H. G. Wells

“ Many people never grow up out of the obsessions of a royalist training, and so it is that the collapse of the Hohenzollern system has left great masses of the German people imaginatively bankrupt and utterly confused. Any people who had had the same training and the same experience would be equally at a loss and helpless. The idea of a great German republic, one and indivisible, has to be built up now in an atmosphere of unparalleled storm, confusion, and disaster.
It cannot be built up all at once, and meanwhile anything superficial in the way of separations may happen to Germany. ”

“ There is the lifting of the waste and weight of private profiteering and nationalist sabotage, from shipping and world transport and the staple productions of the world, through the creation of a group of world authorities for these ends. Everybody of intelligence knows that these are just possible achievements for mankind, and that the outlook for mankind is dangerous and on the whole dingy until they are attained and secured. But there is no political party in the world that dare do more in office than fumble and prevaricate about any of them. ”

“ There may be a future for Communism there, and there will probably be a big movement towards Communism in the industrial centres of India and China and Japan. But in Europe I think that the Communist drive has passed its maximum and that the popular mind is moving onward to a more constructive and hopeful type of Socialism.
Just as art in a phase of extreme sterility escaped by going back behind Raphael and starting afresh from the Pre-Raphaelite phase, so I think Socialism will soon be getting behind the unfortunate misdirection of Marx and Engels to become once more Utopian and fruitful. ”

“ I have no doubt in my own mind that if Portugal were a free State in a larger union in which sovereignty was sufficiently merged to ensure a common currency, a common inter-State traffic control, free trade at least within the union, common labour conditions, and a common front to the speculative forces that are destroying Europe, her outlook would be vastly different from what it is to-day. She would very speedily cease to be a land of slovenly and increasingly inaccessible loveliness, and her people would no longer be the most lamentably wasted nation in Europe. ”

“ This British feat at Singapore deserves an equal denunciation. These preparations of the French and British are equally acts of war against the general peace of mankind. It is no good treating the French as though they alone were outraging the unity of mankind with their great armies and equipments. Great Britain, we now see by this crime at Singapore, is just as mischievously and criminally disposed. Both Powers are disturbers of the peace and destroyers of human hope. ”

“ So far the enfranchisement of women in Britain and America has had a confusing and belittling influence upon politics. It was the women’s influence in politics which achieved the crowning silliness of making Prohibition a part of the constitution of the United States, and in England women have done nothing to save the face of the countryside from Mr. Wheatley’s dismal women-enslaving house pustules. The drive for better education is no stronger than it was before our sisters had the vote; the drive for more scientific research is perceptibly feebler. ”

“ But I have never faltered in my belief in the greatness and soundness of the German people, and in my appreciation of all that we owe in intellectual, social, and industrial stimulus to Germany.
Her present situation is unparalleled. Every attempt she makes to get to her feet is thwarted by her pitiless, senseless foe. Our English-speaking peoples, in our slow, oafish way, are looking on, are assisting, at an attempt to waste and torment to death a great community as civilised as our own. ”

“ Perhaps the Communist, with all his faults, his wastefulness and ugliness of method, has something vital to teach the world, if it is no more than discipline and devoted subordination to large ideas. Perhaps the whole European system, like Russia, may after all need to be regrafted upon this new strange root of Communism before it enters upon a fresh creative phase. I do not know. But it is plain to me that the years pass and the recovery of Europe does not begin. ”

“ We must all get in each other’s way; that is the “common sense” of national “policy.” Why else are we all boxed up in little separate sovereign States? And so you and I, Dear Reader, will never get more than such brief samples and intimations of the happiness we might have in the air, and most people now alive in the world will never get to flying at all. They will die and never know. They will grub along the earth’s surface and die with this great delight almost within their reach, taunting them by its humming passage across their sky. ”

“ But do the Americans present either a new race or even a new culture? I deny both these propositions. They are racially a still largely unfused mixture of Europeans, and the novel features of their social and cultural life merely mark a new phase into which the British and the European and the Slav cultures are all following America. That is to say, I do not believe that America is diverging upon a line of her own, but is simply ahead along a path that the other great constituents of the coming world community must all presently follow. ”

“ If the League of Nations at Geneva wasn’t the dismallest sham on the earth, it would insist upon running the posts of Europe and having a mint of its own. Wherever one goes in Europe one finds oneself loaded up with foreign money that ceases to be current after a day’s journey, and with useless postage stamps. And every silly little scrap of Europe is pretending to be a separate economic system—in mysterious conflict with other economic systems. Every hundred miles or so in Europe there is a fresh tariff barrier. ”

“ Belloc there is much to interest us in him profoundly. He is vigorously expressive; he speaks for forces in our community that are more often silently active; he gives resistances animation. The least original of contemporary writers, he has retained the leading ideas of an upbringing that was essentially Catholic and Latin in a practically inflexible form. His world, after a few merely preparatory phases and with a polite gesture to the Greeks, begins and ends with Rome. His mind in this age of tumultuous growth is like a naughty and growing child refusing to be put into larger clothes. ”

“ A day will come, I believe, when this great dream will be realised, when all the paraphernalia of war or of national sovereignty—it is the same thing—will have followed the stone gods and human sacrifices to limbo, and when a new phase of human experience will begin.
So far there has been no real civilisation of the world; civilisation is still only an occasional incident, a passing gleam of promise in the lives of a handful of people here and there. ”

“ I do not let the fact that some of us, myself included, are having an undeservedly good time hide the fact that the system, such as it is, is wasteful, that it cripples the possibilities of nearly everyone, and is, to millions of people, actively distressful and cruel.
I belong to a small but growing minority which believes that man has come to such a phase of knowledge and power that he is already able and may very soon be willing to put a bit between the teeth of the monster of wild change that is now trampling this world. ”

“ My imagination takes refuge from the slums of to-day in a world like a great garden, various, orderly, lovingly cared-for, dangerous still but no longer dismal, secure from dull and base necessities. I have come to believe in the complete possibility of such a world, and to realise the broad lines upon which we can work for its attainment through a great extension of the scientific spirit to the mental field, and through a deliberate reconstruction of social and economic life upon the framework of a new, far-reaching educational organisation. ”

“ Until that federal body can be developed and equipped with forces and resources of its own—it is the most urgent of all necessary precautions against a future great war—there is nothing for us to do but to go on holding these possessions of the third order, without trading discrimination or settlement discrimination, against any other race or people.
It is part of the fantastic nationalism that still plays so astonishing a rôle in the political life of the world, to hold that every definable region of the earth’s surface belongs, from sky to centre, to the inhabitants it supports. ”

“ Yet at the same time I am doubtful whether there is much of a future for the Communist Party. I doubt whether in twenty-five years’ time there will be many Communists, under that name, below middle-age. A few nice, fierce old gentlemen will survive in smoking-rooms and cafés. The Communist movement is a part of the present world, it is a shadow cast by existing economic absurdities, it is a current reaction. ”

“ Get on with a school and college system commensurate with the enormous needs and dangers of this new age of world communication, or blunder and suffer. Teach everyone born into the world the history of mankind, the significance of racial differences, expand every individual imagination to the conception of the racial life as a great adventure, and to some sense of what it may achieve in the days to come. ”

“ The Americans decided a century and a half ago that one necessary condition of existence for a federal union of sovereign States was universal free trade. All interference with the free movement of another community’s trade, all tariff barriers and the like, are a mild form of war. It must be plain to everyone that the present division of Africa is extremely unstable, and that if the system of competitive powers in Europe is to go on, it is only a question of how long it will take France to feel secure enough against Germany to set about fighting for the whole of raw-material Africa. ”

“ And just as an attack of France upon Britain is unthinkable at the present time, although all the [Pg 200] military advantage lies at present with France, so, too, any attack upon the vast joint territories of the United States and the British Empire, though they neither of them had a battleship in commission nor a ton of explosive ready, would be an absurd proposition. There is no other Power on earth that could do it to any profit at all, and without the ultimate certainty of a crushing rearmament and revenge. It would be like a tiger-cat trying to kill and eat an elephant. ”

“ At the present level of education in the world, progress is like pushing one’s way through a riot. The underlying fact in all these matters is that the common uneducated man is a violent fool in social and public affairs. He can work in no way better than his quality. He has not sufficient understanding to work in any other way. If there were no Fascism there would be something else of the same sort. The hope of the world lies in a broader and altogether more powerful organisation of education. ”

“ Lloyd George is back in the middle of the limelight in his original rôle of a great Liberal leader. Gestures of reconciliation of an almost scandalous warmth have characterised all the chief Liberal gatherings, and it is a wonder to the rest of mankind that British Liberalism ever permitted even an appearance of dissension. And Mr. Lloyd George has completely and triumphantly come back. It is his victory as much as it is anybody’s victory. ”