'The Open Conspiracy': H.G. Wells Plots The World Empire
by Michele Steinberg
Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 33, Number 12
March 24, 2006
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-- A Modern Utopia, by H. G. Wells
-- Tales of Space and Time, by H. G. Wells
-- The History of the Fabian Society, by Edward R. Pease
-- The Open Conspiracy, by H. G. Wells
-- The Time Machine: An Invention, by H. G. Wells
-- The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells
-- The Way the World Is Going: Guesses & Forecasts of The Years Ahead, by H.G. Wells
-- Rabindranath Tagore: In Conversation with H. G. Wells, Excerpted from: A Tagore Reader, edited by Amiya Chakravarty
-- H. G. Wells, by Wikipedia
-- Political views of H.G. Wells, by Wikipedia
-- 'The Open Conspiracy': H.G. Wells Plots The World Empire, by Michele Steinberg
-- Celebrating HG Wells’s role in the creation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights: Wells was highly prophetic. But, asks Ali Smith, could he have foreseen that the fundamental freedoms h, set out in The Rights of Man would be under attack 75 years later?, by Ali Smith
-- H.G. Wells' Interview With Stalin Helped Change the Fundamental Principles of Liberalism, by Malcolm Cowley
-- Icarus, or The Future of Science, by Bertrand Russell
-- James Joyce: H.G. Wells reviews "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", by H.G. Wells
-- New Republic, by Spartacus Educational
-- One of Wells’s Worlds, by John Maynard Keynes
-- The Godfather of American Liberalism: H. G. Wells: novelist, historian, authoritarian, anticapitalist, eugenicist, and advisor to presidents, by Fred Siegel
-- The Idea of a League of Nations: "What has happened is essentially this, that the natural limitations on warfare which have existed hitherto appear to have broken down.", by Herbert George Wells
-- Utopian Pessimist: The works, world view, and women of H. G. Wells, by Adam Kirsch
This is reprinted from "Zbigniew Brzezinski and September 11th," a Special Report issued in February 2002 by the LaRouche in 2004 Presidential campaign committee.
In 1928, the leading British Round Table strategist, H.G. Wells, wrote The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company).
Milner was the creator of the Round Table Group (since this is but another name for the Kindergarten) and remained in close personal contact with it for the rest of his life. In the sketch of Milner in the Dictionary of National Biography, written by Basil Williams of the Kindergarten, we read: "He was always ready to discuss national questions on a non-party basis, joining with former members of his South African 'Kindergarten' in their 'moot,' from which originated the political review, The Round Table, and in a more heterogeneous society, the 'Coefficients,' where he discussed social and imperial problems with such curiously assorted members as L. S. Amery, H. G. Wells, (Lord) Haldane, Sir Edward Grey, (Sir) Michael Sadler, Bernard Shaw, J. L. Garvin, William Pember Reeves, and W. A. S. Hewins.""
-- The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, by Carroll Quigley
The Open Conspiracy is Wells' Mein Kampf -- a recipe for how to establish a world government that would, over time, perhaps even over generations, recruit individuals and set up institutions to create a world "directorate" to run a "new world order."
In Great Britain we writers have been invited to place ourselves at the disposal of some Ministry of Information, that is to say at the disposal of hitherto obscure and unrepresentative individuals, and write under its advice. Officials from the British Council and the Conservative Party Headquarters appear in key positions in this Ministry of Information. That curious and little advertised organisation I have just mentioned, the creation I am told of Lord Lloyd, that British Council, sends emissaries abroad, writers, well-dressed women and other cultural personages, to lecture, charm and win over foreign appreciation for British characteristics, for British scenery, British political virtues and so forth. Somehow this is supposed to help something or other. Quietly, unobtrusively, this has gone on. Maybe these sample British give unauthorised assurances but probably they do little positive harm. But they ought not to be employed at all. Any government propaganda is contrary to the essential spirit of democracy.During the First World War, Chesterton, [H. G.] Wells, and others of the New Age crowd worked for Wellington House, Britain's propaganda unit under Charles Masterman, which was taken over by Lord Beaverbrook [aka Max Aitken] in 1917.
-- The CCF and the God of Thunder Cult, by Stanley Ezrol & Jeffrey Steinberg
The expression of opinion and collective thought should be outside the range of government activities altogether. It should be the work of free individuals whose prominence is dependent upon the response and support of the general mind.
-- The New World Order: Whether it is attainable, how it can be attained, and what sort of world a world at peace will have to be, by H. G. Wells
Wells does not stand in opposition to fascism or communism, he merely sees these forms as experiments or immature expressions of the "new order" which will be replaced by his vision of the new order.
The financial and economic life of mankind has become world-wide, and it is suffering a vast demoralisation by the universal insecurity in monetary standards. There is no evidence anywhere of democracy’s ability to tackle this difficult and urgent problem. The world needs a common money....It can only get a practically common money through the cooperation of governments....
Economic life, too, has ceased to be manageable through comparatively small businesses run as individual adventures. Control of staple products, systematic regulated production and distribution in the case of such commodities as coal are urgently needed. These things extend beyond national limits....Democracy seems incapable of producing politicians competent to direct these big affairs. Private business alone is too chaotic and individualistic to direct them....
The disposition to push aside parliamentary governments spreads daily.... Russia... China... Italy... Spain... Poland and Hungary... Greece.... Turkey....
It seemed as though Great Britain also might join the comity of nations weary of politicians....
Outside of America extraordinarily few people still believe in political democracy at all except as a make-shift to stand in the way of worse things, tyrannies, oligarchies and the like horrors.... A number of us do imagine that democracy might be preserved, as a vastly different and more efficient method of government... with very much smaller parliamentary bodies... and hand over the decisive control of things to a body of prominent citizens.... elections by suddenly and fortuitously appointed jurymen instead of by entire constituencies....
The essential weakness of democracy... is that the great mass of human beings are not sufficiently intelligent nor sufficiently interested to follow political issues at all... the Sovereign People is roused to a temporary sporting interest, and votes according to panic or prejudice. It does not even vote according to its interests....
Every extension of the suffrage in Great Britain has brought in more masses of utterly indifferent people to vote....
Political democracy is still apparently a going concern in America, least chastened of continents, but elsewhere there seems very little go left in it. And I do not think that we begin yet to realise the significance of those new associations of which Communism and Fascism are the best-known types, and the Kuomintang....
I find the Communist Party a very wonderful and instructive fact in my world.... Economic and social doctrine apart, I recognise very enviable and admirable qualities in the Communist Party both in Russia and in England..... it is very largely composed of quite young people who give themselves to an astonishing extent to what they believe to be the social, political and economic rebirth of the world. They are, the most of them, animated by an intense, essentially religious passion. They toil mentally and make great sacrifices. They shape their lives to fit their faith..... They cooperate with one another with a remarkably willing discipline. Religious is the only word I know to describe their enthusiasm, and there is not a religious teacher in the world who would not gladly inoculate the youth of his congregation with the courage, spirit, and energy these Communists display — if he could get it separated from the mind and spirit of Marx.... They go to prison and even, in some Eastern countries, to death very courageously.
And if you are loth to hear so much good of the Communist Party, perhaps the Fascists are more to your taste.... there, too, in bands of no very considerable multitude, is a devotion and a spirit that can give over a great country into their hands.
I want to suggest that we may be only in the opening phase of this sort of political religiosity, both on the left side and on the right side, and that in its development lies the answer to the question of what is to come after democracy.... These experiments seem to show already quite new possibilities of concentrated directive power.
-- Doubts of Democracy: New Experiments in Government, from "The Way The World is Going," by H. G. Wells
"The Open Conspiracy is not so much a socialism," says Wells, "as a more comprehensive scheme that has eaten and assimilated whatever was digestible of its socialist forebears." He even suggests that "young people" be incorporated into the Open Conspiracy through organizations like "the Italian fasci."
The race process as a whole has come home to me with unusual vividness....
We are in the beginning of an age whose broad characteristics may be conveyed some day by calling it The Age of Democracy under Revision....
That Ascendency of Democracy has culminated; and like some wave that breaks upon a beach, its end follows close upon its culmination.
Now what do we mean by this word Democracy?....
All human beings are of equal value in the sight of God.... All men are equal before the law... One man's money is as good as another's.
This implies a repudiation of caste, of inherent rank and function, of all privileges and all fixed subordinations. It is equalitarian or rebellious. And it is mildly paradoxical in the fact that, by insisting upon the importance of all individualities, it tends to restrain the exaltation of particular individuals, and by exalting all individuals to an equal level, it subordinates all individuals to the mass....
Democracy to many minds will also involve the challenging and repudiation of authority....
In politics it produced government by elected representative assemblies — elected by an ever-widening constituency of voters....
The crowd of individuals and its interplay have become everything. Great ideas that bind people together into any form of collective life are disregarded. Great religious ideas, great political ideas and developments are not there in any living, fermenting, debatable form.... You think at once of a picture of humanity like a market-place, like a fair, like the high-road to anywhere on a busy day....
The disappearance, so to speak, of the whole world in a crowd of people.... What is everybody's business is nobody’s business.... Modern Democracy is not a permanent form of political and social life, but a phase of immense dissolution.....
If we turn to painting or to music we find all over this period the same effect of release — if you like — detachment, anyhow, from broad constructive conceptions and any sort of synthesis. There was very little detached painting in the old world. It was a part of something else. It decorated a building, it subserved a religious or political as well as a decorative purpose.... But with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries painting became more and more liberated, said good-bye to the altar-piece and the palace and set out upon a life of its own. Now our painters are pure anarchists. They paint what pleases them for the sake of painting. They paint with a total disregard of any collective reality....
So too music has broken loose. In the old world it was relevant and generally subordinate.... Music which, apart from its beauty, has no sort of collective meaning, no social object at all....
The chief forms of human expression during the past age enables us to see in all of them Democracy as a great process of loosening of bonds and general disintegration....
In the realms of political, literary and artistic expression Democracy meant fragmentation and reduction to unorganised masses...
The proposition that any man is as important as any man has come hard against certain mental and material realities. History for the last hundred years or so has been largely the story of that collision. This assertion of human equality has come against the severest stresses at the boundaries where language meets language, and at the geographical or social frontiers of dissimilar races. There the common man, who has been willing to break down all the boundaries between himself and his superiors, discovers deep instinctive dispositions to call a halt and draw the line.... The Age of Democracy has also been the Age of Nationalism. Never in the whole history of mankind have national and racial antagonisms been so acute and conscious, so massive, powerful and dangerous, as they have become during the ascent of Democracy.... Still more edifying are the fluctuations of the Labour movement in such countries as Australia and South Africa with regard to yellow and brown immigration and the black vote.
But nationalism is not the greatest force that Modern Democracy has evoked against itself in its ascent. Far more fundamental is the synthetic drive in economic life, the enormous material pressure making for the replacement of individual and small competitive businesses by great and unifying enterprises....
These great crystallisations of business — so large as to become at last monopolies — are plainly due to the releases of Democracy, the freedom of science, invention, experiment and enterprise, the lack of control and restriction the ascent of Democracy has involved.... But the main expression of this conflict between synthesis and analysis in the democratic age has been the struggle for and against Socialism.... Socialism is the attempt to democratise economic life....
Since the War, there has been a growing distrust of and discontent with the politicians and the political methods evolved by Parliamentary Democracy.
In two great Latin countries ... In Russia ... In China .... the magic has gone out of the method of government by general elections....
Democracy is entering upon a phase of revision in which Parliaments and parliamentary bodies and political life as we know it to-day are destined to disappear....
For a number of generations the democratic process ruling the world has meant nothing but release, enfranchisement for freedom, the breaking down of controls and restraints and obstacles. There has been a worldwide detachment of individuals from codes and controls, subjugations and responsibilities, functions and duties. I suggest that this process of dissolution is at an end, and that mankind is faced — is challenged — by the need for reorganisation and reorientation, political and social and intellectual, quite beyond the power of the negligent common voter and his politicians and the happy-go-lucky education and literature on which our minds are fed....
How futile so far have been the attempts of our modern democratic Governments and communities to find solutions, to ... the problem of war.... I take it that an enormous majority of humanity now wants no more war.
Yet consider how feeble have been the efforts of any Government since 1918 to set up more than the flimsiest paper barriers against war. The sabres still rattle in Europe....
Modern Democracy has no power to handle... the monetary question.... A stable money basis of world-wide validity is essential.... And nowhere, in any Democracy, has the mass of voters shown the slightest understanding of or ability to grasp the processes which threw them out of employment, made their poor savings evaporate, and snatched the necessaries of life out of their reach....
Through changes in methods of transport and the advance of science and invention, economic life has become world-wide and a certain economic unity is being imposed willy-nilly upon the globe.... the method of the small individual manufacturer and trader, the method even of the moderate-sized competing company, the method even of national groups, tend to be superseded, in the case of all our staple supplies, by combinations upon a universal scale. The master problem before us all, before our race, is how to achieve this world economic unity, how to produce a system of world controls with as little blind experiment as possible, without the sacrifice of countless millions of whole generations, in the throes of this inevitable reconstruction. How to establish enough political unity in the world to ensure peace; how to establish enough political unity to save industry and trade from becoming the mere preliminaries to a gamble with the exchange; how to establish enough political unity to control and direct the distribution of raw products, employment and manufactured goods about the earth....
The root of the trouble with Modern Democracy ... is the indifference, ignorance and incapacity of the common man towards public affairs....
Our modern democratic Governments reveal as clearly that the onset of Modern Democracy did not mean a transfer of power from the few to the many, but a disappearance of power from the world.... Faced with gigantic constructive needs of ever-increasing urgency, political Democracy fails. It cannot produce inventive and original Governments; it cannot produce resolute Governments; it cannot produce understanding, far-thinking Governments. Its utmost act of will is the capricious or peevish dismissal of Governments by a general election....
We need now more definite direction and government in human affairs, on a scale and of a quality commensurate with the three mighty problems our race has to face.... Are there any signs of a new, more decisive and more vigorously constructive form of government in our world? I submit there are, and on these signs I rest my anticipations of the Age of Democracy under Revision that is dawning upon us.... I would particularly draw your attention [to] the Communist Party and Fascism....
I am anti-Communist and anti-Fascist. But what I am discussing now is not the mental content of these two movements, but their quality and spirit as organisations....
They are both mainly composed of youngish people.... The movement dominates the entire life. The individual gives himself — or herself — to the movement in a spirit essentially religious. It enters into the life and into the conscience as few religions do nowadays. Communism indeed claims that it is a complete substitute for religion. Everything else is to be subordinated to the ends of the movement....
Neither in Italy nor Russia do the masses of the population seem to resent the dictatorship of these associations....
I am building my expectation of a new phase in human affairs upon the belief that there is a profoundly serious minority in the mass of our generally indifferent species.... They are the salt of the earth, these people capable of devotion and of living lives for remote and mighty ends....
More than twenty years ago, in a book called “A Modern Utopia,” when there was not a fact on earth to support me, I sketched a World State ruled by a self-devoted organisation of volunteers. To-day I can recall that conception of a future society and I can appeal to Russia, China, Italy and much that is astir everywhere, to substantiate that possibility.... What is there to prevent a great politico-religious drive for social and world unity taking hold everywhere of the active and adventurous minority of mankind....
We are already in the beginning of the phase of Democratic Synthesis, a great religious-spirited phase. If you choose to link it to Christianity or Islam or Buddhism or any existing democratic religion; or to Communism, that religious substitute; or call it in itself the Religion of Progress, nothing that I am saying here to-night will stand in your way....
If this thesis is right, the novel and the drama should be changing. They should both be bringing in great issues, a quasi-religious attitude to world affairs as a living part of the human story.... It should be turning decisively towards responsibility, to what I might call creative propaganda. It should be permeated by the question: “What do these lives make for?"
-- Democracy Under Revision, from "The Way The World is Going," by H. G. Wells
No, Wells has one essential enemy that the Open Conspiracy must destroy: that is, the sovereign nation-state. The goal of its destruction is his life's work.
As Wells put it, "This is my religion .... This book states as plainly and clearly as possible the essential ideas of my life, the perspectives of my world. My other writings, with hardly an exception, explore, try over, illuminate, comment upon or flower out of the essential matter that I here attempt at last to strip bare to its foundations and state unmistakably .... Here are my directive aims and the criteria of all I do .... [It is] a scheme for all human requirements."
Wells sets out the means to accomplish three ghastly goals, all in the name of ending war and poverty, to "save" man from himself:
• End the nation-state forever, replacing it with a world government run by the "Atlantic" elite: "The Open Conspiracy rests upon a disrespect for nationality, and there is no reason why it should tolerate noxious or obstructive governments because they hold their own in this or that patch of human territory. It lies within the power of the Atlantic communities to impose peace upon the world and secure unimpeded movement and free speech from end to end of the earth. This is a fact on which the Open Conspiracy must insist."
But, Wells cautions, the Open Conspiracy might have to make war in order to end war. He explains that the Open Conspiracy's commitment to world peace and ending war does not mean an exclusion of soldiers, warriors, and military means. Rather, the question is to whom might these warriors be loyal. It may be necessary for the Open Conspiracy to use "enlightened" warriors: "From the outset, the Open Conspiracy will set its face against militarism [but] the anticipatory repudiation of military service need not necessarily involve a denial of the need of military action on behalf of the world commonweal, for the suppression of national brigandage, nor need it prevent the military training of members of the Open Conspiracy .... Our loyalty to our current government, we would intimate, is subject to its sane and adult behavior."
• Control human population to a limit set by a "world directorate" created by this elite. The means to be used for this population control would be "science" (eugenics, sterilization, and birth control); and total economic control by the world "directorate" of all credit generation, and of all distribution of economic staples needed for human survival (food, water, and shelter).
The Open Conspiracy "turns to biology for ... the regulation of quantity and a controlled distribution of human population of the world." And without this degree of control, the human race is doomed. So instead of the General Welfare of the U.S. Constitution, Wells suggests a selective welfare where the world directorate eliminates population growth in order to perfect the race. This is not just a material necessity, explains Wells, but larger, for under the Open Conspiracy "[man] will not be left with his soul tangled, haunted by monstrous and irrational fears and a prey to malicious impulse .... He will feel better, will better, think better, see, taste, and hear better than men do now. All these things are plainly possible for him. They pass out of his tormented desire now, they elude and mock him, because chance, confusion, and squalor rule his life. All the gifts of destiny are overlaid and lost to him. He must still suspect and fear."
The statesman, both for himself and others, must recognise ... the necessity for real and imaginary aggregations to sustain men in their practical service of the order of the world. He must be a sociologist; he must study the whole science of aggregations in relation to that World State to which his reason and his maturest thought direct him. He must lend himself to the development of aggregatory ideas that favour the civilising process, and he must do his best to promote the disintegration of aggregations and the effacement of aggregatory ideas, that keep men narrow and unreasonably prejudiced one against another....
The natural man does not feel he is aggregating at all, unless he aggregates against something. He refers himself to the tribe; he is loyal to the tribe, and quite inseparably he fears or dislikes those others outside the tribe. The tribe is always at least defensively hostile and usually actively hostile to humanity beyond the aggregation....
One finds among the civilised peoples of the world certain broad types of aggregatory idea. There are, firstly, the national ideas, ideas which, in their perfection, require a uniformity of physical and mental type, a common idiom, a common religion, a distinctive style of costume, decoration, and thought, and a compact organisation acting with complete external unity.... And I will confess and point out that my own detachment from these delusions is so imperfect and discontinuous that in another passage I have committed myself to a short assertion of the exceptionally noble quality of the English imagination... I am constantly gratified by flattering untruths about English superiority which I should reject indignantly were the application bluntly personal, and I am ever ready to believe the scenery of England, the poetry of England, even the decoration and music of England, in some mystic and impregnable way, the best. This habit of intensifying all class definitions, and particularly those in which one has a personal interest, is in the very constitution of man's mind. It is part of the defect of that instrument.... And a too consistent attack on it may lead simply to its inversion, to a vindictively pro-foreigner attitude that is equally unwise.
The second sort of aggregatory ideas, running very often across the boundaries of national ideas and in conflict with them, are religious ideas.... There was, and there remains to this day, a profound disregard of local dialect and race in the Roman Catholic tradition, which has made that Church a persistently disintegrating influence in national life. Equally spacious and equally regardless of tongues and peoples is the great Arabic-speaking religion of Mahomet....
True to the law that all human aggregation involves the development of a spirit of opposition to whatever is external to the aggregation, extraordinary intensifications of racial definition are going on; the vileness, the inhumanity, the incompatibility of alien races is being steadily exaggerated. The natural tendency of every human being towards a stupid conceit in himself and his kind, a stupid depreciation of all unlikeness, is traded upon by this bastard science.... These new arbitrary and unsubstantial race prejudices become daily more formidable. They are shaping policies and modifying laws, and they will certainly be responsible for a large proportion of the wars, hardships, and cruelties the immediate future holds in store for our earth.
No generalisations about race are too extravagant for the inflamed credulity of the present time. No attempt is ever made to distinguish differences in inherent quality—the true racial differences—from artificial differences due to culture.....
It surely needs at least the gifts and training of a first-class novelist, combined with a sedulous patience that probably cannot be hoped for in combination with these, to gauge the all-round differences between man and man.... And then consider the sort of people who pronounce judgments on the moral and intellectual capacity of the negro, the Malay, or the Chinaman. You have missionaries, native schoolmasters, employers of coolies, traders, simple downright men, who scarcely suspect the existence of any sources of error in their verdicts, who are incapable of understanding the difference between what is innate and what is acquired, much less of distinguishing them in their interplay....But all such questions are illuminated as soon as we recognise the nature of the spiritual essence which lies at the back of our blood. Who can deny that this question is closely linked to that of race, which at the present time is once more coming markedly to the front? Yet this question of race is one that we can never understand until we understand the mysteries of the blood and of the results accruing from the mingling of the blood of different races. And finally, there is yet one other question, the importance of which is becoming more and more acute as we endeavour to extricate ourselves from the hitherto aimless methods of dealing with it, and seek to approach it in its more comprehensive bearings. This problem is that of colonisation, which crops up wherever civilised races come into contact with the uncivilised: namely -- To what extent are uncivilised peoples capable of becoming civilised? How can a negro or an utterly barbaric savage become civilised? And in what way ought we to deal with them? And here we have to consider not only the feelings due to a vague morality, but we are also confronted by great, serious, and vital problems of existence itself.
Those who are not aware of the conditions governing a people -- whether it be on the up- or down-grade of its evolution, and whether the one or the other is a matter conditioned by its blood -- such people as these will, indeed, be unlikely to hit on the right mode of introducing civilisation to an alien race. These are all matters which arise as soon as the Blood Question is touched upon....
At the present time everything in a man's environment is impressed upon his blood; hence the environment fashions the inner man in accordance with the outer world. In the case of primitive man it was that which was contained within the body that was more fully expressed in the blood. In those early times the recollection of ancestral experiences was inherited, and, along with this, good or evil tendencies. In the blood of the descendants were to be traced the effects of the ancestors' tendencies. But, when the blood was mixed through exogamy, this close connection with ancestors was severed, and man began to live his own personal life. He began to regulate his moral tendencies according to what he experienced in his own personal life. Thus, in an unmixed blood is expressed the power of the ancestral life, and in a mixed blood the power of personal experience....
When two groups of people come into contact, as is the case in colonisation, then those who are acquainted with the conditions of evolution are able to foretell whether or no an alien form of civilisation can be assimilated by the others. Take, for example, a people that is the product of its environment, into whose blood this environment has built itself, and try to graft upon such a people a new form of civilisation. The thing is impossible. This is the reason why certain aboriginal peoples have to go under, as soon as colonists come to their particular parts of the world.
It is from this point of view that the question will have to be considered, and the idea that changes are capable of being forced upon all and sundry will in time cease to be upheld, for it is useless to demand from blood more than it can endure....
Whoever, therefore, would master a man, must first master that man's blood. This must be borne in mind if any advance is to be made in practical life. For example, the individuality of a people may be destroyed if, when colonising, you demand from its blood more than it can bear, for in the blood the ego is expressed. Beauty and truth possess a man only when they possess his blood.
-- The Occult Significance of Blood, by Rudolf SteinerThe Utopian experiment, humble as it is, can, I think, throw some light on these mighty problems. The relations between the type and the various sub-types, between the type and the individual, between the sub-type and the individual - whether in plant or beast or man - are matters which could not be handled within the limits of this book, and which I have therefore as far as possible ignored. Nor have I attempted to deal with the difficult problems that are presented by the existence of races, such as the Negro, which seem to be far below the normal level of human development. There is, however, in the vast region of thought which these and kindred problems open out to us, one by-way which I must be allowed to follow for a while.
The wild bullace is, I believe, the ancestor of many of our yellow plums. In other words, bullacehood can develop into plumhood, and even into the perfection of plumhood. Similarly human nature can develop into something so high above the normal level of human nature that it might almost seem to belong to another genus. But there is a difference between the two cases. The bullace ideal is in the individual bullace tree. So, in a sense, is the plum ideal. But the latter cannot be realised, or even approached, by the individual bullace tree. It cannot be realised, or even approached, by the bullace species except through a long course of culture and breeding.
-- What Is and What Might Be: A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular, by Edmond Holmes
For my own part I am disposed to discount all adverse judgments and all statements of insurmountable differences between race and race.... Here or there is a brutish or evil face, but you can find as brutish and evil in the Strand on any afternoon. There are differences no doubt, but fundamental incompatibilities—no!....
A great and increasing number of people are persuaded that “half-breeds” are peculiarly evil creatures—as hunchbacks and bastards were supposed to be in the middle ages.... It may be that most “half-breeds” are failures in life, but that proves nothing. They are, in an enormous number of cases, illegitimate and outcast from the normal education of either race; they are brought up in homes that are the battle-grounds of conflicting cultures; they labour under a heavy premium of disadvantage....
Suppose, then, for a moment, that there is an all-round inferior race; a Modern Utopia is under the hard logic of life, and it would have to exterminate such a race as quickly as it could. On the whole, the Fijian device seems the least cruel. But Utopia would do that without any clumsiness of race distinction, in exactly the same manner, and by the same machinery, as it exterminates all its own defective and inferior strains; that is to say, as we have already discussed in Chapter the Fifth, § 1, by its marriage laws, and by the laws of the minimum wage. That extinction need never be discriminatory. If any of the race did, after all, prove to be fit to survive, they would survive—they would be picked out with a sure and automatic justice from the over-ready condemnation of all their kind.
Is there, however, an all-round inferior race in the world? Even the Australian black-fellow is, perhaps, not quite so entirely eligible for extinction as a good, wholesome, horse-racing, sheep-farming Australian white may think. These queer little races, the black-fellows, the Pigmies, the Bushmen, may have their little gifts, a greater keenness, a greater fineness of this sense or that, a quaintness of the imagination or what not, that may serve as their little unique addition to the totality of our Utopian civilisation. We are supposing that every individual alive on earth is alive in Utopia, and so all the surviving “black-fellows” are there. Every one of them in Utopia has had what none have had on earth, a fair education and fair treatment, justice, and opportunity. Suppose that the common idea is right about the general inferiority of these people, then it would follow that in Utopia most of them are childless, and working at or about the minimum wage, and some will have passed out of all possibility of offspring under the hand of the offended law; but still—cannot we imagine some few of these little people—whom you must suppose neither naked nor clothed in the European style, but robed in the Utopian fashion—may have found some delicate art to practise, some peculiar sort of carving, for example, that justifies God in creating them? Utopia has sound sanitary laws, sound social laws, sound economic laws; what harm are these people going to do?....
And, indeed, coming along that terrace in Utopia, I see a little figure, a little bright-eyed, bearded man, inky black, frizzy haired, and clad in a white tunic and black hose, and with a mantle of lemon yellow wrapped about his shoulders. He walks, as most Utopians walk, as though he had reason to be proud of something, as though he had no reason to be afraid of anything in the world. He carries a portfolio in his hand....
When you say Chinaman, you think of a creature with a pigtail, long nails, and insanitary habits, and when you say negro you think of a filthy-headed, black creature in an old hat. You do this because your imagination is too feeble to disentangle the inherent qualities of a thing from its habitual associations....
Because the proportion of undesirables is higher among negroes, that does not justify a sweeping condemnation. You may have to condemn most, but why all? There may be—neither of us knows enough to deny—negroes who are handsome, capable, courageous.”...
It would seem that the ideal of the British Liberals and of the American Democrats is to favour the existence of just as many petty, loosely allied, or quite independent nationalities as possible, just as many languages as possible, to deprecate armies and all controls, and to trust to the innate goodness of disorder and the powers of an ardent sentimentality to keep the world clean and sweet. The Liberals will not face the plain consequence that such a state of affairs is hopelessly unstable, that it involves the maximum risk of war with the minimum of permanent benefit and public order. They will not reflect that the stars in their courses rule inexorably against it. It is a vague, impossible ideal, with a rude sort of unworldly moral beauty....
Neither of these two schools of policy, neither the international laisser faire of the Liberals, nor “hustle to the top” Imperialism, promise any reality of permanent progress for the world of men. They are the resort, the moral reference, of those who will not think frankly and exhaustively over the whole field of this question....
It would be so easy to bring about a world peace within a few decades, was there but the will for it among men!... There are the common people and the subject peoples to be educated and drilled, to be led to a common speech and a common literature, to be assimilated and made citizens....
How foolish and dangerous it is still to sustain linguistic differences and custom houses, and all sorts of foolish and irritating distinctions between their various citizens! Why should not all these peoples agree to teach some common language, French, for example, in their common schools, or to teach each other's languages reciprocally? Why should they not aim at a common literature, and bring their various common laws, their marriage laws, and so on, into uniformity? Why should they not work for a uniform minimum of labour conditions through all their communities? Why, then, should they not—except in the interests of a few rascal plutocrats—trade freely and exchange their citizenship freely throughout their common boundaries? No doubt there are difficulties to be found, but they are quite finite difficulties. What is there to prevent a parallel movement of all the civilised Powers in the world towards a common ideal and assimilation?
Stupidity—nothing but stupidity, a stupid brute jealousy, aimless and unjustifiable.
-- Race in Utopia, from "A Modern Utopia," by H. G. Wells
• Eliminate forever the "illusion" that man is made in the image of God, and as such, has a capacity for the Good. Instead, Wells insists that man is an "imperfect animal": jealous, rageful, easy to anger, and "not to be trusted in the dark."
"Man is a malicious animal," says Wells, with a "common disposition to be stupid, indolent, habitual and defensive." In man, the creative impulses are weaker forces than "acute destructive ones." Human nature is destructive, he insists, explaining:
"To make is a long and wearisome business, with many arrests and disappointments, but to break gives an instant thrill. We all know something of the delight of the bang. Such impulses must be controlled by the world directorate."