It is a project of world-politics, and there is no modest way of treating such a project. It would be better left alone than treated timidly. It is a change in which nations and political and educational svstems are the counters, and about which we must think, if we are to think effectively, in terms of the wealth of nations and millions of men. It is a proposal to change the life and mentality of everyone on earth.

Now the thought of those who direct their attention to the moral probabilities of a world-peace turns largely upon the idea of loyalty. They apprehend man as a creature of intense essential egotism, who has to be taught and trained very painfully and laboriously to unselfishness, and the substitution of great and noble ends for base and narrow ones. They argue that he was in his origins a not very social creature who has been forced by his own inventions into a larger circle of intercourse. He had learned his first unselfishness from his mother in the family group; he had been tamed into devotion by the tribe and his tribal religion; the greater dangers of a solitary life had enforced these subjugations upon him. But he still relapses very readily into base self-seeking. His loyalty to his nation may easily become a mere extension of his personal vanity; his religious faith a cloak for hatred of and base behavior toward unbelievers. In times of peace and security, the great forms in which he lives do so tend to degenerate. And the great justification of war from this point of view is that it creates a phase of national life in which a certain community of sacrifice to a common end, a certain common faithfulness and helpfulness, is exacted as a matter of course from every citizen. Men are called upon to die, and all are called upon to give help and suffer privations. War gives reality to loyalty. It is the fire that makes fine the clay of solidarity. The war-phase has been hitherto a binding and confirming phase in the life of communities, while peace has been a releasing and relaxing phase. And if we are to contemplate a state of the world in which there is to be no warfare, we must be prepared also, these critics argue, for a process of moral disintegration.

The late Professor William James found enough validity in this line of thought to discuss it very seriously. In his essay on ‘The Moral Equivalent of War’ he deals very illuminatingly with this question. He agrees that to relieve the consciousness of ordinary men from the probability of war without substituting any other incentive to devotion, may be a very grave social loss. His own suggestion for giving every citizen a sense of obligation and ownership in the commonwealth for weaving the ideas of loyalty and service, that is, into every life, is to substitute the collective war of mankind against ignorance, confusion, and natural hardships, for the war between man and man; to teach this, not only theoretically, but by the very practical expedient of insisting upon a period of compulsory state service for every citizen, male or female. He proposes to solve at the same time this moral problem and an equally grave social problem by making the unskilled or semi-skilled part of the labor in the (nationalized) mines, in the (nationalized) fisheries, in hospitals, in many types of factory, and so forth a public service. Personal freedom, he insists, has invariably been bought, and must always be bought by responsible participation in the toils and cares of that system of law and service which constitutes the framework of human liberty.

It would be idle to deny the substantial truth in this type of criticism of peace. To recognize it is to sweep out of one’s mind all dreams of a world-peace contrived by a few jurists and influential people in some odd corner of the world’s administrative bureaus. Permanent world-peace must necessarily be a great process and state of affairs, greater, indeed, than any warprocess, because it must anticipate, comprehend, and prevent any warprocess, and demand the understanding, the willing and conscious participation of the great majority of human beings. We, who look to it as a possible thing, are bound not to blind ourselves to, or conceal from others, the gigantic and laborious system of labors, the immense tangle of cooperations, which its establishment involves. If political institutions or social methods stand in the way of this great good for mankind it is fatuous to dream of compromises with them. A world peace organization cannot evade universal relationships.

It is clear that, if a world-league is to be living and enduring, the idea of it and the need and righteousness of its service must be taught by every educational system in the world. It must either be served by, or be in conflict with, every religious organization; it must come into the life of everyone, not to release men and women from loyalty, but to demand it for itself.

The answer to this criticism that the world-peace will release men from service, is therefore, that the world-peace is itself a service. It calls, not as war does, for the deaths, but for that greater gift, the lives, of men. The League of Nations cannot be a little thing; it is either to be a great thing in the world, an overriding idea of a greater state, or nothing. Every state aims ultimately at the production of a sort of man, and it is an idle and a wasteful diplomacy, a pandering to timidities and shams, to pretend that the World-League of Nations is not ultimately a state aiming at that ennobled individual whose city is the world.
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Re: 'The Open Conspiracy': H.G. Wells Plots The World Empire

Postby admin » Wed Nov 06, 2019 12:04 am

The Evolution of H.G. Wells
H.G. Wells by Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie Simon and Schuster, 487 pp., $10
by Greg Lawless
The Harvard Crimson
December 14, 1973

THE FIRST complete biography of Herbert George Wells comes at no better time. With the comet Kohoutek whispering across the winter skies, and new visions of apocalypse conveniently centering themselves around its strange apparition, science is experiencing one of its cyclical, popular questionings. While Kohoutek harkens back to one of Wells's more obscure works, In The Days of The Comet, another more recent scientific popularization revives what was a major issue in Wells's life and works. That is the great debate of nature vs. nurture, genetics vs. environment, Shockley vs. the sane world. For, throughout Wells's works, there is a recurring pattern of ideas which centers around the stark determinism of Darwinian evolution, the possible effects it may have if inferior men continue to breed, and the need for an enlightened (ie. genetically superior) elite to rule the world. This pattern looms large in H.G. Wells, an enlightening--if limited--new biography by Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie.

The biographical approach is exciting. Relying on a thorough investigation of meticulously collected documents, letters, unpublished manuscripts, and personal accounts, the MacKenzies have set out to sketch in detail the growth and development of Wells's ideas. The man behind the ideas is sometimes obscured, but in many cases his overpowering, prolific writings justify the technique, just as their raw energy and wide scope sometimes dwarfed Wells himself in his own day. At times, however, this is slightly annoying--if not downright disconcerting. Wells, after all, led a colorful life, as a pulp-writer, a man of letters, a radical politician, and a libertine par excellence.

The rise of H.G. Wells from a boy in extreme poverty to a man of influence in the early twentieth century is infinitely more intriguing than analogous stories on this side of the Atlantic about Carnegie or Rockefeller. Wells was born in 1866 to a fanatically fundamentalist mother and a relatively impotent cricket-playing father perched ominously close to the bottom rung of a socially immobile ladder of Victorian society. Relying mostly on his raw intelligence, voracious reading habits, and an outstanding ability to cram, Wells was able to avoid the draper's life his mother had so carefully planned for him. 'Bertie' was the youngest child--spoiled, frail, and often "dreamy." Later in life, this same dreamy imagination would spring Wells into the public eye via his scientific romances. Fro the time being, it sparked his curiosity and led to honors grades in school. After a rather torturous two years as a draper's apprentice, he was finally able to find some schooling and, in 1885, gain entrance into London University. It was here that many of Wells's strongest ideas were formulated. T.H. Huxley, one of his teachers in the first year, but by no means his mentor (Wells recounts saying only two words to the man, "Hello, Professor."), was to be a guiding inspiration for the rest of his life. What promised to be a stellar academic career faded quickly the following year when Wells began to find radical politics more interesting than intellectual pursuits. At the same time, inspired by Huxley, he was cutting his teeth on Marxism--Darwin's theory of evolution.

These would prove central to his scientific romances of the 1890s: The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The First Men in the Moon. Wells saw in Darwinism the basic roots of man's decay: natural selection would eventually separate the weak and the strong into two distinct classes. The powerful class would oppressively dominate the subservient one, using it for whatever means it wished. This theme is best seen in The Time Machine, where the cave-dwelling Morlocks lord over the gentle, but inferior Eloi. The War of the Worlds reflects a different kind of Darwinism, where the Martians kill off the "weak and the silly," leaving the earth to begin again, ruled by the strong. The MacKenzies are sensitive enough to perceive Wells's frustrated attempts to synthesize evolution and entropy into apocalypse as a projection of his own sense of personal collapse from chronic lung disease. But this is an exception. They often fail to explore the full influence of his personal life on his work beyond a superficial level.

AS ENGLAND turned towards novelty in both the arts and sciences at the turn of the century, Wells turned more and more towards realistic social prophecy, and a new optimism in which free will and determinism would control Darwinism. In Anticipations he talks of a new "Human Ecology" which could help predict "biological, intellectual, and economic consequences." At the forefront of his "free will" is a new "mass of capable men," engendered by sterilization programs in which mankind can "tolerate no dark corners where the people of the abyss may fester." In A Modern Utopia, these supermen are called Samurai. And even though they rule over a socialist state, it is they--and not the masses--who are the key to the society. His gigantic Outline of History is more Wells than history, as again, nations and cultures rise because of a ruling elite, and fall on account of a natural social selection.

Throughout the thirty years of his scientific romances and prophecies Wells was in a constant state of emotional flux. His first marriage to his cousin, Isabel, in 1893 lasted only two years. He then married his mistress, Amy Robbins, and soon asked her to "accept" his promiscuous ways with other women. She accepted it, but certainly Wells's life was profoundly affected by his short-term infatuations. The MacKenzies explore his wanderlust as one of his deep-seeded conflicts between rationalism and irrationalism--and this seems to make a great deal of sense. Wells always saw in science both a new order that would prove mankind's salvation and the apocalyptic reaper.

BY THE END of his life, Wells had embraced and then rejected his literary friends, Henry James, Arnold Bennett; and his socialist friends in the Fabian Society, including George Bernard Shaw. In 1946, after two world wars, he wrote Mind at the End of its Tether. Here Wells finally resolves his classic conflict: The mind, in the evolutionary process, in the creation of visionary socialist societies, could simply not be counted on at all.

Wells's imagination soared to unequaled heights in the early parts of the twentieth century. But its unfirm grasp of reality and its reliance on magical science--which at times predicted many real things to come--was too shaky. It had to fall. The MacKenzies have captured much of that capitulation in H.G. Wells. In a way, they have missed a lot, too. Their strict chronological progression never really succeeds in making Wells lifelike. He remains, to a certain extent, a flat two-dimensional shadow lurking behind an endless series of documents and letters. His works are too simply explained away by his life. Biographies should give life to their subjects. But perhaps Wells will always be an invisible man.
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Re: 'The Open Conspiracy': H.G. Wells Plots The World Empire

Postby admin » Thu Apr 09, 2020 9:05 am

Part 1 of 2

The Great State
from "An Englishman Looks at the World: Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters
by H.G. Wells
1914

Sec. 1

For many years now I have taken a part in the discussion of Socialism. During that time Socialism has become a more and more ambiguous term. It has seemed to me desirable to clear up my own ideas of social progress and the public side of my life by restating them, and this I have attempted in this essay.

In order to do so it has been convenient to coin two expressions, and to employ them with a certain defined intention. They are firstly: The Normal Social Life, and secondly: The Great State. Throughout this essay these expressions will be used in accordance with the definitions presently to be given, and the fact that they are so used will be emphasised by the employment of capitals. It will be possible for anyone to argue that what is here defined as the Normal Social Life is not the normal social life, and that the Great State is indeed no state at all. That will be an argument outside the range delimited by these definitions.

Now what is intended by the Normal Social Life here is a type of human association and employment, of extreme prevalence and antiquity, which appears to have been the lot of the enormous majority of human beings as far back as history or tradition or the vestiges of material that supply our conceptions of the neolithic period can carry us. It has never been the lot of all humanity at any time, to-day it is perhaps less predominant than it has ever been, yet even to-day it is probably the lot of the greater moiety of mankind.

Essentially this type of association presents a localised community, a community of which the greater proportion of the individuals are engaged more or less directly in the cultivation of the land. With this there is also associated the grazing or herding over wider or more restricted areas, belonging either collectively or discretely to the community, of sheep, cattle, goats, or swine, and almost always the domestic fowl is commensal with man in this life. The cultivated land at least is usually assigned, temporarily or inalienably, as property to specific individuals, and the individuals are grouped in generally monogamic families of which the father is the head. Essentially the social unit is the Family, and even where, as in Mohammedan countries, there is no legal or customary restriction upon polygamy, monogamy still prevails as the ordinary way of living. Unmarried women are not esteemed, and children are desired. According to the dangers or securities of the region, the nature of the cultivation and the temperament of the people, this community is scattered either widely in separate steadings or drawn together into villages. At one extreme, over large areas of thin pasture this agricultural community may verge on the nomadic; at another, in proximity to consuming markets, it may present the concentration of intensive culture. There may be an adjacent Wild supplying wood, and perhaps controlled by a simple forestry. The law that holds this community together is largely traditional and customary and almost always as its primordial bond there is some sort of temple and some sort of priest. Typically, the temple is devoted to a local god or a localised saint, and its position indicates the central point of the locality, its assembly place and its market. Associated with the agriculture there are usually a few imperfectly specialised tradesmen, a smith, a garment-maker perhaps, a basket-maker or potter, who group about the church or temple. The community may maintain itself in a state of complete isolation, but more usually there are tracks or roads to the centres of adjacent communities, and a certain drift of travel, a certain trade in non-essential things. In the fundamentals of life this normal community is independent and self-subsisting, and where it is not beginning to be modified by the novel forces of the new times it produces its own food and drink, its own clothing, and largely intermarries within its limits.

This in general terms is what is here intended by the phrase the Normal Social Life. It is still the substantial part of the rural life of all Europe and most Asia and Africa, and it has been the life of the great majority of human beings for immemorial years. It is the root life. It rests upon the soil, and from that soil below and its reaction to the seasons and the moods of the sky overhead have grown most of the traditions, institutions, sentiments, beliefs, superstitions, and fundamental songs and stories of mankind.

But since the very dawn of history at least this Normal Social Life has never been the whole complete life of mankind. Quite apart from the marginal life of the savage hunter, there have been a number of forces and influences within men and women and without, that have produced abnormal and surplus ways of living, supplemental, additional, and even antagonistic to this normal scheme.

And first as to the forces within men and women. Long as it has lasted, almost universal as it has been, the human being has never yet achieved a perfect adaptation to the needs of the Normal Social Life. He has attained nothing of that frictionless fitting to the needs of association one finds in the bee or the ant. Curiosity, deep stirrings to wander, the still more ancient inheritance of the hunter, a recurrent distaste for labour, and resentment against the necessary subjugations of family life have always been a straining force within the agricultural community. The increase of population during periods of prosperity has led at the touch of bad seasons and adversity to the desperate reliefs of war and the invasion of alien localities. And the nomadic and adventurous spirit of man found reliefs and opportunities more particularly along the shores of great rivers and inland seas. Trade and travel began, at first only a trade in adventitious things, in metals and rare objects and luxuries and slaves. With trade came writing and money; the inventions of debt and rent, usury and tribute. History finds already in its beginnings a thin network of trading and slaving flung over the world of the Normal Social Life, a network whose strands are the early roads, whose knots are the first towns and the first courts.

Indeed, all recorded history is in a sense the history of these surplus and supplemental activities of mankind. The Normal Social Life flowed on in its immemorial fashion, using no letters, needing no records, leaving no history. Then, a little minority, bulking disproportionately in the record, come the trader, the sailor, the slave, the landlord and the tax-compeller, the townsman and the king.

All written history is the story of a minority and their peculiar and abnormal affairs. Save in so far as it notes great natural catastrophes and tells of the spreading or retrocession of human life through changes of climate and physical conditions it resolves itself into an account of a series of attacks and modifications and supplements made by excessive and superfluous forces engendered within the community upon the Normal Social Life. The very invention of writing is a part of those modifying developments. The Normal Social Life is essentially illiterate and traditional. The Normal Social Life is as mute as the standing crops; it is as seasonal and cyclic as nature herself, and reaches towards the future only an intimation of continual repetitions.

Now this human over-life may take either beneficent or maleficent or neutral aspects towards the general life of humanity. It may present itself as law and pacification, as a positive addition and superstructure to the Normal Social Life, as roads and markets and cities, as courts and unifying monarchies, as helpful and directing religious organisations, as literature and art and science and philosophy, reflecting back upon the individual in the Normal Social Life from which it arose, a gilding and refreshment of new and wider interests and added pleasures and resources. One may define certain phases in the history of various countries when this was the state of affairs, when a countryside of prosperous communities with a healthy family life and a wide distribution of property, animated by roads and towns and unified by a generally intelligible religious belief, lived in a transitory but satisfactory harmony under a sympathetic government. I take it that this is the condition to which the minds of such original and vigorous reactionary thinkers as Mr. G.K. Chesterton and Mr. Hilaire Belloc for example turn, as being the most desirable state of mankind.

But the general effect of history is to present these phases as phases of exceptional good luck, and to show the surplus forces of humanity as on the whole antagonistic to any such equilibrium with the Normal Social Life. To open the book of history haphazard is, most commonly, to open it at a page where the surplus forces appear to be in more or less destructive conflict with the Normal Social Life. One opens at the depopulation of Italy by the aggressive great estates of the Roman Empire, at the impoverishment of the French peasantry by a too centralised monarchy before the revolution, or at the huge degenerative growth of the great industrial towns of western Europe in the nineteenth century. Or again one opens at destructive wars. One sees these surplus forces over and above the Normal Social Life working towards unstable concentrations of population, to centralisation of government, to migrations and conflicts upon a large scale; one discovers the process developing into a phase of social fragmentation and destruction and then, unless the whole country has been wasted down to its very soil, the Normal Social Life returns as the heath and furze and grass return after the burning of a common. But it never returns in precisely its old form. The surplus forces have always produced some traceable change; the rhythm is a little altered. As between the Gallic peasant before the Roman conquest, the peasant of the Gallic province, the Carlovingian peasant, the French peasant of the thirteenth, the seventeenth, and the twentieth centuries, there is, in spite of a general uniformity of life, of a common atmosphere of cows, hens, dung, toil, ploughing, economy, and domestic intimacy, an effect of accumulating generalising influences and of wider relevancies. And the oscillations of empires and kingdoms, religious movements, wars, invasions, settlements leave upon the mind an impression that the surplus life of mankind, the less-localised life of mankind, that life of mankind which is not directly connected with the soil but which has become more or less detached from and independent of it, is becoming proportionately more important in relation to the Normal Social Life. It is as if a different way of living was emerging from the Normal Social Life and freeing itself from its traditions and limitations.

And this is more particularly the effect upon the mind of a review of the history of the past two hundred years. The little speculative activities of the alchemist and natural philosopher, the little economic experiments of the acquisitive and enterprising landed proprietor, favoured by unprecedented periods of security and freedom, have passed into a new phase of extraordinary productivity. They had added preposterously and continue to add on a gigantic scale and without any evident limits to the continuation of their additions, to the resources of humanity. To the strength of horses and men and slaves has been added the power of machines and the possibility of economies that were once incredible The Normal Social Life has been overshadowed as it has never been overshadowed before by the concentrations and achievements of the surplus life. Vast new possibilities open to the race; the traditional life of mankind, its traditional systems of association, are challenged and threatened; and all the social thought, all the political activity of our time turns in reality upon the conflict of this ancient system whose essentials we have here defined and termed the Normal Social Life with the still vague and formless impulses that seem destined either to involve it and the race in a final destruction or to replace it by some new and probably more elaborate method of human association.

Because there is the following difference between the action of the surplus forces as we see them to-day and as they appeared before the outbreak of physical science and mechanism. Then it seemed clearly necessary that whatever social and political organisation developed, it must needs; rest ultimately on the tiller of the soil, the agricultural holding, and the Normal Social Life. But now even in agriculture huge wholesale methods have appeared. They are declared to be destructive; but it is quite conceivable that they may be made ultimately as recuperative as that small agriculture which has hitherto been the inevitable social basis. If that is so, then the new ways of living may not simply impose themselves in a growing proportion upon the Normal Social Life, but they may even oust it and replace it altogether. Or they may oust it and fail to replace it. In the newer countries the Normal Social Life does not appear to establish itself at all rapidly. No real peasantry appears in either America or Australia; and in the older countries, unless there is the most elaborate legislative and fiscal protection, the peasant population wanes before the large farm, the estate, and overseas production.

Now most of the political and social discussion of the last hundred years may be regarded and rephrased as an attempt to apprehend this defensive struggle of the Normal Social Life against waxing novelty and innovation and to give a direction and guidance to all of us who participate. And it is very largely a matter of temperament and free choice still, just where we shall decide to place ourselves. Let us consider some of the key words of contemporary thought, such as Liberalism, Individualism, Socialism, in the light of this broad generalisation we have made; and then we shall find it easier to explain our intention in employing as a second technicality the phrase of The Great State as an opposite to the Normal Social Life, which we have already defined.

Sec. 2

The Normal Social Life has been defined as one based on agriculture, traditional and essentially unchanging. It has needed no toleration and displayed no toleration for novelty and strangeness. Its beliefs have been on such a nature as to justify and sustain itself, and it has had an intrinsic hostility to any other beliefs. The God of its community has been a jealous god even when he was only a tribal and local god. Only very occasionally in history until the coming of the modern period do we find any human community relaxing from this ancient and more normal state of entire intolerance towards ideas or practices other than its own. When toleration and a receptive attitude towards alien ideas was manifested in the Old World, it was at some trading centre or political centre; new ideas and new religions came by water along the trade routes. And such toleration as there was rarely extended to active teaching and propaganda. Even in liberal Athens the hemlock was in the last resort at the service of the ancient gods and the ancient morals against the sceptical critic.

But with the steady development of innovating forces in human affairs there has actually grown up a cult of receptivity, a readiness for new ideas, a faith in the probable truth of novelties. Liberalism—I do not, of course, refer in any way to the political party which makes this profession—is essentially anti-traditionalism; its tendency is to commit for trial any institution or belief that is brought before it. It is the accuser and antagonist of all the fixed and ancient values and imperatives and prohibitions of the Normal Social Life. And growing up in relation to Liberalism and sustained by it is the great body of scientific knowledge, which professes at least to be absolutely undogmatic and perpetually on its trial and under assay and re-examination.

Now a very large part of the advanced thought of the past century is no more than the confused negation of the broad beliefs and institutions which have been the heritage and social basis of humanity for immemorial years. This is as true of the extremest Individualism as of the extremest Socialism. The former denies that element of legal and customary control which has always subdued the individual to the needs of the Normal Social Life, and the latter that qualified independence of distributed property which is the basis of family autonomy. Both are movements against the ancient life, and nothing is more absurd than the misrepresentation which presents either as a conservative force. They are two divergent schools with a common disposition to reject the old and turn towards the new. The Individualist professes a faith for which he has no rational evidence, that the mere abandonment of traditions and controls must ultimately produce a new and beautiful social order; while the Socialist, with an equal liberalism, regards the outlook with a kind of hopeful dread, and insists upon an elaborate readjustment, a new and untried scheme of social organisation to replace the shattered and weakening Normal Social Life.

Both these movements, and, indeed, all movements that are not movements for the subjugation of innovation and the restoration of tradition, are vague in the prospect they contemplate. They produce no definite forecasts of the quality of the future towards which they so confidently indicate the way. But this is less true of modern socialism than of its antithesis, and it becomes less and less true as socialism, under an enormous torrent of criticism, slowly washes itself clean from the mass of partial statement, hasty misstatement, sheer error and presumption that obscured its first emergence.

But it is well to be very clear upon one point at this stage, and that is, that this present time is not a battle-ground between individualism and socialism; it is a battle-ground between the Normal Social Life on the one hand and a complex of forces on the other which seek a form of replacement and seem partially to find it in these and other doctrines.

Nearly all contemporary thinkers who are not too muddled to be assignable fall into one of three classes, of which the third we shall distinguish is the largest and most various and divergent. It will be convenient to say a little of each of these classes before proceeding to a more particular account of the third. Our analysis will cut across many accepted classifications, but there will be ample justification for this rearrangement. All of them may be dealt with quite justly as accepting the general account of the historical process which is here given.

Then first we must distinguish a series of writers and thinkers which one may call—the word conservative being already politically assigned—the Conservators.

These are people who really do consider the Normal Social Life as the only proper and desirable life for the great mass of humanity, and they are fully prepared to subordinate all exceptional and surplus lives to the moral standards and limitations that arise naturally out of the Normal Social Life. They desire a state in which property is widely distributed, a community of independent families protected by law and an intelligent democratic statecraft from the economic aggressions of large accumulations and linked by a common religion. Their attitude to the forces of change is necessarily a hostile attitude. They are disposed to regard innovations in transit and machinery as undesirable, and even mischievous disturbances of a wholesome equilibrium. They are at least unfriendly to any organisation of scientific research, and scornful of the pretensions of science. Criticisms of the methods of logic, scepticism of the more widely diffused human beliefs, they would classify as insanity. Two able English writers, Mr. G.K. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc, have given the clearest expression to this system of ideals, and stated an admirable case for it. They present a conception of vinous, loudly singing, earthy, toiling, custom-ruled, wholesome, and insanitary men; they are pagan in the sense that their hearts are with the villagers and not with the townsmen, Christian in the spirit of the parish priest. There are no other Conservators so clear-headed and consistent. But their teaching is merely the logical expression of an enormous amount of conservative feeling. Vast multitudes of less lucid minds share their hostility to novelty and research; hate, dread, and are eager to despise science, and glow responsive to the warm, familiar expressions of primordial feelings and immemorial prejudices The rural conservative, the liberal of the allotments and small-holdings type, Mr. Roosevelt—in his Western-farmer, philoprogenitive phase as distinguished from the phase of his more imperialist moments—all present themselves as essentially Conservators as seekers after and preservers of the Normal Social Life.

So, too, do Socialists of the William Morris type. The mind of William Morris was profoundly reactionary He hated the whole trend of later nineteenth-century modernism with the hatred natural to a man of considerable scholarship and intense aesthetic sensibilities. His mind turned, exactly as Mr. Belloc's turns, to the finished and enriched Normal Social Life of western Europe in the middle ages, but, unlike Mr. Belloc, he believed that, given private ownership of land and the ordinary materials of life, there must necessarily be an aggregatory process, usury, expropriation, the development of an exploiting wealthy class. He believed profit was the devil. His "News from Nowhere" pictures a communism that amounted in fact to little more than a system of private ownership of farms and trades without money or any buying and selling, in an atmosphere of geniality, generosity, and mutual helpfulness. Mr. Belloc, with a harder grip upon the realities of life, would have the widest distribution of proprietorship, with an alert democratic government continually legislating against the protean reappearances of usury and accumulation and attacking, breaking up, and redistributing any large unanticipated bodies of wealth that appeared. But both men are equally set towards the Normal Social Life, and equally enemies of the New. The so-called "socialist" land legislation of New Zealand again is a tentative towards the realisation of the same school of ideas: great estates are to be automatically broken up, property is to be kept disseminated; a vast amount of political speaking and writing in America and throughout the world enforces one's impression of the widespread influence of Conservator ideals.

Of course, it is inevitable that phases of prosperity for the Normal Social Life will lead to phases of over-population and scarcity, there will be occasional famines and occasional pestilences and plethoras of vitality leading to the blood-letting of war. I suppose Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc at least have the courage of their opinions, and are prepared to say that such things always have been and always must be; they are part of the jolly rhythms of the human lot under the sun, and are to be taken with the harvest home and love-making and the peaceful ending of honoured lives as an integral part of the unending drama of mankind.

Sec. 3

Now opposed to the Conservators are all those who do not regard contemporary humanity as a final thing nor the Normal Social Life as the inevitable basis of human continuity. They believe in secular change, in Progress, in a future for our species differing continually more from its past. On the whole, they are prepared for the gradual disentanglement of men from the Normal Social Life altogether, and they look for new ways of living and new methods of human association with a certain adventurous hopefulness.

Now, this second large class does not so much admit of subdivision into two as present a great variety of intermediaries between two extremes. I propose to give distinctive names to these extremes, with the very clear proviso that they are not antagonised, and that the great multitude of this second, anti-conservator class, this liberal, more novel class modern conditions have produced falls between them, and is neither the one nor the other, but partaking in various degrees of both. On the one hand, then, we have that type of mind which is irritated by and distrustful of all collective proceedings which is profoundly distrustful of churches and states, which is expressed essentially by Individualism. The Individualist appears to regard the extensive disintegrations of the Normal Social Life that are going on to-day with an extreme hopefulness. Whatever is ugly or harsh in modern industrialism or in the novel social development of our time he seems to consider as a necessary aspect of a process of selection and survival, whose tendencies are on the whole inevitably satisfactory. The future welfare of man he believes in effect may be trusted to the spontaneous and planless activities of people of goodwill, and nothing but state intervention can effectively impede its attainment. And curiously close to this extreme optimistic school in its moral quality and logical consequences, though contrasting widely in the sinister gloom of its spirit, is the socialism of Karl Marx. He declared the contemporary world to be a great process of financial aggrandisement and general expropriation, of increasing power for the few and of increasing hardship and misery for the many, a process that would go on until at last a crisis of unendurable tension would be reached and the social revolution ensue. The world had, in fact, to be worse before it could hope to be better. He contemplated a continually exacerbated Class War, with a millennium of extraordinary vagueness beyond as the reward of the victorious workers. His common quality with the Individualist lies in his repudiation of and antagonism to plans and arrangements, in his belief in the overriding power of Law. Their common influence is the discouragement of collective understandings upon the basis of the existing state. Both converge in practice upon laissez faire. I would therefore lump them together under the term of Planless Progressives, and I would contrast with them those types which believe supremely in systematised purpose.

The purposeful and systematic types, in common with the Individualist and Marxist, regard the Normal Social Life, for all the many thousands of years behind it, as a phase, and as a phase which is now passing, in human experience; and they are prepared for a future society that may be ultimately different right down to its essential relationships from the human past. But they also believe that the forces that have been assailing and disintegrating the Normal Social Life, which have been, on the one hand, producing great accumulations of wealth, private freedom, and ill-defined, irresponsible and socially dangerous power, and, on the other, labour hordes, for the most part urban, without any property or outlook except continuous toil and anxiety, which in England have substituted a dischargeable agricultural labourer for the independent peasant almost completely, and in America seem to be arresting any general development of the Normal Social Life at all, are forces of wide and indefinite possibility that need to be controlled by a collective effort implying a collective design, deflected from merely injurious consequences and organised for a new human welfare upon new lines. They agree with that class of thinking I have distinguished as the Conservators in their recognition of vast contemporary disorders and their denial of the essential beneficence of change. But while the former seem to regard all novelty and innovation as a mere inundation to be met, banked back, defeated and survived, these more hopeful and adventurous minds would rather regard contemporary change as amounting on the whole to the tumultuous and almost catastrophic opening-up of possible new channels, the violent opportunity of vast, deep, new ways to great unprecedented human ends, ends that are neither feared nor evaded.

Now while the Conservators are continually talking of the "eternal facts" of human life and human nature and falling back upon a conception of permanence that is continually less true as our perspectives extend, these others are full of the conception of adaptation, of deliberate change in relationship and institution to meet changing needs. I would suggest for them, therefore, as opposed to the Conservators and contrasted with the Planless Progressives, the name of Constructors. They are the extreme right, as it were, while the Planless Progressives are the extreme left of Anti-Conservator thought.
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Re: 'The Open Conspiracy': H.G. Wells Plots The World Empire

Postby admin » Thu Apr 09, 2020 9:06 am

Part 2 of 2

I believe that these distinctions I have made cover practically every clear form of contemporary thinking, and are a better and more helpful classification than any now current. But, of course, nearly every individual nowadays is at least a little confused, and will be found to wobble in the course even of a brief discussion between one attitude and the other. This is a separation of opinions rather than of persons. And particularly that word Socialism has become so vague and incoherent that for a man to call himself a socialist nowadays is to give no indication whatever whether he is a Conservator like William Morris, a non-Constructor like Karl Marx, or a Constructor of any of half a dozen different schools. On the whole, however, modern socialism tends to fall towards the Constructor wing. So, too, do those various movements in England and Germany and France called variously nationalist and imperialist, and so do the American civic and social reformers. Under the same heading must come such attempts to give the vague impulses of Syndicalism a concrete definition as the "Guild Socialism" of Mr. Orage. All these movements are agreed that the world is progressive towards a novel and unprecedented social order, not necessarily and fatally better, and that it needs organised and even institutional guidance thither, however much they differ as to the form that order should assume.

For the greater portion of a century socialism has been before the world, and it is not perhaps premature to attempt a word or so of analysis of that great movement in the new terms we are here employing. The origins of the socialist idea were complex and multifarious never at any time has it succeeded in separating out a statement of itself that was at once simple, complete and acceptable to any large proportion of those who call themselves socialists. But always it has pointed to two or three definite things. The first of these is that unlimited freedoms of private property, with increasing facilities of exchange, combination, and aggrandisement, become more and more dangerous to human liberty by the expropriation and reduction to private wages slavery of larger and larger proportions of the population. Every school of socialism states this in some more or less complete form, however divergent the remedial methods suggested by the different schools. And, next, every school of socialism accepts the concentration of management and property as necessary, and declines to contemplate what is the typical Conservator remedy, its re-fragmentation. Accordingly it sets up not only against the large private owner, but against owners generally, the idea of a public proprietor, the State, which shall hold in the collective interest. But where the earlier socialisms stopped short, and where to this day socialism is vague, divided, and unprepared, is upon the psychological problems involved in that new and largely unprecedented form of proprietorship, and upon the still more subtle problems of its attainment. These are vast, and profoundly, widely, and multitudinously difficult problems, and it was natural and inevitable that the earlier socialists in the first enthusiasm of their idea should minimise these difficulties, pretend in the fullness of their faith that partial answers to objections were complete answers, and display the common weaknesses of honest propaganda the whole world over. Socialism is now old enough to know better. Few modern socialists present their faith as a complete panacea, and most are now setting to work in earnest upon these long-shirked preliminary problems of human interaction through which the vital problem of a collective head and brain can alone be approached.

A considerable proportion of the socialist movement remains, as it has been from the first, vaguely democratic. It points to collective ownership with no indication of the administrative scheme it contemplates to realise that intention. Necessarily it remains a formless claim without hands to take hold of the thing it desires. Indeed in a large number of cases it is scarcely more than a resentful consciousness in the expropriated masses of social disintegration. It spends its force very largely in mere revenges upon property as such, attacks simply destructive by reason of the absence of any definite ulterior scheme. It is an ill-equipped and planless belligerent who must destroy whatever he captures because he can neither use nor take away. A council of democratic socialists in possession of London would be as capable of an orderly and sustained administration as the Anabaptists in Munster. But the discomforts and disorders of our present planless system do tend steadily to the development of this crude socialistic spirit in the mass of the proletariat; merely vindictive attacks upon property, sabotage, and the general strike are the logical and inevitable consequences of an uncontrolled concentration of property in a few hands, and such things must and will go on, the deep undertow in the deliquescence of the Normal Social Life, until a new justice, a new scheme of compensations and satisfactions is attained, or the Normal Social Life re-emerges.

Fabian socialism was the first systematic attempt to meet the fatal absence of administrative schemes in the earlier socialisms. It can scarcely be regarded now as anything but an interesting failure, but a failure that has all the educational value of a first reconnaissance into unexplored territory. Starting from that attack on aggregating property, which is the common starting-point of all socialist projects, the Fabians, appalled at the obvious difficulties of honest confiscation and an open transfer from private to public hands, conceived the extraordinary idea of filching property for the state. A small body of people of extreme astuteness were to bring about the municipalisation and nationalisation first of this great system of property and then of that, in a manner so artful that the millionaires were to wake up one morning at last, and behold, they would find themselves poor men! For a decade or more Mr. Pease, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb, Mrs. Besant, Dr. Lawson Dodd, and their associates of the London Fabian Society, did pit their wits and ability, or at any rate the wits and ability of their leisure moments, against the embattled capitalists of England and the world, in this complicated and delicate enterprise, without any apparent diminution of the larger accumulations of wealth. But in addition they developed another side of Fabianism, still more subtle, which professed to be a kind of restoration in kind of property to the proletariat and in this direction they were more successful. A dexterous use, they decided, was to be made of the Poor Law, the public health authority, the education authority, and building regulations and so forth, to create, so to speak, a communism of the lower levels. The mass of people whom the forces of change had expropriated were to be given a certain minimum of food, shelter, education, and sanitation, and this, the socialists were assured, could be used as the thin end of the wedge towards a complete communism. The minimum, once established, could obviously be raised continually until either everybody had what they needed, or the resources of society gave out and set a limit to the process.

This second method of attack brought the Fabian movement into co-operation with a large amount of benevolent and constructive influence outside the socialist ranks altogether. Few wealthy people really grudge the poor a share of the necessities of life, and most are quite willing to assist in projects for such a distribution. But while these schemes naturally involved a very great amount of regulation and regimentation of the affairs of the poor, the Fabian Society fell away more and more from its associated proposals for the socialisation of the rich. The Fabian project changed steadily in character until at last it ceased to be in any sense antagonistic to wealth as such. If the lion did not exactly lie down with the lamb, at any rate the man with the gun and the alleged social mad dog returned very peaceably together. The Fabian hunt was up.

Great financiers contributed generously to a School of Economics that had been founded with moneys left to the Fabian Society by earlier enthusiasts for socialist propaganda and education. It remained for Mr. Belloc to point the moral of the whole development with a phrase, to note that Fabianism no longer aimed at the socialisation of the whole community, but only at the socialisation of the poor. The first really complete project for a new social order to replace the Normal Social Life was before the world, and this project was the compulsory regimentation of the workers and the complete state control of labour under a new plutocracy. Our present chaos was to be organised into a Servile State.

Sec. 4

Now to many of us who found the general spirit of the socialist movement at least hopeful and attractive and sympathetic, this would be an almost tragic conclusion, did we believe that Fabianism was anything more than the first experiment in planning—and one almost inevitably shallow and presumptuous—of the long series that may be necessary before a clear light breaks upon the road humanity must follow. But we decline to be forced by this one intellectual fiasco towards the laissez faire of the Individualist and the Marxist, or to accept the Normal Social Life with its atmosphere of hens and cows and dung, its incessant toil, its servitude of women, and its endless repetitions as the only tolerable life conceivable for the bulk of mankind—as the ultimate life, that is, of mankind. With less arrogance and confidence, but it may be with a firmer faith, we declare that we believe a more spacious social order than any that exists or ever has existed, a Peace of the World in which there is an almost universal freedom, health, happiness, and well-being and which contains the seeds of a still greater future, is possible to mankind. We propose to begin again with the recognition of those same difficulties the Fabians first realised. But we do not propose to organise a society, form a group for the control of the two chief political parties, bring about "socialism" in twenty-five years, or do anything beyond contributing in our place and measure to that constructive discussion whose real magnitude we now begin to realise.

We have faith in a possible future, but it is a faith that makes the quality of that future entirely dependent upon the strength and clearness of purpose that this present time can produce. We do not believe the greater social state is inevitable.

Yet there is, we hold, a certain qualified inevitability about this greater social state because we believe any social state not affording a general contentment, a general freedom, and a general and increasing fullness of life, must sooner or later collapse and disintegrate again, and revert more or less completely to the Normal Social Life, and because we believe the Normal Social Life is itself thick-sown with the seeds of fresh beginnings. The Normal Social Life has never at any time been absolutely permanent, always it has carried within itself the germs of enterprise and adventure and exchanges that finally attack its stability. The superimposed social order of to-day, such as it is, with its huge development of expropriated labour, and the schemes of the later Fabians to fix this state of affairs in an organised form and render it plausibly tolerable, seem also doomed to accumulate catastrophic tensions. Bureaucratic schemes for establishing the regular lifelong subordination of a labouring class, enlivened though they may be by frequent inspection, disciplinary treatment during seasons of unemployment, compulsory temperance, free medical attendance, and a cheap and shallow elementary education fail to satisfy the restless cravings in the heart of man. They are cravings that even the baffling methods of the most ingeniously worked Conciliation Boards cannot permanently restrain. The drift of any Servile State must be towards a class revolt, paralysing sabotage and a general strike. The more rigid and complete the Servile State becomes, the more thorough will be its ultimate failure. Its fate is decay or explosion. From its dibris we shall either revert to the Normal Social Life and begin again the long struggle towards that ampler, happier, juster arrangement of human affairs which we of this book, at any rate, believe to be possible, or we shall pass into the twilight of mankind.

This greater social life we put, then, as the only real alternative to the Normal Social Life from which man is continually escaping. For it we do not propose to use the expressions the "socialist state" or "socialism," because we believe those terms have now by constant confused use become so battered and bent and discoloured by irrelevant associations as to be rather misleading than expressive. We propose to use the term The Great State to express this ideal of a social system no longer localised, no longer immediately tied to and conditioned by the cultivation of the land, world-wide in its interests and outlook and catholic in its tolerance and sympathy, a system of great individual freedom with a universal understanding among its citizens of a collective thought and purpose.

Now, the difficulties that lie in the way of humanity in its complex and toilsome journey through the coming centuries towards this Great State are fundamentally difficulties of adaptation and adjustment. To no conceivable social state is man inherently fitted: he is a creature of jealousy and suspicion, unstable, restless, acquisitive, aggressive, intractable, and of a most subtle and nimble dishonesty. Moreover, he is imaginative, adventurous, and inventive. His nature and instincts are as much in conflict with the necessary restrictions and subjugation of the Normal Social Life as they are likely to be with any other social net that necessity may weave about him. But the Normal Social Life has this advantage that it has a vast accumulated moral tradition and a minutely worked-out material method. All the fundamental institutions have arisen in relation to it and are adapted to its conditions. To revert to it after any phase of social chaos and distress is and will continue for many years to be the path of least resistance for perplexed humanity.

This conception of the Great State, on the other hand, is still altogether unsubstantial. It is a project as dream-like to-day as electric lighting, electric traction, or aviation would have been in the year 1850. In 1850 a man reasonably conversant with the physical science of his time could have declared with a very considerable confidence that, given a certain measure of persistence and social security, these things were more likely to be attained than not in the course of the next century. But such a prophecy was conditional on the preliminary accumulation of a considerable amount of knowledge, on many experiments and failures. Had the world of 1850, by some wave of impulse, placed all its resources in the hands of the ablest scientific man alive, and asked him to produce a practicable paying electric vehicle before 1852, at best he would have produced some clumsy, curious toy, more probably he would have failed altogether; and, similarly, if the whole population of the world came to the present writer and promised meekly to do whatever it was told, we should find ourselves still very largely at a loss in our project for a millennium. Yet just as nearly every man at work upon Voltaic electricity in 1850 knew that he was preparing for electric traction, so do I know quite certainly, in spite of a whole row of unsolved problems before me, that I am working towards the Great State.

Let me briefly recapitulate the main problems which have to be attacked in the attempt to realise the outline of the Great State. At the base of the whole order there must be some method of agricultural production, and if the agricultural labourer and cottager and the ancient life of the small householder on the holding, a life laborious, prolific, illiterate, limited, and in immediate contact with the land used, is to recede and disappear it must recede and disappear before methods upon a much larger scale, employing wholesale machinery and involving great economies. It is alleged by modern writers that the permanent residence of the cultivator in close relation to his ground is a legacy from the days of cumbrous and expensive transit, that the great proportion of farm work is seasonal, and that a migration to and fro between rural and urban conditions would be entirely practicable in a largely planned community. The agricultural population could move out of town into an open-air life as the spring approached, and return for spending, pleasure, and education as the days shortened. Already something of this sort occurs under extremely unfavourable conditions in the movement of the fruit and hop pickers from the east end of London into Kent, but that is a mere hint of the extended picnic which a broadly planned cultivation might afford. A fully developed civilisation, employing machines in the hands of highly skilled men, will minimise toil to the very utmost, no man will shove where a machine can shove, or carry where a machine can carry; but there will remain, more particularly in the summer, a vast amount of hand operations, invigorating and even attractive to the urban population Given short hours, good pay, and all the jolly amusement in the evening camp that a free, happy, and intelligent people will develop for themselves, and there will be little difficulty about this particular class of work to differentiate it from any other sort of necessary labour.

One passes, therefore, with no definite transition from the root problem of agricultural production in the Great State to the wider problem of labour in general.

A glance at the countryside conjures up a picture of extensive tracts being cultivated on a wholesale scale, of skilled men directing great ploughing, sowing, and reaping plants, steering cattle and sheep about carefully designed enclosures, constructing channels and guiding sewage towards its proper destination on the fields, and then of added crowds of genial people coming out to spray trees and plants, pick and sort and pack fruits. But who are these people? Why are they in particular doing this for the community? Is our Great State still to have a majority of people glad to do commonplace work for mediocre wages, and will there be other individuals who will ride by on the roads, sympathetically, no doubt, but with a secret sense of superiority? So one opens the general problem of the organisation for labour.

I am careful here to write "for labour" and not "of Labour," because it is entirely against the spirit of the Great State that any section of the people should be set aside as a class to do most of the monotonous, laborious, and uneventful things for the community. That is practically the present arrangement, and that, with a quickened sense of the need of breaking people in to such a life, is the ideal of the bureaucratic Servile State to which, in common with the Conservators, we are bitterly opposed. And here I know I am at my most difficult, most speculative, and most revolutionary point. We who look to the Great State as the present aim of human progress believe a state may solve its economic problem without any section whatever of the community being condemned to lifelong labour. And contemporary events, the phenomena of recent strikes, the phenomena of sabotage, carry out the suggestion that in a community where nearly everyone reads extensively travels about, sees the charm and variety in the lives of prosperous and leisurely people, no class is going to submit permanently to modern labour conditions without extreme resistance, even after the most elaborate Labour Conciliation schemes and social minima are established Things are altogether too stimulating to the imagination nowadays. Of all impossible social dreams that belief in tranquillised and submissive and virtuous Labour is the wildest of all. No sort of modern men will stand it. They will as a class do any vivid and disastrous thing rather than stand it. Even the illiterate peasant will only endure lifelong toil under the stimulus of private ownership and with the consolations of religion; and the typical modern worker has neither the one nor the other. For a time, indeed, for a generation or so even, a labour mass may be fooled or coerced, but in the end it will break out against its subjection, even if it breaks out to a general social catastrophe.

We have, in fact, to invent for the Great State, if we are to suppose any Great State at all, an economic method without any specific labour class. If we cannot do so, we had better throw ourselves in with the Conservators forthwith, for they are right and we are absurd. Adhesion to the conception of the Great State involves adhesion to the belief that the amount of regular labour, skilled and unskilled, required to produce everything necessary for everyone living in its highly elaborate civilisation may, under modern conditions, with the help of scientific economy and power-producing machinery, be reduced to so small a number of working hours per head in proportion to the average life of the citizen, as to be met as regards the greater moiety of it by the payment of wages over and above the gratuitous share of each individual in the general output; and as regards the residue, a residue of rough, disagreeable, and monotonous operations, by some form of conscription, which will demand a year or so, let us say, of each person's life for the public service. If we reflect that in the contemporary state there is already food, shelter, and clothing of a sort for everyone, in spite of the fact that enormous numbers of people do no productive work at all because they are too well off, that great numbers are out of work, great numbers by bad nutrition and training incapable of work, and that an enormous amount of the work actually done is the overlapping production of competitive trade and work upon such politically necessary but socially useless things as Dreadnoughts, it becomes clear that the absolutely unavoidable labour in a modern community and its ratio to the available vitality must be of very small account indeed. But all this has still to be worked out even in the most general terms. An intelligent science of economics should afford standards and technicalities and systematised facts upon which to base an estimate. The point was raised a quarter of a century ago by Morris in his "News from Nowhere," and indeed it was already discussed by More in his "Utopia." Our contemporary economics is, however, still a foolish, pretentious pseudo-science, a festering mass of assumptions about buying and selling and wages-paying, and one would as soon consult Bradshaw or the works of Dumas as our orthodox professors of economics for any light upon this fundamental matter.

Moreover, we believe that there is a real disposition to work in human beings, and that in a well-equipped community, in which no one was under an unavoidable urgency to work, the greater proportion of productive operations could be made sufficiently attractive to make them desirable occupations. As for the irreducible residue of undesirable toil, I owe to my friend the late Professor William James this suggestion of a general conscription and a period of public service for everyone, a suggestion which greatly occupied his thoughts during the last years of his life. He was profoundly convinced of the high educational and disciplinary value of universal compulsory military service, and of the need of something more than a sentimental ideal of duty in public life. He would have had the whole population taught in the schools and prepared for this year (or whatever period it had to be) of patient and heroic labour, the men for the mines, the fisheries, the sanitary services, railway routine, the women for hospital, and perhaps educational work, and so forth. He believed such a service would permeate the whole state with a sense of civic obligation....

But behind all these conceivable triumphs of scientific adjustment and direction lies the infinitely greater difficulty on our way to the Great State, the difficulty of direction. What sort of people are going to distribute the work of the community, decide what is or is not to be done, determine wages, initiate enterprises; and under what sort of criticism, checks, and controls are they going to do this delicate and extensive work? With this we open the whole problem of government, administration and officialdom.

The Marxist and the democratic socialist generally shirk this riddle altogether; the Fabian conception of a bureaucracy, official to the extent of being a distinct class and cult, exists only as a starting-point for healthy repudiations. Whatever else may be worked out in the subtler answers our later time prepares, nothing can be clearer than that the necessary machinery of government must be elaborately organised to prevent the development of a managing caste in permanent conspiracy, tacit or expressed, against the normal man. Quite apart from the danger of unsympathetic and fatally irritating government there can be little or no doubt that the method of making men officials for life is quite the worst way of getting official duties done. Officialdom is a species of incompetence. This rather priggish, teachable, and well-behaved sort of boy, who is attracted by the prospect of assured income and a pension to win his way into the Civil Service, and who then by varied assiduities rises to a sort of timidly vindictive importance, is the last person to whom we would willingly entrust the vital interests of a nation. We want people who know about life at large, who will come to the public service seasoned by experience, not people who have specialised and acquired that sort of knowledge which is called, in much the same spirit of qualification as one speaks of German Silver, Expert Knowledge. It is clear our public servants and officials must be so only for their periods of service. They must be taught by life, and not "trained" by pedagogues. In every continuing job there is a time when one is crude and blundering, a time, the best time, when one is full of the freshness and happiness of doing well, and a time when routine has largely replaced the stimulus of novelty. The Great State will, I feel convinced, regard changes in occupation as a proper circumstance in the life of every citizen; it will value a certain amateurishness in its service, and prefer it to the trite omniscience of the stale official. On that score of the necessity or versatility, if on no other score, I am flatly antagonistic to the conceptions of "Guild Socialism" which have arisen recently out of the impact of Mr. Penty and Syndicalism upon the uneasy intelligence of Mr. Orage.

And since the Fabian socialists have created a widespread belief that in their projected state every man will be necessarily a public servant or a public pupil because the state will be the only employer and the only educator, it is necessary to point out that the Great State presupposes neither the one nor the other. It is a form of liberty and not a form of enslavement. We agree with the older forms of socialism in supposing an initial proprietary independence in every citizen. The citizen is a shareholder in the state. Above that and after that, he works if he chooses. But if he likes to live on his minimum and do nothing—though such a type of character is scarcely conceivable—he can. His earning is his own surplus. Above the basal economics of the Great State we assume with confidence there will be a huge surplus of free spending upon extra-collective ends. Public organisations, for example, may distribute impartially and possibly even print and make ink and paper for the newspapers in the Great State, but they will certainly not own them. Only doctrine-driven men have ever ventured to think they would. Nor will the state control writers and artists, for example, nor the stage—though it may build and own theatres—the tailor, the dressmaker, the restaurant cook, an enormous multitude of other busy workers-for-preferences. In the Great State of the future, as in the life of the more prosperous classes of to-day, the greater proportion of occupations and activities will be private and free.

I would like to underline in the most emphatic way that it is possible to have this Great State, essentially socialistic, owning and running the land and all the great public services, sustaining everybody in absolute freedom at a certain minimum of comfort and well-being, and still leaving most of the interests, amusements, and adornments of the individual life, and all sorts of collective concerns, social and political discussion, religious worship, philosophy, and the like to the free personal initiatives of entirely unofficial people.

This still leaves the problem of systematic knowledge and research, and all the associated problems of aesthetic, moral, and intellectual initiative to be worked out in detail; but at least it dispels the nightmare of a collective mind organised as a branch of the civil service, with authors, critics, artists, scientific investigators appointed in a phrensy of wire-pulling—as nowadays the British state appoints its bishops for the care of its collective soul.

Let me now indicate how these general views affect the problem of family organisation and the problem of women's freedom. In the Normal Social Life the position of women is easily defined. They are subordinated but important. The citizenship rests with the man, and the woman's relation to the community as a whole is through a man. But within that limitation her functions as mother, wife, and home-maker are cardinal. It is one of the entirely unforeseen consequences that have arisen from the decay of the Normal Social Life and its autonomous home that great numbers of women while still subordinate have become profoundly unimportant They have ceased to a very large extent to bear children, they have dropped most of their home-making arts, they no longer nurse nor educate such children as they have, and they have taken on no new functions that compensate for these dwindling activities of the domestic interior. That subjugation which is a vital condition to the Normal Social Life does not seem to be necessary to the Great State. It may or it may not be necessary. And here we enter upon the most difficult of all our problems. The whole spirit of the Great State is against any avoidable subjugation; but the whole spirit of that science which will animate the Great State forbids us to ignore woman's functional and temperamental differences. A new status has still to be invented for women, a Feminine Citizenship differing in certain respects from the normal masculine citizenship. Its conditions remain to be worked out. We have indeed to work out an entire new system of relations between men and women, that will be free from servitude, aggression, provocation, or parasitism. The public Endowment of Motherhood as such may perhaps be the first broad suggestion of the quality of this new status. A new type of family, a mutual alliance in the place of a subjugation, is perhaps the most startling of all the conceptions which confront us directly we turn ourselves definitely towards the Great State.

And as our conception of the Great State grows, so we shall begin to realise the nature of the problem of transition, the problem of what we may best do in the confusion of the present time to elucidate and render practicable this new phase of human organisation. Of one thing there can be no doubt, that whatever increases thought and knowledge moves towards our goal; and equally certain is it that nothing leads thither that tampers with the freedom of spirit, the independence of soul in common men and women. In many directions, therefore, the believer in the Great State will display a jealous watchfulness of contemporary developments rather than a premature constructiveness. We must watch wealth; but quite as necessary it is to watch the legislator, who mistakes propaganda for progress and class exasperation to satisfy class vindictiveness for construction. Supremely important is it to keep discussion open, to tolerate no limitation on the freedom of speech, writing, art and book distribution, and to sustain the utmost liberty of criticism upon all contemporary institutions and processes.

This briefly is the programme of problems and effort to which my idea of the Great State, as the goal of contemporary progress, leads me.

The diagram on p. 131 shows compactly the gist of the preceding discussion; it gives the view of social development upon which I base all my political conceptions.
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