Part 1
# A year of prophesying ### By Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
---
A YEAR OF PROPHESYING
_MR. WELLS has also written the following novels_:
THE WHEELS OF CHANCE. LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM. KIPPS. TONO-BUNGAY. ANN VERONICA. MR. POLLY. THE NEW MACHIAVELLI. MARRIAGE. THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS. THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN. BEALBY. THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT. MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH. THE SOUL OF A BISHOP. JOAN AND PETER. THE UNDYING FIRE. THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART. SARGON, KING OF KINGS. (CHRISTINA ALBERTA’S FATHER.)
_The following fantastic and imaginative romances_:
THE TIME MACHINE. THE WONDERFUL VISIT. THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU. THE INVISIBLE MAN. THE WAR OF THE WORLDS. THE SLEEPER AWAKES. THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON. THE SEA LADY. THE FOOD OF THE GODS. IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET. THE WAR IN THE AIR. THE WORLD SET FREE. MEN LIKE GODS. THE DREAM.
_Numerous short stories collected under the following titles_:
THE STOLEN BACILLUS. THE PLATTNER STORY. TALES OF SPACE AND TIME. TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM.
_A series of books on social, religious, and political questions_:
ANTICIPATIONS (1900). A MODERN UTOPIA. THE FUTURE IN AMERICA. NEW WORLDS FOR OLD. FIRST AND LAST THINGS. GOD THE INVISIBLE KING. THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY. RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS. THE SALVAGING OF CIVILISATION. WASHINGTON AND THE HOPE OF PEACE. A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD. THE STORY OF A GREAT SCHOOLMASTER.
_And two little books about children’s play, called_:
FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS.
The uniform Atlantic Edition of Mr. Wells’ works (limited in America to eight hundred sets) is published by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
A YEAR OF PROPHESYING
BY H. G. WELLS
New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1925 _All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY H. G. WELLS.
Set up and printed. Published January, 1925.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FOREWORD
This book consists of a year of journalistic writing, fifty-five articles altogether, and all that ought to be said in the preface will be found in the concluding article.
H. G. W.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS AND THE FEDERATION OF MANKIND 3
II. THE BEAUTY OF FLYING 10
III. THE TRIUMPH OF FRANCE 15
IV. THE SINGAPORE ARSENAL 21
V. THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS AGAIN 27
VI. THE AVIATION OF THE HALF-CIVILISED 34
VII. WILL GERMANY BREAK INTO PIECES? 41
VIII. THE FUTURE OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE 47
IX. WINSTON 63
X. THE OTHER SIDE IN FRANCE 69
XI. THE LAST OF THE VICTORIANS 75
XII. POLITICS AS A PUBLIC NUISANCE 81
XIII. THE RE-EMERGENCE OF MR. LLOYD GEORGE 87
XIV. SPAIN AND ITALY WHISPER TOGETHER 93
XV. LATIN AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE 99
XVI. COSMOPOLITAN AND INTERNATIONAL 105
XVII. THE PARLIAMENTARY TRIANGLE 111
XVIII. MODERN GOVERNMENT: PARLIAMENT AND REAL ELECTORAL REFORM 117
XIX. SCRAPPING THE GOLD STANDARD 123
XX. THE HUB OF EUROPE: CZECHO-SLOVAKIA AND FRANCE 130
XXI. THE MANDARINS AT THE GATE: THE REVIVAL OF THE OLD LEARNING 136
XXII. LENIN: PRIVATE CAPITALISM AGAINST COMMUNISM 142
XXIII. THE FANTASIES OF MR. BELLOC AND THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD 148
XXIV. A CREATIVE EDUCATIONAL SCHEME FOR BRITAIN: A TENTATIVE FORECAST 156
XXV. PORTUGAL AND PROSPERITY: THE BLESSEDNESS OF BEING A LITTLE NATION 164
XXVI. RECONSTRUCTION OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS: THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM 170
XXVII. THE LABOUR PARTY ON TRIAL: THE FOLLY OF THE FIVE CRUISERS 177
XXVIII. DICTATORS OR POLITICIANS? THE DILEMMA OF CIVILISATION 184
XXIX. YOUTH AND THE VOTE: THE REJUVENESCENCE OF THE WORLD 190
XXX. OLIVE BRANCHES OF STEEL: SHOULD THE ANGELS OF PEACE CARRY BOMBS? 197
XXXI. THE CASE OF UNAMUNO: THE FEEBLE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS 204
XXXII. AN OPEN LETTER TO ANATOLE FRANCE ON HIS EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY 210
XXXIII. THE EUROPEAN KALEIDOSCOPE: THE GERMAN WILL IN DEFAULT 214
XXXIV. CHINA: THE LAND OUT OF THE LIMELIGHT 220
XXXV. AIR ARMAMENT: THE SUPREMACY OF QUALITY 226
XXXVI. LABOUR POLITICIANS: THE EVAPORATION OF THE INTELLIGENZIA 232
XXXVII. CONSTRUCTIVE IDEAS AND THEIR RELATION TO CURRENT POLITICS 239
XXXVIII. THE WEMBLEY EMPIRE: AN EXHIBITION OF LOST OPPORTUNITIES 245
XXXIX. THE EXTINCTION OF PARTY GOVERNMENT 251
XL. THE SERFDOM OF IGNORANCE: THE RIGHT OF WOMEN TO KNOWLEDGE 257
XLI. BLINKERS FOR FREE YOUTH: YOUNG AMERICA ASKS TO HEAR AND SEE 262
XLII. THE LAWLESSNESS OF AMERICA AND THE WAY TO ORDER 268
XLIII. THE SHABBY SCHOOLS OF THE PIOUS: DRAINS AND THE ODOUR OF SANCTITY 273
XLIV. THE INCOMPATIBILITY IN INDIA: DIVORCE OR LEGAL SEPARATION 278
XLV. THE SPIRIT OF FASCISM: IS THERE ANY GOOD IN IT AT ALL? 285
XLVI. THE RACE CONFLICT: IS IT UNAVOIDABLE? 291
XLVII. THE SCHOOLS OF A NEW AGE: A FORECAST 298
XLVIII. THE IMPUDENCE OF FLAGS: OUR POWER RESOURCES AND MY ELEPHANTS, WHALES, AND GORILLAS 303
XLIX. HAS COMMUNISM A FUTURE? THE POSSIBILITY OF A SOCIALIST RENASCENCE 310
L. THE LITTLE HOUSE: AS IT WAS, IS NOW, AND APPARENTLY EVER WILL BE 317
LI. THE TRIVIALITY OF DEMOCRACY AND THE FEMININE INFLUENCE IN POLITICS 323
LII. SEX ANTAGONISM: AN UNAVOIDABLE AND INCREASING FACTOR IN MODERN LIFE 329
LIII. LIVING THROUGH: THE TRUTH ABOUT AN INTERVIEW 334
LIV. THE CREATIVE PASSION 341
LV. AFTER A YEAR OF JOURNALISM: AN OUTBREAK OF AUTO-OBITUARY 347
A YEAR OF PROPHESYING
I
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS AND THE FEDERATION OF MANKIND
22.9.23
I am one of those people who believe that if human affairs are to go on without decay and catastrophe, there must be an end to the organisation of war. I believe that the power to prepare for war and make war must be withdrawn from separate States, as already it has been withdrawn from separate cities and from districts and from private individuals, and that ultimately there must be a Confederation of all mankind to keep one peace throughout the world.
The United States of America is but the first instance of a federating process which will, I believe, extend at last to the whole world. Since 1917 I have given much more of my waking life to that vision of a confederated mankind than I have given to any other single interest or subject. And yet I am not a supporter of the League of Nations in its present form, and I do not think that the League of Nations at Geneva is ever likely to develop into an effective World Confederation. It is much more likely to develop into a serious obstacle to such a Confederation. The sooner now that it is scrapped and broken up the better, I think, for mankind. I am hostile to the present League of Nations _because_ I desire the Confederation of Mankind.
I do not think that the obstructive possibilities of the existing League of Nations are sufficiently understood by liberal-minded people throughout the world. I do not think they realise how effectively it may be used as a consumer and waster of the creative energy that would otherwise carry us forward toward World Confederation.
The League of Nations that we saw in our visions in those distressful and yet creative years, 1917-18, was to have been a real step forward in human affairs. It was to have been a repetition on a gigantic scale of that magnificent turning-point in the history of America when it was decided that the conferring representatives of the liberated colonies should talk no longer of the people of Virginia, the people of Georgia, and the people of Massachusetts, but instead of the people of the United States. So in a wider stride we were to begin to forget the particular interests of the people of Germany and of the people of France and of the people of England in a new realisation of the common needs and dangers and sacrifices of the people of the world. So we hoped. So we still try to hope.
But that was far too wide a stride for humanity to take all at once. The League we desired was to have been the first loose conference that would have ended in a federal government for the whole earth. It was to have controlled war establishments from the start, constricted or abolished all private armament firms, created and maintained a world standard of currency, of labour legislation, of health and education, watched the world production of staple articles for the common good, restricted malignant tariff hostilities, negotiated and regulated the migrations of populations, and made the ways of the world, the high seas, and the international land routes alike open and safe for all decent men. So we saw it as a new, brave assertion of human sanity and of the right of all men to a certain fullness of life, against old hates, old prejudices, old debts and claims and limitations.
And there seemed to some of us to be sufficient will in the world then for so bold and great a beginning. I wonder--empty speculation though it is now--if we were indeed so wrong in thinking that--if some man or group of men of supreme genius might not have achieved a real world peace even in 1919. All over the world there were millions of people, prepared by immense sufferings and fears for so drastic a change. There were great masses of people everywhere mentally ready for that League. For many months President Wilson, simply because he had said “League of Nations” plainly and clearly, was the greatest man on earth. He overshadowed Kings and Emperors.
Most of us can still recall that false dawn, that phase of hope. When the first great gathering to inaugurate the English League of Nations Union met in Westminster, people were turned away from the dangerously packed hall, not by the hundred but by the thousand. But it is easier to assemble crowds of enthusiastic people than to give them faithful leaders and capable Ministers. The First Crusade might have taught us that. The new movement had no leaders worth considering, and into the vacuum poured all the eager stuff of the old order. I remember how my heart sank that day when I saw the brightest bishops and the best-advertised Nonconformist leaders, politicians needing a new line of goods, the rising Bar and the social collectors, Mrs. Asquith and her set, all the much-photographed and the much-talked-about, swarming up upon the Westminster platform, pushing well into the limelight, nodding and gesticulating to each other, as gay as if they were at a fashionable wedding, before dear Lord Grey, that dignified image of British statesmanship, read out the platitudes he had prepared for the occasion. The common folk of the earth might want a new organisation of peace in the world, but these people of all people I realised would never give it them.
Things come not so swiftly to suffering mankind. The order has indeed gone forth, men know their need, but the master artisan that will fulfil it has still to learn his business and make his tools. Perhaps he has still to be born. And, meanwhile, in the light of this false dawn, a League of Nations, that hardly pretended even to look like what we desired, was planned in Paris hurriedly and cheaply, and run up at Geneva. It has provided a job for Sir Eric Drummond, a British Foreign Office official unknown to the generality of mankind, and Lord Robert Cecil, hitherto prominent chiefly as the inveterate enemy of unsectarian education in England, secured political resuscitation as its leading advocate. With the permission of France and Great Britain this League has negotiated one or two minor settlements that were not too deeply entangled in the policy of these Great Powers, and it has afforded a number of Spanish-American politicians agreeable, if expensive, holidays in Europe. And whenever one wants to talk of the Confederation of Mankind now, it gets in the way.
We had thought that the League of Nations would abolish diplomacy. We found it had merely added another piece, and a very ineffective piece at that, to the already crowded diplomatic game upon the European board.
That great Confederation of Mankind that we desire, that great peace with variety round and about the earth, cannot arise out of such a beginning. This League of Nations at Geneva is not even the germ of such a thing. Rather it is the instinctive effort of the old European order to stifle this creative idea on its birth by encysting it in a tradition of futility and diplomatic methods. The way to human confederation is by a longer route, and the end is not to be attained by any such hasty constitution as that of the League. The Confederation of Man is a task for generations. Tens of thousands of leaderly men and women must serve that idea and live and die for it before it can approach realisation. Millions must respond to the service of their leadership. The idea must become the fundamental political idea of hundreds of millions, ousting kings and flags from men’s imaginations. Then we can begin to get together an effective ruling body. A stupendous task, you say, but not an impossible one. A day will come, I believe, when this great dream will be realised, when all the paraphernalia of war or of national sovereignty--it is the same thing--will have followed the stone gods and human sacrifices to limbo, and when a new phase of human experience will begin.
So far there has been no real civilisation of the world; civilisation is still only an occasional incident, a passing gleam of promise in the lives of a handful of people here and there. But civilisation will come at last for all. It is about that coming of a world confederation and of the world civilisation it will make possible, that I shall be writing chiefly in this series of weekly articles. Now and then I shall diverge to other topics, but that will be my main theme, the realisation of civilisation. I shall consider scientific progress, educational and social work, political happenings, and the general trend of current events, and almost always I shall consider them in direct relation to that new age that lies before mankind. I shall write about the signs of the times and about typical men and women just as they seem to be making or marring these creative hopes. I do not expect my readers to agree with me always. I shall write about contentious things, and my last thought will be of pleasing or propitiating. At times I shall certainly irritate. But I hope to interest. And some few of my younger readers, at least, I hope to infect with that same idea of creative service for the new civilisation which possesses my own life.
II
THE BEAUTY OF FLYING
29.9.23
This last summer I had a number of aeroplane journeys about Europe. I had flights in several of the big omnibus aeroplanes that fly on the more or less regular European services, and also I flew as the single passenger in smaller open machines. There is a delight and wonder in the latter sort of flying altogether lost in the boxed-in aeroplane.
International jealousies, commercial rivalries, and the meanness of outlook universally prevalent in Europe at the present time are muddling away most of the possible freedom and happiness of air travel. I flew from London to Amsterdam, but I had to get my money back for the rest of the journey to Berlin, and take a night train, because of some hitch in the German arrangements, and similarly the Franco-Rumanian service from Vienna via Prague and Strassburg to Paris, so triumphantly inaugurated a little while ago, was in a state of dislocation, and I had to make that journey round by way of Holland to avoid the inconveniences and delays due to the fooleries of French “policy” upon the Rhine. But I flew, when there was a machine to fly in and no patriotic idiocy to prevent it, and I have renewed and strengthened my sense of the sweetness and beauty of air travel--in the small open machine.
As I hung in the crystalline air above the mountains of Slovakia, far above the wooded hills and deep green gorges, with the culminating masses of the Little Carpathians heaped up to the right of me and the line of the White Carpathians away to the left, and ahead of me, still dim and distant, the striped fields and villages of the plain of Bratislava; and as I turned about and looked at the blue Moravian lands behind me, with every stream and pool picked out in molten silver by the afternoon sun, I was as near the summit of felicity as I have been in all my very pleasant life. Ever and again we overtook some little puff of cloud. There were little troops of bright white cloudlets that raced with us eastward, swift and noiseless; their shadows raced our own little shadow up the slopes and across the forest crests below, and their whiteness and their transitory cool embrace as we passed through them, enhanced by contrast the sunlit clearness and brightness of the outspread world.
For the first part of my flight that day I was accompanied by three other Czech machines. They were fighting aeroplanes. They came up abreast of me in the liquid air, and their aviators signalled to me, and then, suddenly, they dived and swept over in a loop and fell down like dead leaves for a thousand feet or so and righted themselves and flew home again to Prague. I have seen such manœuvres before from the ground, but they are far more graceful and lovely when one floats above them and watches the aeroplane drop down like a falling kite, almost, it seems, to the spires and tree-tops.
At last we began to descend, and circled down to Nitra, a place I had never heard of before, a wonderfully beautiful and, I should think, a very prosperous town, with a great church and many spires, and from the aerodrome at Nitra I started again two days later to return to Prague. The weather was unsettled, and the most hopeful time for flying was the early morning. I left Topolcany, where I had been staying, at dawn, therefore, with a full moon shining brightly in a rain-washed sky, and after a little misadventure and a cut head in a ditch, for automobiles are much less safe than aeroplanes, and the roads that morning were wet mire, reached Nitra at sunrise and rose with the red blaze of the sun above the hills.
Sun and aeroplane seemed to soar up together. Never before had I been up in the air so early in the morning. All the little trees below were blobs and dots, but they cast shadows hundreds of feet long, and in the deep blue nooks and crannies of the gold-lit hills the white mists huddled.
The wind rose against us as we returned and blew a gale. We took four hours to make a journey that the other way, before the wind, had taken little more than two. Between Brunn and Prague the aeroplane swayed and danced like a kite on its string, and ever and again found an air pocket and dropped a few score feet. But though I am but a moderate sailor, I do not get air-sick; and to sit loose and lax and unafraid, strapped into an open aeroplane, drenched in sweet air, is altogether different from being enclosed in an air omnibus. I had rather be four hours in an open aeroplane in a high wind than two in an automobile on a bad road or one in a Channel steamboat on a rough day.
Those two flights in Slovakia are among the very happiest experiences I have ever had in my life. And it irks me to think that, because of the incoherent muddle of human affairs, things go so slowly that I shall probably never be able to go round the world in the same delightful fashion, and fly over the deserts of Arabia and the plains of India, and down the gorges of the Yang-tse-Kiang. All these things I might do in a saner world. The places exist, the discoveries have been made, but a magic net of rivalries, obstructions, and vile preoccupations, delays the consummation of these bright possibilities. A happier generation will have all these pleasures within its reach. Such an aeroplane as the one I flew in need not cost more than a Ford car, even now, and it is almost as easy to fly as it is to drive an automobile.
But, of course, all such things must wait, and civilisation must wait, until M. Poincaré has collected the claims of France upon Germany or smashed up Europe. It is so much more important, you understand, to collect these legendary, impossible debts, that one little scrap of Europe has figured up against another little scrap of Europe, than to get on with living. The Germans must not be allowed to develop their air services; that would never do for the politicians; and, indeed, every European country must do all it can to restrain the air development of every other country. We must all get in each other’s way; that is the “common sense” of national “policy.” Why else are we all boxed up in little separate sovereign States? And so you and I, Dear Reader, will never get more than such brief samples and intimations of the happiness we might have in the air, and most people now alive in the world will never get to flying at all. They will die and never know. They will grub along the earth’s surface and die with this great delight almost within their reach, taunting them by its humming passage across their sky.
III
THE TRIUMPH OF FRANCE
6.10.23
The long-spun-out passive resistance in the Ruhr is over, and the controlled, instructed, and disciplined French Press, and the more than French Press which serves the national interests of France in Great Britain and Holland and other European countries, is cock-a-hoop with the clamour of this empty victory. Let us consider what it means for civilisation and the world at large.
Men’s memories are short, and it may be well to remind them of the broad facts that have led up to this outrageous, pitiful struggle of the Ruhr. In November 1918 the German people, after an unexampled struggle of four years, surrendered to the Allied Powers arrayed against them. They surrendered on the promises held out to them by the Fourteen Points of President Wilson and by the British propaganda of Crewe House. They surrendered, and they were disarmed and placed in a position in which it was impossible for them to resume resistance. The Americans and British, at any rate, were bound in honour to see that the virtual pact of the surrender was observed, and they did not do so. A peace was put over the German peoples having no relation to the clear understanding of the virtual pact of the surrender, and the bill for damages and reparations was figured up against them utterly beyond their capacity to pay. The Germans signed the Peace Treaty only after the most strenuous protests and because they were then powerless to do anything else. The Treaty was not a bargain to which they agreed, it was a monstrous and impossible obligation rammed down their throats.