tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91750018070491064482024-03-14T01:38:21.283-07:00H. G. WellsTodo este blog está bajo la licencia <a href="http://es.creativecommons.org/licencia/">creative commons</a>. Este blog pertenece a compinchados@gmail.comdevorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.comBlogger36125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-26656913966510218492013-10-03T15:43:00.000-07:002013-10-03T15:55:58.756-07:00El capítulo censurado de la máquina del tiempo<div style="text-align: justify;">
La máquina del tiempo fue publicada primero en forma serial en los número de enero a mayo de 1895 de la revista The New Review. Wells cobró £100, equivalente a £10.000 de hoy. Fue publicado en forma de libro en Gran Bretaña por <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinemann_%28book_publisher%29">Heinemann</a>, y por <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Holt_and_Company">Henry Holt and Company</a> en los Estados Unidos, ambas en el mismo mes (mayo de 1895) [<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine#History">fuente</a>].</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
El argumento es bastante conocido. Un científico, al que Wells llama el Viajero del Tiempo, inventa una máquina para viajar en el tiempo, se sube a ella y viaja hasta el año 802.701. Allí se encuentra la humanidad escindida en dos especies: los vagos y hermosos Eloi, que viven en la superficie y son alimentados por los Morlocks, que son la otra especie humana, son bestias horribles y deformes, que viven bajo tierra, la luz los espanta (no pueden soportar ni la luz de una cerilla), y se alimentan de los Eloi. Naturalmente el argumento es mucho más largo pero con esto basta para mis pretensiones [<a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_m%C3%A1quina_del_tiempo#Argumento">fuente</a>].<br />
<br />
Una sección del capítulo 11 de la edición de The New Review fue suprimida en la edición birtánica, pero no de la edición serializada de la revista ni en la edición americana. En este texto el protagonista, El Viajero del Tiempo, huyendo de los Morlocks, viaja en su máquina a un futuro indeterminado donde encuentra una tierra irreconocible poblada de unos pequeños herbívoros saltadores que, al principio, le parecen conejos saltadores o pequeños canguros. Mata uno con una piedra y se da cuenta de que es un <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant%C3%ADgrado">plantígrado</a>, sin cola, pelo gris corto, con cinco débiles dedos, "sus patas delanteras eran tan humanas como la patas delanteras de una rana," con una cabeza redondeada, con una frente proyectada hacia adelante, y los ojos estaban en el frente de la cara, y el pelo de la cabeza era lacio.<br />
<br />
"Un temor desagradable cruzó mi mente," dice el Viajero del Tiempo. Cuando estaba por examinar sus dientes y otras partes de su anatomía para intentar descubir otras características humanas, aparece un gigantesco monstruo con un parecido a un ciempiés con unos 10 metros de longitud, con unos ojos poligonales y dos cuernos parecidos a antenas. El Viajero del Tiempo sale huyendo dejando su "animal gris, u hombre gris, o lo que fuera, en el suelo", corre hacia la máquina y escapa, de la misma forma que hizo con los Morlocks, poniéndola en marcha y avanzando hacia el futuro.<br />
<br />
Fuente: <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Grey_Man">The Grey Man, el hombre gris.</a><br />
<br />
La explicación de este ser gris, mitad conejo saltarín, mitad hombre, es muy sencilla. Wells pensaba que la evolución podía funcionar tanto hacia adelante como hacia atrás, es decir, de seres más simples a seres más complejos, y viceversa. Los Eloi son seres estúpidos y vagos, que no se dan cuenta de que son cebados por los Morlocks para ser comidos. Tienen la inteligencia de un perro o la de un niño de dos o tres años. Los Morlocks son seres brutales parecidos a gorilas u orangutanes, podríamos decir caníbales (aunque los Eloi y los Morlocks son especies diferentes, como en su día fueron los Neandertales y los hombres de Cromagnon, por lo tanto quizás no sea apropiado llamar caníbales, ya que tampoco son caníbales los seres humanos que comen monos). Quedan pocos rastros de humanidad en los Morlocks.<br />
<br />
Pero el Viajero del Tiempo viaja hacia el futuro unos cuantos miles de millones de años más. Este salto en el tiempo es mucho mayor. El primer salto del tiempo es de finales del siglo XIX al año 802.701 (pregunta: ¿sería el siglo 8.028?). El segundo salto es mucho mayor. Esto le da tiempo a Wells a afirmar que los cambios evolutivos ya son mucho mayores, del género homo a una especie de mamífero de pequeño tamaño parecido a un conejo saltarín.<br />
<br />
La razón por la que se suprimió en la edición británica del libro me parece clara. El texto no añade nada nuevo a la acción de la novela, centrada en la interacción entre los Eloi y los Morlocks. Este texto sólo tiene un fin: mostrar las ideas de Wells sobre la evolución.</div>
devorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-62045558501484152010-05-07T11:18:00.000-07:002010-05-07T11:23:07.149-07:00Boon and the quarrel with Henry James<a href="http://books.google.com.ar/books?id=p4w4AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA113&lpg=PA113&dq=%22Boon+and+the+quarrel+with+Henry+James%22&source=bl&ots=EFqD-wNfKW&sig=puXeuYimbF6trAkFDS840_Hghsk&hl=es&ei=2FjkS9_LNIO88gbrhJhp&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22Boon%20and%20the%20quarrel%20with%20Henry%20James%22&f=false">Boon and the quarrel with Henry James</a>.<br /><br />[page 117]devorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-59375804441954775442009-10-18T13:44:00.000-07:002009-12-22T16:25:49.333-08:00War and the Future<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDpVsnFcWkCLbwqdi-SAvHowCb-5uxFnv1Cdf5cWuv8ddxQLuQUAy_y3IGhgHDPhjFg_Xbd63ZvYDDYhmo958EQ56Vs2FZtpZiLa-D0yyQh-hocf7-fvWmVo6m8hbLpy2dotpYpMx5S7Rx/s1600-h/war+and+the+future.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 280px; height: 280px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDpVsnFcWkCLbwqdi-SAvHowCb-5uxFnv1Cdf5cWuv8ddxQLuQUAy_y3IGhgHDPhjFg_Xbd63ZvYDDYhmo958EQ56Vs2FZtpZiLa-D0yyQh-hocf7-fvWmVo6m8hbLpy2dotpYpMx5S7Rx/s320/war+and+the+future.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5394329409374544770" /></a><br />Enlace para descargarlo de <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1804/1804-h/1804-h.htm">Project Gutenberg</a>.devorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-85955736738478829792009-10-18T13:40:00.000-07:002009-10-19T12:07:14.927-07:00What is coming?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS-KQGROpkS2pDKGoFHdqr-2QGP9z8ySENk-5IFKJ8WGmDAiZqRYKzUp69AuJeM1Fry6JRBU_5KYmRlXyzDFMzxQEvgHuk0a1dJkj8l74Rtp3ZEsGmPEBlDelmfiCBSse95j4PqL9WySEA/s1600-h/wha+is+coming.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 103px; height: 160px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS-KQGROpkS2pDKGoFHdqr-2QGP9z8ySENk-5IFKJ8WGmDAiZqRYKzUp69AuJeM1Fry6JRBU_5KYmRlXyzDFMzxQEvgHuk0a1dJkj8l74Rtp3ZEsGmPEBlDelmfiCBSse95j4PqL9WySEA/s320/wha+is+coming.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5394389650882099922" /></a><br />Para descargarlo de <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/11289">project gutenberg</a>.devorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-88160001233160913422009-10-18T13:36:00.000-07:002009-10-19T12:10:49.782-07:00The World Set Free<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPSxD_GNorYOohjXm5KmFyMYzLUZNVFYnjCPEbAbcQvcPZLPUHSxHGCUcLdeMORsyaZL1NIVedGnXI4KIAfZToxRFpoJ70FqP9Ws-rs-5ojgfqW_xoUlmPpq4-L8T981YXhxdVT8IudMyu/s1600-h/The+world+set+free.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 158px; height: 197px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPSxD_GNorYOohjXm5KmFyMYzLUZNVFYnjCPEbAbcQvcPZLPUHSxHGCUcLdeMORsyaZL1NIVedGnXI4KIAfZToxRFpoJ70FqP9Ws-rs-5ojgfqW_xoUlmPpq4-L8T981YXhxdVT8IudMyu/s320/The+world+set+free.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5394390635010634610" /></a><br />Sinopsis en <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Set_Free">wikipedia</a> en inglés. Pra descargarlo o leerlo online en inglés, en <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1059">project gutenberg</a>.devorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-25309862723834410172009-10-18T13:31:00.000-07:002009-10-18T13:34:52.656-07:00The war in the AirSinopsis: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_in_the_Air">Wikipedia</a> en inglés. Para descargarlo en inglés en <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/780">project gutenberg</a>.devorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-61795887251150352212009-10-18T13:27:00.000-07:002009-10-18T13:29:24.468-07:00The War that will End War<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/warthatwillendwa00welluoft">Fuente</a>.<br /><br />^ <br /><br />'HE WAR <br /><br />IATWILL <br /><br />ADWAR <br /><br /><br /><br />H.QWELLS <br /><br /><br /><br /><br />London : <br />FranJ(&0cil ^bhmr^Lion (auri <br /><br /><br /><br />THE WAR THAT <br />WILL END WAR <br /><br /><br /><br /><br />THE WAR THAT <br />WILL END WAR <br /><br /><br /><br />BY <br /><br /><br /><br />H. G. WELLS <br /><br />Author of "THE WAR OF THE WORLDS," <br />"THE WAR IN THE AIR," ETC. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br />LONDON <br /><br />FRANK & CECIL PALMER <br />RED LION COURT, E.C. <br /><br /><br /><br />First Published October, 1914 <br />Second Impression October, 1914 <br />Third Impression October^ 1914 <br /><br /><br /><br />CONTENTS <br /><br />PAGE <br /><br />I. WHY BRITAIN WENT TO WAR 7 <br /><br />II. THE SWORD OF PEACE 14 <br /><br />III. HANDS OFF THE PEOPLE'S FOOD - 20 <br /><br />IV. CONCERNING MR. MAXIMILIAN <br /><br />CRAFT - 29 <br /><br />V. THE MOST NECESSARY MEASURES <br /><br />IN THE WORLD 37 <br /><br />VI. THE NEED OF A NEW MAP OF <br /><br />EUROPE 46 <br /><br />VII. THE OPPORTUNITY OF LIBERALISM 55 <br /><br />VIII. THE LIBERAL FEAR OF RUSSIA 63 <br /><br />IX. AN APPEAL TO THE AMERICAN <br /><br />PEOPLE 73 <br /><br />X. COMMON SENSE AND THE BALKAN <br /><br />STATES 82 <br /><br />XL THE WAR OF THE MIND - 90 <br /><br /><br /><br />I. <br /><br />WHY BRITAIN WENT <br />TO WAR <br /><br />A CLEAR EXPOSITION OF WHAT WE ARE FIGHTING FOR <br /><br />THE cause of a war and the object of a war <br />are not necessarily the same. The cause of this <br />war was the invasion of Luxemburg and Belgium. <br />We declared war because we were bound by | <br />treaty to declare war. We have been pledged , <br />to protect the integrity of Belgium since the <br />kingdom of Belgium has existed. If the Germans ' <br />had not broken the guarantees they shared j <br />with us to respect the neutrality of these [ <br />little States we should certainly not be at war J <br />at the present time. The fortified eastern <br />frontier of France could have been held against <br />any attack without any help from us. We had <br />no obligations and no interests there. We were <br />pledged to France simply to protect her from , <br />a naval attack by sea, but the Germans had <br />already given us an undertaking not to make <br />such an attack. It was our Belgian treaty and <br />the sudden outrage on Luxemburg that pre- <br />cipitated us into" this conflict. No Power in the <br />world would have respected our Flag or accepted <br />our national word again if we had not fought. <br />So much for the immediate cause of the war. <br /><br />But now we come to the object of this war. \ <br />We began to fight because our honour and our <br /><br /><br /><br />8 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />pledge obliged us ; but so soon as we are embarked <br />upon the fighting we have to ask ourselves what <br />is the end at which our fighting aims. We cannot <br />simply put the Germans back over the Belgian <br />border and tell them not to do it again. We <br />find ourselves at war with that huge military <br />empire with which we have been doing our best <br />to keep the peace since first it rose upon the ruins <br />of French Imperialism in 1871. And war is <br />mortal conflict. We have now either to destroy <br />or be destroyed. We have not sought this <br />reckoning, we have done our utmost to avoid it ; <br />but now that it has been forced upon us it is <br />imperative that it should be a thorough reckoning. <br />This is a war that touches every man and every <br />home in each of the combatant countries. It is <br />a war, as Mr. Sidney Low has said, not of soldiers <br />but of whole peoples. And it is a war that must <br />be fought to such a finish that every man in each <br />of the nations engaged understands what has <br />happened. There can be no diplomatic settle- <br />ment that will leave German Imperialism free <br />to explain away its failure to its people and start <br />new preparations. We have to go on until we <br />are absolutely done for, or until the Germans <br />as a people know that they are beaten, and are <br />convinced that they have had enough of war. <br /><br />We are fighting Germany. But we are fighting <br />without any hatred of the German people. We <br />do not intend to destroy either their freedom or <br />their unity. But we have to destroy an evil <br />system of government and the mental and material <br />corruption that has got hold of the German <br /><br /><br /><br />WHY BRITAIN WENT TO WAR n <br /><br />imagination and taken possession of German liism <br />We have to smash the Prussian Imperialism in- <br />thoroughly as Germany in 1871 smashed the" <br />rotten Imperialism of Napoleon III. And also <br />we have to learn from the failure of that victory <br />to avoid a vindictive triumph. <br /><br />This Prussian Imperialism has been for forty <br />years an intolerable nuisance in the earth. Ever <br />since the crushing of the French in 1871 the evil <br />thing has grown and cast its spreading shadow <br />over Europe. Germany has preached a pro- <br />paganda of ruthless force and political materialism <br />to the whole uneasy world. " Blood and iron," <br />she boasted, was the cement of her unity, and <br />almost as openly the little, mean, aggressive <br />statesmen and professors who have guided her <br />destinies to this present conflict have professed <br />cynicism and an utter disregard of any ends but <br />nationally selfish ends, as though it were religion. <br />Evil just as much as good may be made into a <br />Cant. Physical and moral brutality has indeed <br />become a cant in the German mind, and spread <br />from Germany throughout the world. I could <br />wish it were possible to say that English and <br />American thought had altogether escaped its <br />corruption. But now at last we shake ourselves <br />free and turn upon this boasting wickedness to <br />rid the world of it. The whole world is tired <br />of it. And " Gott ! " Gott so perpetually <br />invoked Gott indeed must be very tired of it <br /><br />This is already the vastest war in history. It <br />is war not of nations, but of mankind. It is a <br />war to exorcise a world-madness and end an age. <br /><br /><br /><br />THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />8 <br /><br />I : .id note how this Cant of public rottenness <br />%j had its secret side. The man who preaches <br />cynicism in his own business transactions had <br />better keep a detective and a cash register for <br />his clerks ; and it is the most natural thing in the <br />world to find that this system, which is outwardly <br />vile, is also inwardly rotten. Beside the Kaiser <br />stands the firm of Krupp, a second head to the <br />State ; on the very steps of the throne is the <br />armament trust, that organised scoundrelism <br />which has, in its relentless propaganda for profit, <br />mined all the security of civilisation, brought <br />up and dominated a Press, ruled a national <br />literature, and corrupted universities. <br /><br />Consider what the Germans have been, and <br />what the Germans can be. Here is a race which <br />has for its chief fault docility and a belief in <br />teachers and rulers. For the rest, as all who <br />know it intimately will testify, it is the most <br />amiable of peoples. It is naturally kindly, com- <br />fort-loving, child-loving, musical, artistic, intelli- <br />gent. In countless respects German homes and <br />towns and countrysides are the most civilised in the <br />world. But these people did a little lose their heads <br />after the victories of the sixties and seventies, and <br />there began a propaganda of national vanity and <br />national ambition. It was organised by a stupidly <br />forceful statesman, it was fostered by folly upon the <br />throne. It was guarded from wholesome criticism <br />by an intolerant censorship. It never gave <br />sanity a chance. A certain patriotic sentiment- <br />ality lent itself only too readily to the suggestion <br />of the flatterer, and so there grew up this <br /><br /><br /><br />WHY BRITAIN WENT TO WAR 11 <br /><br />monstrous trade in weapons. German patriotism <br />became an " interest," the greatest of the " in- <br />terests." It developed a vast advertisement <br />propaganda. It subsidised Navy Leagues and <br />Aerial Leagues, threatening the world. Man- <br />kind, we saw too late, had been guilty of an <br />incalculable folly in permitting private men to <br />make a profit out of the dreadful preparations <br />for war. But the evil was started ; the German <br />imagination was captured and enslaved. On <br />every other European country that valued its <br />integrity there was thrust the overwhelming <br />necessity to arm and drill and still to arm and <br />drill. Money was withdrawn from education, <br />from social progress, from business enterprise, <br />and art and scientific research, and from every <br />kind of happiness ; life was drilled and darkened. <br /><br />So that the harvest of this darkness comes now <br />almost as a relief, and it is a grim satisfaction in <br />our discomforts that we can at last look across <br />the roar and torment of battlefields to the <br />possibility of an organised peace. <br /><br />For this is now a war for peace. <br /><br />It aims straight at disarmament. It aims at a <br />settlement that shall stop this sort of thing for <br />ever. Every soldier who fights against Germany <br />now is a crusader against war. This, the greatest <br />of all wars, is not just another war it is the last <br />war ! England, France, Italy, Belgium, Spain, <br />and all the little countries of Europe, are heartily <br />sick of war ; the Tsar has expressed a passionate <br />hatred of war ; the most of Asia is unwarlike ; <br />the United States has no illusions about war. <br /><br /><br /><br />12 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />And never was war begun so joylessly, and never <br />was war begun with so grim a resolution. In <br />England, France, Belgium, Russia, there is no <br />thought of glory. <br /><br />We know we face unprecedented slaughter and <br />agonies ; we know that for neither side will there <br />be easy triumphs or prancing victories. Already, <br />in that warring sea of men, there is famine as <br />well as hideous butchery, and soon there must <br />come disease. <br /><br />Can it be otherwise ? <br /><br />We face, perhaps, the most awful winter that <br />mankind has ever faced. <br /><br />But we English and our allies, who did not <br />seek this catastrophe, face it with anger and <br />determination rather than despair. <br /><br />Through this war we have to march, through <br />pain, through agonies of the spirit worse than <br />pain, through seas of blood and filth. We <br />English have not had things kept from us. We <br />know what war is ; we have no delusions. We have <br />read books that tell us of the stench of battlefields, <br />and the nature of wounds, books that Germany <br />suppressed and hid from her people. And we <br />face these horrors to make an end of them. <br /><br />There shall be no more Kaisers, there shall be <br />no more Krupps, we are resolved. That foolery <br />shall end ! <br /><br />And not simply the present belligerents must <br />come into the settlement. <br /><br />All America, Italy, China, the Scandinavian <br />Powers, must have a voice in the final readjust- <br />ment, and set their hands to the ultimate <br /><br /><br /><br />WHY BRITAIN WENT TO WAR 13 <br /><br />guarantees. I do not mean that they need fire a <br />single shot or load a single gun. But they must <br />come in. And in particular to the United States <br />do we look to play a part in that pacification of <br />the world for which our whole nation is working, <br />and for which, by the thousand, men are now <br />laying down their lives. <br /><br /><br /><br />II. <br />THE SWORD OF PEACE <br /><br />" EVERY SWORD THAT IS DRAWN AGAINST GERMANY <br />NOW IS A SWORD DRAWN FOR PEACE." <br /><br />Europe is at war ! <br /><br />The monstrous vanity that was begotten by <br />the easy victories of '70 and '71 has challenged <br />the world, and Germany prepares to reap the <br />harvest Bismarck sowed. That trampling, drill- <br />ing foolery in the heart of Europe, that has <br />arrested civilisation and darkened the hopes of <br />mankind for forty years. German Imperialism, <br />German militarism, has struck its inevitable blow. <br />The victory of Germany will mean the permanent <br />enthronement of the War God over all human <br />affairs. The defeat of Germany may open the <br />way to disarmament and peace throughout the <br />earth. <br /><br />To those who love peace there can be no other <br />hope in the present conflict than the defeat, the <br />utter discrediting of the German legend, the <br />ending for good and all of the blood and iron <br />superstition, of Krupp, flag-wagging Teutonic <br />Kiplingism, and all that criminal, sham efficiency <br />that centres in Berlin. Never was war so <br />righteous as war against Germany now. Never <br />has any State in the world so clamoured for <br />punishment. <br /><br /><br /><br />THE SWORD OF PEACE 15 <br /><br />But be it remembered that Europe's quarrel <br />is with the German State, not with the German <br />people ; with a system, and not with a race. <br />The older tradition of Germany is a pacific and <br />civilising tradition. The temperament of the <br />mass of German people is kindly, sane and amiable. <br />Disaster to the German Army, if it is unaccom- <br />panied by any such memorable wrong as dis- <br />memberment or intolerable indignity, will mean <br />the restoration of the greatest people in Europe <br />to the fellowship of Western nations. The role <br />of England in this huge struggle is plain as <br />daylight. We have to fight. If only on account <br />of the Luxemburg outrage we have to fight. <br />If we do not fight, England will cease to be a <br />country to be proud of ; it will be a dirt-bath <br />to escape from. But it is inconceivable that we <br />should not fight. And having fought, then in <br />the hour of victory it will be for us to save the <br />liberated Germans from vindictive treatment, <br />to secure for this great people their right, as one <br />united German-speaking State, to a place in the <br />sun. <br /><br />First we have to save ourselves and Europe, <br />and then we have to stand between German on <br />the one hand and the Cossack and revenge on <br />the other. <br /><br />For my own part, I do not doubt that Germany <br />and Austria are doomed to defeat in this war. <br />It may not be catastrophic defeat, though even <br />that is possible, but it is defeat. There is no <br />destiny in the stars and every sign is false if this <br />is not so. <br /><br /><br /><br />16 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />They have provoked an overwhelming com- <br />bination of enemies. They have under-rated <br />France. They are hampered by a bad social <br />and military tradition. The German is not <br />naturally a good soldier ; he is orderly and <br />obedient, but he is not nimble nor quick-witted ; <br />since his sole considerable military achievement, <br />his not very lengthy march to Paris in 1870 and <br />'71, the conditions of modern warfare have been <br />almost completely revolutionised and in a direc- <br />tion that subordinates the massed fighting of <br />unintelligent men to the rapid initiative of <br />individualised soldiers. And, on the other hand, <br />since those years of disaster, the Frenchman has <br />learnt the lesson of humility ; he is prepared <br />now sombrely for a sombre struggle ; his is the <br />gravity that precedes astonishing victories. In <br />the air, in the open field, with guns and machines, <br />it is doubtful if anyone fully realises the supe- <br />riority of his quality to the German. This <br />sudden attack may take him aback for a week or <br />so, though I doubt even that, but in the end I <br />think he will hold his own ; even without us he <br />will hold his own, and with us then I venture to <br />prophesy that within three months from now his <br />Tricolour will be over the Rhine. And even <br />suppose his line gets broken by the first rush. <br />Even then I do not see how the Germans are to <br />get to Paris or anywhere near Paris. I do not <br />see how against the strength of the modern <br />defensive and the stinging power of an intelligent <br />enemy in retreat, of whch we had a little fore- <br />taste in South Africa, the exploit of Sedan can <br /><br /><br /><br />THE SWORD OF PEACE 17 <br /><br />be repeated. A retiring German army, on the <br />other hand, will be far less formidable than a <br />retiring French army, because it has less " devil " <br />in it, because it is made up of men taught to <br />obey in masses, because its intelligence is con- <br />centrated in its aristocratic officers, because it is <br />dismayed when it breaks ranks. The German <br />army is everything the Conscriptionists dreamt <br />of making our people ; it is, in fact, an army <br />about twenty years behind the requirements of <br />contemporary conditions. <br /><br />On the Eastern frontier the issue is more <br />doubtful because of the uncertainty of Russian <br />things. The peculiar military strength of Russia, <br />a strength it was not able to display in Manchuria, <br />lies in its vast resources of mounted men. A set <br />invasion of Prussia may be a matter of many <br />weeks, but the raiding possibilities in Eastern <br />Germany are enormous. It is difficult to guess <br />how far the Russian attack will be guided by <br />intelligence, and how far Russia will blunder, <br />but Russia will have to blunder very disastrously <br />indeed before she can be put upon the defensive. <br />A Russian raid is far more likely to threaten <br />Berlin than a German to reach Paris. <br /><br />Meanwhile there is the struggle on the sea. In <br />that I am prepared for some rude shocks. The <br />Germans have devoted an amount of energy to <br />the creation of an aggressive navy that would <br />have been spent more wisely in consolidating <br />their European position. It is probably a <br />thoroughly good navy, and ship for ship the <br />equal of our own. But the same lack of <br /><br />B <br /><br /><br /><br />18 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />invention, the same relative uncreativeness that <br />has kept the German behind the Frenchman in <br />things aerial has made him, regardless of his <br />shallow seas, follow our lead in naval matters, <br />and if we have erred, and I believe we have <br />erred, in overrating the importance of the big <br />battleship, the German has at least very obligingly <br />fallen in with our error. The safest, most effec- <br />tive, place for the German fleet at the present <br />time is the Baltic Sea. On this side of the Kiel <br />Canal, unless I overrate the powers of the water- <br />plane, there is no safe harbour for it. If it goes <br />into port anywhere that port can be ruined, and <br />the bottled-up ships can be destroyed at leisure <br />by aerial bombs. So that if they are on this side <br />of the Kiel Canal they must keep the sea and <br />fight, if we let them, before their coal runs short. <br />Battle in the open sea in this case is their only <br />chance. They will fight against odds, and with <br />every prospect of a smashing, albeit we shall <br />certainly have to pay for that victory in ships and <br />men. In the Baltic we shall not be able to get <br />at them without the participation of Denmark, <br />and they may have a considerable use against <br />Russia. But in the end even there mine and <br />aeroplane and destroyer should do their work. <br /><br />So I reckon that Germany will be held east and <br />west, and that she will get her fleet practically <br />destroyed. We ought also to be able to sweep <br />her shipping off the seas, and lower her flag for <br />ever in Africa and Asia and the Pacific. All the <br />probabilities, it seems to me, point to that. <br />There is no reason whv Italv should not stick to <br /><br /><br /><br />THE SWORD OF PEACE 19 <br /><br />her present neutrality, and there is considerable <br />inducement close at hand for both Denmark and <br />Japan to join in, directly they are convinced of <br />the failure of the first big rush on the part of <br />Germany. All these issues will be more or less <br />definitely decided within the next two or three <br />months. By that time I believe German Impe- <br />rialism will be shattered, and it may be possible <br />to anticipate the end of the armaments phase of <br />European history. France, Italy, England, and <br />all the smaller Powers of Europe are now pacific <br />countries ; Russia, after this huge war, will be <br />too exhausted for further adventure ; a shattered <br />Germany will be a revolutionary Germany, as <br />sick of uniforms and the Imperialist idea as <br />France was in 1871, as disillusioned about pre- <br />dominance as Bulgaria is to-day. The way will <br />be open at last for all these Western Powers to <br />organise peace. That is why I, with my declared <br />horror of war, have not signed any of these <br />" stop-the-war " appeals and declarations that <br />have appeared in the last few days. Every sword <br />that is drawn against Germany now is a sword <br />drawn for peace. <br /><br /><br /><br />III. <br /><br />HANDS OFF THE <br />PEOPLE'S FOOD <br /><br />This is a war-torn article, a convalescent <br />article. <br /><br />It is characteristic of the cheerful gallantry <br />of the time that after being left for dead on <br />Saturday evening this article should be able, in <br />an only very slightly bandaged condition, to take <br />its place in the firing-line again on Thursday <br />morning. <br /><br />It was first written late on Friday night ; it <br />was written in a mood of righteous excitement, <br />and it was an extremely ineffective article. In <br />the night I could not sleep because of its badness, <br />and because I did so vehemently want it to hit <br />hard and get its effect. I turned out about two <br />o'clock in the morning and redrafted it, and the <br />next day I wrote it all over again differently and <br />carefully, and I think better. In the afternoon <br />it was blown up by the discovery that Mr. <br />Runciman had anticipated its essential idea. He <br />had brought in, and the House had passed through <br />all its stages, a Bill to give the Board of Trade <br />power to requisition and deal with hoarded or <br />reserved food. That was exactly the demand of <br />my article. My article, about to die, saluted <br />this most swift and decisive Government of <br />ours <br /><br /><br /><br />HANDS OFF THE PEOPLE'S FOOD 21 <br /><br />Then I perceived that there were still many <br />things to be said about this requisitioning of <br />food. The Board of Trade has got its powers, but <br />apparently they have still to be put into operation. <br />It is extremely desirable that there should be a <br />strong public opinion supporting and watching <br />the exercise of these powers, and that they should <br />be applied at the proper point immediately. The <br />powers Mr. Runciman has secured so rapidly for <br />the Board of Trade have to be put into operation <br />there must be an equally rapid development of <br />local committees and commandos to carry out <br />his idea. The shortage continues. It is not <br />over. The common people, who are sending <br />their boys so bravely and uncomplainingly to <br />the front, must be relieved at once from the <br />intolerable hardships which a certain section of <br />the prosperous classes, a small section but an <br />actively mischievous section, is causing them. It <br />is a right ; not a demand for charity. It is <br />ridiculous to treat the problem in any other <br />way. <br /><br />So far the poorer English have displayed an <br />amazing and exemplary patience in this crisis, a <br />humility and courage that make one the prouder <br />for being also English. Apart from any failure <br />of employment at the present time, it must be <br />plain to anyone who has watched the present <br />rise of prices and who knows anything either at <br />first hand of poor households or by reading such <br />investigations as those of Mrs. Pember Reeves <br />upon the family budgets of the poor, that the <br />rank and file of our population cannot now be <br /><br /><br /><br />22 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />getting enough to eat. They are suffering need- <br />less deprivation and also they are suffering needless <br />vexation. And there is no atom of doubt why <br />they are suffering these distresses. It is that <br />pretentious section of the prosperous classes, the <br />section we might hit off with the phrase " auto- <br />mobile-driving villadom," the " Tariff Reform <br />and damn Lloyd George and Keir Hardie " class, <br />the most pampered and least public-spirited of <br />any stratum in the community, which has grabbed <br />at the food ; it has given way to an inglorious <br />panic ; it has broken ranks and stampeded to the <br />stores and made the one discreditable exception <br />in the splendid spectacle of our national solidarity. <br />While the attention of all decent English folk <br />has been concentrated upon the preparations for <br />our supreme blow at Prussian predominance in <br />Europe, villadom has been swarming to the shops, <br />buying up the food of the common people, <br />carrying it off in the family car (adorned, of course, <br />with a fluttering little Union Jack) ; father has <br />given a day from business, mother has helped, <br />even those shiny-headed nuts, the sons, have <br />condescended to assist, and now villadom, feeling <br />a little safer, is ready with the dinner-bell, its <br />characteristic instrument of music, to maffick at <br />the victories it has done its best to spoil. And <br />villadom promoted and distended, villadom in <br />luck, turned millionaire, villadom on a scale that <br />can buy a peerage and write you its thousands-of- <br />pounds cheque for a showy subscription list, has <br />been true to its origins. Lord Maffick, emulating <br />Mr. and Mrs. Maffick, swept his district clean <br /><br /><br /><br />HANDS OFF THE PEOPLE'S FOOD 23 <br /><br />of flour ; let the thing go down to history. Lord <br />Maffick now explains that he bought it to dis- <br />tribute among his poorer neighbours that is <br />going to be the stock excuse of these people <br />but that sort of buying is just exactly as bad for <br />prices as buying for Lord Maffick's personal <br />interior. The sooner that flour gets out of the <br />houses of Lord Maffick and Horatio Maffick, <br />Esquire, and young Mr. Maffick and the rest of <br />them, and into the houses of their poorer neigh- <br />bours, the better for them and the country. <br />The greatest danger to England at the present <br />time is neither the German army nor the German <br />fleet, but this morally rotten section of our <br />community. <br /><br />Now it is no use scolding these people. It is <br />no use appealing to their honour and patriotism. <br />Honour they have none, and their idea of pat- <br />riotism is to " tax the foreigner," wave Union <br />Jacks, and clamour for the application to England <br />of just that universal compulsory service which <br />leads straight to those crowded, ineffective <br />massacres of common soldiers that are beginning <br />upon the German war-front. Exhortation may <br />sway the ninety-and-nine, but the one mean man <br />in the hundred will spoil the lot. The thing to <br />do now is to get to work at once in every locality, <br />requisitioning all excessive private stores of food <br />or gold coins they can be settled for after the <br />war not only the stores of the private food- <br />grabbers, but also the stores of the speculative <br />wholesalers who are holding up prices to <br />the retail shops. Only in that way can the <br /><br /><br /><br />24 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />operations of this intolerable little minority be <br />completely checked. Under every county council <br />food committees should be formed at once to <br />report on the necessities of the general mass and <br />conduct inquiries into hoarding and the seizure <br />and distribution of hoards, small and great. <br /><br />Now this is a public work calling for the most <br />careful and open methods. Food distribution <br />in England is partly in the hands of great systems <br />of syndicated shops and partly still in the hands of <br />one-shop local tradesmen. It is imperative that <br />the brightest light should be kept upon the opera- <br />tions of both small and large provision dealers. <br />The big firms are in the control of men whose <br />business successes have received in many instances <br />marks of the signal favour and trust of our rulers. <br />Lord Devonport, for example, is a peer ; Sir <br />Thomas Lipton is a baronet ; they are not to <br />be regarded as mere private traders, but as men <br />honoured by association with the hierarchy of <br />our national life on account of their distinguished <br />share in the public food service. It will help <br />them in their quasi-public duties to give them <br />the support of our attention. Are they devoting <br />their enormous economic advantages to keeping <br />prices at a reasonable level, or are these various <br />systems of syndicated provision shops also putting <br />things up against the consumer ? With con- <br />certed action on the part of these stores the most <br />perfect control of prices is possible everywhere, <br />except in the case of a few out-of-the-way villages. <br />Is it being done ? Nobody wants to see the <br />names of Lord Devonport or Sir Thomas Lipton <br /><br /><br /><br />HANDS OFF THE PEOPLE'S FOOD 25 <br /><br />or the various other rich men associated with <br />them in the food supply flourishing about on <br />royal subscription lists at the present time ; their <br />work lies closer at hand. What we all want is to <br />feel that they are devoting their utmost resources <br />to the public food service of which they constitute <br />so important a part. Let me say at once that I <br />have every reason to believe they are doing it, <br />and that they are alive to the responsibilities of <br />their positions. But we must keep the limelight <br />on them and on their less honoured and con- <br />spicuous fellow-merchants. They are playing as <br />important and vital a part indeed, they are <br />called upon to play as brave and self-sacrificing a <br />part as any general at the front. If they fail <br />us it will be worse than the loss of many thousands <br />of men in battle. Let us watch them, and I <br />believe we shall watch them with admiration. <br />But let us watch them. Let us report their <br />movements, ask them to reassure us, chronicle <br />their visits to the Board of Trade. <br /><br />I will not expatiate upon the possible heroisms <br />of the wholesale provision trade. I do but glance <br />at the possibility of Lord Devonport or Sir <br />Thomas Lipton, after the war, living, financially <br />ruined, but glorious, in a little cottage. " I gave <br />back to the people in their hour of need what <br />I made from them in their hours of plenty," he <br />would say. " I have suffered that thousands <br />might not suffer. It is nothing. Think of the <br />lads who died in Belgium." <br /><br />By all accounts, the small one-shop provision <br />dealers are behaving extremely well. In my own <br /><br /><br /><br />26 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />town of Dunmow I know of two little shop- <br />keepers who have dared to offend important <br />customers rather than fulfil panic orders. They <br />deserve medals. In poor districts many such men <br />are giving credit, eking out, tiding over, and all <br />the time running tremendous risks. Not all <br />heroes are upon the battlefield, and some of the <br />heroes of this war are now fighting gallantly for <br />our land behind grocers' counters and in village <br />general shops, and may end, if not in the burial <br />trench, in the bankruptcy court. Indeed, many <br />of them are already on the verge of bankruptcy. <br />The wholesalers have, I know, in many cases <br />betrayed them, not simply by putting up prices, <br />but by suddenly stopping customary credits, and <br />this last week has seen some dismal nights of <br />sleepless worry in the little bedrooms over the <br />isolated grocery. While we look to the syndicated <br />shops to do their duty, it is of the utmost import- <br />ance also that we should not permit a massacre <br />of the small tradespeople. A catastrophe to the <br />small shopkeeper at the present time will not only <br />throw a multitude of broken men upon public <br />resources, but leave a gap in the homely give- <br />and-take of back-street and village economies that <br />will not be easily repaired. So that I suggest <br />that the requisitioned stocks of forestalling whole- <br />salers there ought to be a great bulk of such <br />food-stuff already in the hands of the authorities <br />shall be sold in the first instance at wholesale <br />prices to the isolated shopkeepers, and not directly <br />to the public. Only in the event of a local <br />failure of duty should the direct course be taken. <br /><br /><br /><br />HANDS OFF THE PEOPLE'S FOOD 27 <br /><br />It must be remembered that the whole of the <br />present stress for food is an artificial stress due <br />to the vehement selfishness of vulgar-minded <br />prosperous people and to the base cunning of <br />quite exceptional merchants. But under the <br />strange and difficult and planless conditions of <br />to-day quite a few people can start a rush and <br />produce an almost irresistible pressure. The <br />majority of people who have hoarded and fore- <br />stalled have probably done so very unwillingly, <br />because " others will do it." They would <br />welcome any authoritative action that would <br />enable them to disgorge without feeling that <br />somebody else would instantly snatch what they <br />had surrendered and profit by it. It is for that <br />reason that we must at once organise the com- <br />mandeering and requisitioning of hoards and <br />reserved goods. The mere threat will probably <br />produce a great relaxation of the situation, but <br />the threat must be carried out to the point of <br />having everything ready as soon as possible to seize <br />and sell and distribute. Until that is done this <br />food crisis will wax and wane, but it will not <br />cease ; if we do not carry out Mr. Runciman's <br />initiatives with a certain harsh promptness food <br />trouble will be an intermittent wasting fever in <br />the body politic until the end of the war. <br /><br />And the business will not be over at the end <br />of the war. The patience of the common people <br />has been astonishing. In countless homes there <br />must have been the extremest worry and misery. <br />But except for a few trivial rows, such as the <br />smashing of the windows of Mr. Moss, at Hitchin, <br /><br /><br /><br />28 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />who was probably not a bit to blame, an attack <br />on a bakery somewhere, and some not very bad <br />behaviour in the way of threats and demonstra- <br />tions on the part of East End Jews, there has been <br />no disorder at all. That is because the people <br />are full of the first solemnity of war, eagerly <br />trustful, and still well nourished. <br /><br />At the end unless the more prosperous people <br />pull themselves together it will not be like that. <br /><br /><br /><br />IV. <br /><br />CONCERNING <br />MR. MAXIMILIAN CRAFT <br /><br />I find myself enthusiastic for this war against <br />Prussian militarism. We are, I believe, assisting <br />at the end of a vast, intolerable oppression upon <br />civilisation. We are fighting to release Germany <br />and all the world from the superstition that <br />brutality and cynicism are the methods of success, <br />that Imperialism is better than free citizenship <br />and conscripts better soldiers than free men. <br /><br />And I find another writer who is also being, he <br />declares, patriotically British. Indeed, he waves <br />the Union Jack about to an extent from which <br />my natural modesty recoils. Because you see <br />I am English-cum-Irish, and save for the cross <br />of St. Andrew that flag is mine. To wave it <br />about would, I feel, be just vulgar self-assertion. <br />He, however, is not English. He assumes a <br />variety of names, and some are quite lovely old <br />English names. But his favourite name is Craft, <br />Maximilian Craft and I understand he was born <br />a Kraft. He shoves himself into the affairs of <br />this country with an extraordinary energy ; he <br />takes possession of my Union Jack as if St. George <br />was his father. At present he is advising me very <br />actively how to conduct this war, and telling me <br />exactly what I ought to think about it. He is, <br /><br /><br /><br />30 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />in fact, the English equivalent of those professors <br />of Welt Politik who have guided the German <br />mind to its present magnificent display of shrewd, <br />triumphant statecraft. I suspect him of a distant <br />cousinship with Professor Delbruck. And he is <br />urging upon our attention now a magnificent <br />coup, with which I will shortly deal. <br /><br />In appearance Kraft is by no means completely <br />anglicised himself. He is a large-faced creature <br />with enormous long features and a woolly head ; <br />he is heavy in build and with a back slightly <br />hunched ; he lisps slightly and his manner is <br />either insolently contemptuous or aggressively <br />familiar. He thinks all born Englishmen, as dis- <br />tinguished from the naturalised Englishmen, are <br />also born fools. Always his manner is pervaded <br />by a faint flavour of astonishment at the born <br />foolishness of the born Englishmen. But he <br />thinks their Empire a marvellous accident, a <br />wonderful opportunity for cleverer people. <br /><br />So, with a kind of disinterested energy, he has <br />been doing his best to educate Englishmen up <br />to their Imperial opportunities, to show them how <br />to change luck into cunning, take the wall of <br />every other breed and swagger foremost in the <br />world. He cannot understand that English blood <br />does not warm to such ambitions. When he <br />has wealth it is his nature to show it in watch- <br />chains and studs and signet-rings ; if he had a <br />wife she would dazzle in diamonds ; the furniture <br />of his flat is wonderfully " good," all picked <br />English pieces and worth no end ; he thinks <br />it is just dulness and poorness of spirit that <br /><br /><br /><br />CONCERNING MR. MAXIMILIAN CRAFT 31 <br /><br />disregards these things. He came to England to <br />instruct us in the arts of Empire, when he found <br />that already there was a glut of his kind of wisdom <br />in the German universities. For years until this <br />present outbreak I have followed his career with <br />silent interest rather than affection. And the <br />first thing he undertook to teach us was, I <br />remember, Tariff Reform, " taxing the foreigner." <br />Limitless wealth you get, and you pay nothing. <br />You get a huge national income in imported <br />goods, and also, as your tariff prevents importa- <br />tion, you develop a tremendous internal trade. <br />Two birds (in quite opposite directions) with the <br />same stone. It seemed just plain common sense <br />to him. Anyhow, he felt sure it was good enough <br />for the born English. . . . <br /><br />He is still a little incredulous of our refusal to <br />accept that delightful idea. Meanwhile his kind <br />have dominated the more docile German intelli- <br />gence altogether. They have listened to the <br />whisper of Welt Politik, or at least their rulers <br />have attended ; they have sown exasperation on <br />every frontier, taken the wall, done all the <br />showily aggresssive and successful things. They <br />were the pupils he should have taught. A people <br />at once teachable and spirited. Almost tearfully <br />Kraft has asked us to mark that glorious progress <br />of a once philosophical, civilised, and kindly <br />people. And indeed we have had to mark it <br />and polish our weapons, and with a deepening <br />resentment get more and more weapons, and <br />keep our powder dry, when we would have been <br />far rather occupied with other things. <br /><br /><br /><br />32 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />But amazingly enough we would not listen to <br />his suggestion of universal service. Kraft and <br />his kind believe in numbers. Even the Boer <br />War could not shake his natural aptitude for <br />political arithmetic. He has tried to bring the <br />situation home to us by diagrams, showing us <br />enormous figures, colossal soldiers to represent <br />the German forces and tiny little British men, <br />smaller than the army figures for Bulgaria and <br />for Servia. He does not understand that there <br />can be too many soldiers on a field of battle ; he <br />could as soon believe that one could have too <br />much money. And so he thinks the armies of <br />Russia must be more powerful than the French. <br />When I deny that superiority as I do he <br />simply notes the fact that I am unable to <br />count. <br /><br />And when it comes to schemes of warfare then <br />a kind of delirium of cunning descends upon <br />Kraft. He is full of devices such as we poor <br />fools cannot invent ; sudden attacks without a <br />declaration of war, vast schemes for spy systems <br />and assassin-like disguises, the cowing of a country <br />by the wholesale shooting of uncivil non-com- <br />batants, breaches of neutrality, national treacheries, <br />altered dispatches, forged letters, diplomatic lies, <br />a perfect world-organisation of Super-sneaks. <br />Our poor cousin, Michael, the German, has <br />listened to such wisdom only too meekly. Poor <br />Michael, with his honest blue eyes wonder-lit, <br />has tried his best to be a very devil, and go where <br />Kraft's cousin, Bernhardi, the military " expert," <br />has led him. (So far it has led him into the <br /><br /><br /><br />CONCERNING MR. MAXIMILIAN CRAFT 33 <br /><br />ditches of Liege and the gorges of the Ardennes <br />and much hunger and dirt and blood.) And <br />Kraft over here has watched with an intolerable <br />envy Berlin lying and bullying and being the <br />very Superman of Welt Politik. He has been <br />talking, writing, praying us to do likewise, to <br />strike suddenly before war was declared at the <br />German fleet, to outrage the neutrality of <br />Denmark, to seize Holland, to do something <br />nationally dishonest and disgraceful. Daily he <br />has raged at our milk and water methods. At <br />times we have seemed to him more like a lot of <br />Woodrow Wilsons than reasonable sane men. <br /><br />And he is still ~t it. <br /><br />Only a few da^s ago I took up the paper that <br />has at last moved me to the very plain declarations <br />of this article. It was an English daily paper, <br />and Kraft was telling us, as usual, and with his <br />usual despairful sense of our stupidity, how to <br />conduct this war. And what he said was this <br />that we have to starve Germany not realising <br />that with her choked railways and her wasted <br />crops Germany may be trusted very rapidly to <br />starve herself and that, if we do not prevent <br />them, foodstuffs will go into Germany by way of <br />Holland and Italy. So he wants us to begin at <br />once a hostile blockade of Holland and Italy, c~ <br />better, perhaps, to send each of these innocent <br />and friendly countries an ultimatum forthwith. <br />He wants it done at once, because otherwise the <br />Berlin Krafts, some Delbruck or Bernhardi, or <br />that egregious young statesman, the Crown <br />Prince, may persuade the Prussians to get in their <br /><br /><br /><br />34 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />ultimatum first. Then we should have no <br />chance of doing anything internationally idiotic <br />at all, unless, perhaps, we seized a port in Norway. <br />It might be rather a fine thing, he thinks upon <br />reflection, to seize a port in Norway. <br /><br />Now let us English make it clear, once for all, <br />to the Krafts and other kindred patriotic gentle- <br />men from abroad who are showing us the really <br />artful way to do things, that this is not our way <br />of doing things. Into this war we have gone <br />with clean hands to end the reign of brutal and <br />artful internationalism for ever. Our hearts are <br />heavy at the task before us, but our intention is <br />grim. We mean to conquer. We are prepared <br />for every disaster, for intolerable stresses, for <br />bankruptcy, for hunger, for anything but defeat. <br />Now that we have begun to fight we will fight if <br />needful until the children die of famine in our <br />homes, we will fight though every ship we have <br />is at the bottom of the sea. We mean to fight <br />this war to its very finish, and that finish we are <br />absolutely resolved must be the end of Kraftism <br />in the world. And we will come out of this war <br />with hands as clean as they are now, unstained <br />by any dirty tricks in field or council chamber, <br />neutralities respected and treaties kept. Then <br />we will reckon once for all with Kraft and with <br />his friends and supporters, the private dealers in <br />armaments, and with all this monstrous, stupid <br />brood of villainy that has brought this vast <br />catastrophe upon the world. <br /><br />I say this plainly now for myself and for <br />thousands of silent plain men, because the sooner <br /><br /><br /><br />CONCERNING MR. MAXIMILIAN CRAFT 35 <br /><br />Kraft realises how we feel in this matter the <br />better for him. He betrays at times a remark- <br />able persuasion that at the final settling up of <br />things he will make himself invaluable to us. At <br />diplomacy he knows he shines. Then the lisping <br />whisper has its use, and the studied insolence. <br />Finish the fighting, and then leave it to him. <br />He really believes the born English will. He <br />does not understand in the slightest degree the <br />still passion of our streets. There never was <br />less shouting and less demonstration in England, <br />and never was England so quietly intent. This <br />war is not going to end in diplomacy ; it is going <br />to end diplomacy. It is quite a different sort <br />of war from any that have gone before it. At <br />the end there will be no Conference of Europe <br />on the old lines at all, but a Conference of the <br />World. It will be a Conference for Kraft to <br />laugh at. He will run about button-holing <br />people about it ; almost spitting in their faces <br />with the eagerness of his derisive whispers. It <br />will conduct its affairs with scandalous publicity <br />and a deliberate simplicity. It will be worse <br />than Woodrow Wilson. And it will make a <br />peace that will put an end to Kraft and the spirit <br />of Kraft and Kraftism and the private armament <br />firms behind him for evermore. <br /><br />At which I imagine the head of Kraft going <br />down between his shoulders and his large hands <br />going out like the wings of a cherub. " English- <br />men ! Liberals ! Fools ! Incurable ! How <br />can such things be ? It is not how things <br />are done." <br /><br /><br /><br />36 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />It is how they are going to be done if this world <br />is to be worth living in at all after this war. <br />When we fight Berlin, Kraft, we fight you. . . . <br />An absolute end to you. Yes, <br /><br /><br /><br />V. <br /><br />THE MOST NECESSARY <br />MEASURES IN THE WORLD <br /><br />In this smash-up of empires and diplomacy, <br />this utter disaster of international politics, certain <br />things which would have seemed ridiculously <br />Utopian a few weeks ago have suddenly become <br />reasonable and practicable. One of these, a <br />thing that would have seemed fantastic until the <br />very moment when we joined issue with Germany <br />and which may now be regarded as a sober <br />possibility, is the absolute abolition throughout <br />the world of the manufacture of weapons for <br />private gain. Whatever may be said of the <br />practicability of national disarmament, there can <br />be no dispute not merely of the possibility but <br />of the supreme necessity of ending for ever the <br />days of private profit in the instruments of death. <br />That is the real enemy. That is the evil thing at <br />the very centre of this trouble. <br /><br />At the very core of all this evil that has burst <br />at last in world disaster lies this Kruppism, this <br />sordid enormous trade in the instruments of <br />death. It is the closest, most gigantic organisa- <br />tion in the world. Time after time this huge <br />business, with its bought newspapers, its paid <br />spies, its agents, its shareholders, its insane <br />sympathisers, its vast ramification of open and <br /><br /><br /><br />w <br /><br />38 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />concealed associates, has defeated attempts at <br />pacification, has piled the heap of explosive <br />material higher and higher the heap that has <br />toppled at last into this bloody welter in Belgium, <br />in which the lives of four great nations are now <br />being torn and tormented and slaughtered and <br />wasted beyond counting, beyond imagining. I dare <br />not picture it thinking now of who may read. <br /><br />So long as the unstable peace endured, so long <br />as the Emperor of the Germans and the Krupp <br />concern and the vanities of Prussia hung together, <br />threatening but not assailing the peace of the <br />world, so long as one could dream of holding off <br />the crash and saving lives, so long was it impossible <br />to bring this business to an end or even to propose <br />plainly to bring this business to an end. It was <br />still possible to argue that to be prepared for <br />war was the way to keep the peace; But now <br />everyone knows better. The war has come. <br />Preparation has exploded. Outrageous plunder <br />has passed into outrageous bloodshed. All Europe <br />is in revolt against this evil system. There is no <br />going back now to peace ; our men must die, in <br />heaps, in thousands ; we cannot delude ourselves <br />with dreams of easy victories ; we must all suffer <br />endless miseries and anxieties ; scarcely a human <br />affair is there that will not be marred and darkened <br />by this war. Out of it all must come one uni- <br />versal resolve : that this iniquity must be plucked <br />out by the roots. Whatever follies still lie ahead <br />for mankind this folly at least must end. There <br />must be no more buying and selling of guns and <br />warships and war-machines. There must be no <br /><br /><br /><br />MOST NECESSARY MEASURES IN THE WORLD 39 <br /><br />more gain in arms. Kings and Kaisers must <br />cease to be the commercial travellers of monstrous <br />armament concerns. With the Goeben the Kaiser <br />has made his last sale. Whatever arms the <br />nations think they need they must make for them- <br />selves and give to their own subjects. Beyond <br />that there must be no making of weapons in the <br />earth. <br /><br />This is the clearest common sense. I do not <br />need to argue what is manifest, what every <br />German knows, what every intelligent educated <br />man in the world knows. The Krupp concern <br />and the tawdry Imperialism of Berlin are linked <br />like thief and receiver ; the hands of the German <br />princes are dirty with the trade. All over the <br />world statecraft and royalty have been approached <br />and touched and tainted by these vast firms, <br />but it is in Berlin that the corruption has centred, <br />it is from Berlin that the intolerable pressure <br />to arm and still to arm has come, it is at Berlin <br />alone that the evil can be grappled and killed. <br />Before this there was no reaching it. It was <br />useless to dream even of disarmament while these <br />people could still go on making their material <br />uncontrolled, waiting for the moment of national <br />passion, feeding the national mind with fears and <br />suspicions through their subsidised Press. But <br />now there is a new spirit in the world. There <br />are no more fears ; the worst evil has come to <br />pass. The ugly hatreds, the nourished mis- <br />conceptions of an armed peace, begin already to <br />give place to the mutual respect and pity and <br />disillusionment of a universally disastrous war. <br /><br /><br /><br />40 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />We can at last deal with Krupps and the kindred <br />firms throughout the world as one general <br />problem, one world-wide accessible evil. <br /><br />Outside the circle of belligerent States, and the <br />States which, like Denmark, Italy, Rumania, <br />Norway and Sweden, must necessarily be invited <br />to take a share in the final re-settlement of the <br />world's affairs, there are only three systems of <br />Powers which need be considered in this matter, <br />namely, the English and Spanish-speaking Repub- <br />lics of America and China. None of these States <br />is deeply involved in the armaments trade, <br />several of them have every reason to hate a <br />system that has linked the obligation to deal in <br />armaments with every loan. The United States <br />of America is now, more than ever it was, an <br />anti-militarist Power, and it is not too much to <br />say that the Government of the United States of <br />America holds in its hand the power to sanction <br />or prevent this most urgent need of mankind. <br />If the people of the United States will consider <br />and grasp this tremendous question now ; if <br />they will make up their minds now that there <br />shall be no more profit made in America or <br />anywhere else upon the face of the earth in raw <br />material ; if they will determine to put the vast <br />moral, financial and material influence the States <br />will be able to exercise at the end of this war in <br />the scale against the survival of Kruppism, then <br />it will be possible to finish that vile industry for <br />ever. If, through a failure of courage or <br />imagination, they will not come into this thing, <br />then I fear if it may be done. But I misjudge <br /><br /><br /><br />MOST NECESSARY MEASURES IN THE WORLD 41 <br /><br />the United States if, in the end, they abstain <br />from so glorious and congenial an opportunity. <br /><br />Let me set out the suggestion very plainly. <br />All the plant for the making of war material <br />throughout the world must be taken over by the <br />Government of the State in which it exists ; <br />every gun factory, every rifle factory, every dock- <br />yard for the building of warships. It may be <br />necessary to compensate the shareholders more or <br />less completely ; there may have to be a war <br />indemnity to provide for that, but that is a <br />question of detail. The thing is the conversion <br />everywhere of arms-making into a State monopoly, <br />so that nowhere shall there be a ha'porth of <br />avoidable private gain in it. Then, and then <br />only, will it become possible to arrange for the <br />gradual dismantling of this industry which is <br />destroying humanity, and the reduction of the <br />armed forces of the world to reasonable dimen- <br />sions. I would carry this suppression down even <br />to the restriction of the manufacture and sale of <br />every sort of gun, pistol, and explosive. They <br />should be made only in Government workshops <br />and sold only in Government shops ; there <br />should not be a single rifle, not a Browning <br />pistol, unregistered, unrecorded, and untraceable <br />in the world. But that may be a counsel of <br />perfection. The essential thing is the world <br />suppression of this abominable traffic in the big <br />gear of war, in warships and great guns. <br /><br />With this corruption cleared out of the way, <br />with the armaments commercial traveller flung <br />down the back-stairs he has haunted for so long <br /><br /><br /><br />42 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />and flung so hard that he will be incapacitated <br />for ever it will become possible to consider a <br />scheme for the establishment of the peace of the <br />world. Until that is done any such scheme will <br />remain an idle dream. But him disposed of, the <br />way is open for the association of armed nations, <br />determined to stamp out at once every recru- <br />descence of aggressive war. They will not be <br />totally disarmed Powers. It is no good to disarm <br />while any one single Power is still in love with <br />the dream of military glory. It is no good to <br />disarm while the possibility of war fever is still <br />in the human blood. The intelligence of the <br />whole world must watch for febrile symptoms <br />and prepare to allay them. But after this struggle <br />one may count on the pacific intentions of at <br />least the following States : The British Empire, <br />France, Italy, and all the minor States of the <br />north and west ; the United States has always <br />been a pacific Power ; Japan has had its lesson <br />and is too impoverished for serious hostilities ; <br />China has never been aggressive ; Germany also, <br />unless this war leads to intolerable insults and <br />humiliations for the German spirit, will be war- <br />sick. The Spanish and Portuguese-speaking Re- <br />publics of America are too busy developing <br />materially to dream of war on the modern scale, <br />and the same may presently be true of the Greek, <br />Latin and Slav communities of south-east Europe <br />if, as I hope and believe, this war leads to the <br />rational rearrangement of the Austro-Hungarian <br />empire. 1915 will indeed find this world a <br />strangely tamed and reasonable world. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />MOST NECESSARY MEASURES IN THE WORLD 43 <br /><br />There is only one doubtful country, Russia, <br />and for my own part I do not believe in the <br />wickedness and I doubt the present power of that <br />stupendous barbaric State. Finland and a <br />renascent Polish kingdom at least will be weight <br />on the side of peace. It will be indeed the phase <br />of supreme opportunity for peace. If there is <br />courage and honesty enough in men, I believe it <br />will be possible to establish a world council for <br />the regulation of armaments as the natural <br />outcome of this war. First, the trade in arma- <br />ments must be absolutely killed. And then the <br />next supremely important measure to secure the <br />peace of the world is the neutralisation of the <br />sea. <br /><br />It will lie in the power of England, France, <br />Russia, Italy, Japan and the United States, if <br />Germany and Austria are shattered in this war, <br />to forbid the further building of any more ships <br />of war at all ; to persuade, and if need be, to <br />oblige the minor Powers to sell their navies and to <br />refuse the seas to armed ships not under the <br />control of the confederation. To launch an <br />armed ship can be made an invasion of the common <br />territory of the world. This will be an open <br />possibility in 1915. It will remain an open <br />possibility until men recover from the shock of <br />this conflict. As that begins to be forgotten so <br />this will cease to be a possibility again perhaps <br />for hundreds of years. Already human intelli- <br />gence and honesty have contrived to keep the <br />great American lakes and the enormous Canadian <br />frontier disarmed for a century. Warlike folly <br /><br /><br /><br />44 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />has complained of that, but it has never been <br />strong enough to upset it. What is possible on <br />that scale is possible universally, so soon as the <br />armament trader is put out of mischief. And <br />with the Confederated Peace Powers keeping <br />the seas and guaranteeing the peaceful freedom <br />of the seas to all mankind, treating the transport <br />of armed men and war material, except between <br />one detached part of a State and another, as <br />contraband, and impartially blockading all bel- <br />ligerents, those who know best the significance <br />of the sea power will realise best the reduction <br />in the danger of extensive wars on land. <br /><br />This is no dream. This is the plain common <br />sense of the present opportunity. <br /><br />It may be urged that this is a premature <br />discussion, that this war is still undecided. But, <br />indeed, there can be no decision to this war for <br />France and England at any rate but the defeat of <br />Germany, the abandonment of German mili- <br />tarism, the destruction of the German fleet, and <br />the creation of this opportunity. Nothing short <br />of that is tolerable ; we must fight on to extinc- <br />tion rather than submit to a dishonouring peace <br />in defeat or to any premature settlement. The <br />fate of the world under triumphant Prussianism <br />and Kruppism for the next two hundred years <br />is not worth discussing. There is no conceivable <br />conclusion to this war but submission at Berlin. <br />There is no reasonable course before us now but <br />to give all our strength for victory and the <br />establishment of victory. The end must be <br />victory or our effacement. What will happen <br /><br /><br /><br />MOST NECESSARY MEASURES IN THE WORLD 45 <br /><br />after our eifacement is for the Germans to <br />consider. <br /><br />A war that will merely beat Germany a little <br />and restore the hateful tensions of the last forty <br />years is not worth waging. As an end to all our <br />effort it will be almost as intolerable as defeat. <br />Yet unless a body of definite ideas is formed and <br />promulgated now things may happen so. And <br />so now, while there is yet time, the Liberalism <br />of France and England must speak plainly and <br />make its appeal to the Liberalism of all the world, <br />not to share our war indeed, but to share the <br />great ends for which we are so gladly waging <br />this war. For, indeed, sombrely enough England <br />and France and Belgium and Russia are glad of <br />this day. The age of armed anxiety is over. <br />Whatever betide, it must be an end. And there <br />is no way of making it an end but through these <br />two associated decisions, the abolition of Krupp- <br />ism and the neutralisation of the sea. <br /><br /><br /><br />VI. <br /><br />THE NEED OF A NEW <br />MAP OF EUROPE <br /><br />At the moment of writing the war has not <br />lasted many days, great battles by land and <br />sea alike impend, and yet I find my steadfast <br />anticipation that Prussianism, Bernhardi-ism, <br />the whole theory and practice of the Empire <br />of the Germans, is a rotten and condemned <br />thing, has already strengthened to an absolute <br />conviction. Unforeseen accidents may happen. <br />I say nothing of the sea, but the general and <br />ultimate result seems to me now as certain as <br />the rising of to-morrow's sun. I do not know <br />how much slaughter lies before Europe before <br />Germany realises that she is fool-led and fool- <br />poisoned. I do not know how long the <br />swaggering Prussian officer will be able to <br />drive his crowded men to massacre before <br />they revolt against him, nor do I know how <br />far the inflated vanity of Berlin has made <br />provision for defeat. Germany on the defen- <br />sive for all we can tell may prove a very stub- <br />born thing, and Russia's strength may be, and <br />I think is, over-estimated. All that may delay, <br />but it will not alter the final demonstration <br /><br /><br /><br />THE NEED OF A NEW MAP OF EUROPE 47 <br /><br />that Prussianism, as Mr. Belloc foretold so amaz- <br />ingly, took its mortal wound at the first onset <br />before the trenches of Liege. We begin a new <br />period of history. <br /><br />It is not Germany that has been defeated ; <br />Germany is still an unconquered country. In- <br />deed, now it is a released country. It is a country <br />glorious in history and with a glorious future. <br />But never more after this war has ended will it <br />march to the shout of the Prussian drill sergeant <br />and strive to play bully to the world. The <br />legend of Prussia is exploded. Its appeal was to <br />one coarse criterion, success, and it has failed. <br />Nevermore will the harshness of Berlin over- <br />shadow the great and friendly civilisation of <br />Southern and Western Germany. The work <br />before a world in arms is to clean off the Prussian <br />blue from the life and spirit of mankind. <br /><br />No European Power has any real quarrel with <br />Germany. Our quarrel is with the Empire of <br />the Germans, not with a people but with an idea. <br />Let us in all that follows keep that clearly in our <br />minds. It may be that the German repulse at <br />Liege was but the beginning of a German disaster <br />as great as that of France in 1871. It may be <br />that Germany has no second plan if her first plan <br />fails ; that she will go to pieces after her first <br />defeat. It seems to me that this is so I risk <br />the prophecy, and I would have us prepare our- <br />selves for the temptations of victory. And so <br />to begin with, let us of the liberal faith declare <br />our fixed, unalterable conviction that it will be <br />a sin to dismember Germany or to allow any <br /><br /><br /><br />48 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />German-speaking and German-feeling territory <br />to fall under a foreign yoke. Let us English make <br />sure of ourselves in that matter. There may be <br />restorations of alien territory Polish, French, <br />Danish, Italian, but we have seen enough of <br />racial subjugation now to be sure that we will <br />tolerate no more of it. From the Rhine to East <br />Prussia and from the Baltic to the southern limits <br />of German-speaking Austria, the Germans are <br />one people. Let us begin with the resolution <br />to permit no new bitterness of "conquered <br />territories " to come into existence to disturb the <br />future peace of Europe. Let us see to it that at <br />the ultimate settlement the Germans, however <br />great his overthrow may be, are all left free men. <br />When the Prussians invaded Luxemburg they <br />tore up the map of Europe. To the redrawing <br />of that map a thousand complex forces will come. <br />There will be much attempted over-reaching in <br />the business and much greed. Few will come <br />to negotiations with simple intentions. In a <br />wrangle all sorts of ugly and stupid things may <br />happen. It is for us English to get a head in <br />that matter, to take counsel with ourselves and <br />determine what is just ; it is for us, who are <br />in so many ways detached from and independent <br />of the national passions of the Continent, not to <br />be cunning or politic, but to contrive as unanimous <br />a purpose as possible now, so that we may carry <br />this war to its end with a clear conception of <br />its end, and to use the whole of our strength to <br />make an enduring peace in Europe. That <br />means that we have to re-draw the map so that <br /><br /><br /><br />THE NEED OF A NEW MAP OF EUROPE 49 <br /><br />there shall be, for just as far as we can see ahead, <br />as little cause for warfare among us Western <br />nations as possible. That means that we have <br />to re-draw it justly. And very extensively. <br /><br />Is that an impossible proposal ? I think not. <br />There are, indeed, such things as non-irritating <br />frontiers. Witness the frontiers of Canada. <br />Certain boundaries have served in Europe now <br />for the better part of a hundred years, and grow <br />less amenable to disturbance every year. Nobody, <br />for example, wants to use force to readjust the <br />mutual frontiers in Europe of Holland, Belgium, <br />France, Spain, Portugal and Italy, and none of <br />these Powers desire now to acquire the foreign <br />possessions of any other of the group. They <br />are Powers permanently at peace. Will it not be <br />possible now to make so drastic a readjustment <br />as to secure the same practical contentment <br />between all the European Powers ? Is not this <br />war that crowning opportunity ? It seems to me <br />that in this matter it behoves us to form an <br />opinion sane and definite enough to meet the <br />sudden impulses of belligerent triumph and over- <br />ride the secret counsels of diplomacy. It is a <br />thing to do forthwith. Let us decide what we <br />are going on fighting for, and let us secure it and <br />settle it. It is not an abstract interesting thing <br />to do ; it is the duty of every English citizen now <br />to study this problem of the map of Europe, so <br />that we can make an end for ever to that dark <br />game of plots and secret treaties and clap-trap <br />synthetic schemes that has wasted the forces of <br />civilisation (and made the fortunes of the Krupp <br /><br /><br /><br />50 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />family) in the last forty years. We are fighting <br />now for a new map of Europe if we are fighting for <br />anything at all. I could imagine that new map <br />of Europe as if it were the flag of the allies who <br />now prepare to press the Germans back towards <br />their proper territory. <br /><br />In the first place, I suggest that France must <br />recover Lorraine, and that Luxemburg must <br />be linked in closer union with Belgium. Alsace, <br />it seems to me, should be given a choice between <br />France and an entry into the Swiss Confederation. <br />It would possibly choose France. Denmark <br />should have again the distinctly Danish part of <br />her lost provinces restored to her. Trieste and <br />Trent, and perhaps also Pola, should be restored <br />to Italy. This will re-unite several severed <br />fragments of peoples to their more congenial <br />associates. But these are minor changes compared <br />with the new developments that are now, in some <br />form, inevitable in the East of Europe, and for <br />those we have to nerve our imaginations, if this <br />vast war and waste of men is to end in an enduring <br />peace. The break-up of the Austrian Empire <br />has hung over Europe like a curse for forty years. <br />Let us break it up now and have done with it. <br />What is to become of the non-German regions <br />of Austria-Hungary ? And what is to happen <br />upon the Polish frontier of Russia ? <br /><br />First, then, I would suggest that the three <br />fragments of Poland should be reunited, and that <br />the Tsar of Russia should be crowned King of <br />Poland. I propose then we define that as our <br />national intention, that we use all the liberalising <br /><br /><br /><br />THE NEED OF A NEW MAP OF EUROPE 51 <br /><br />influence this present war will give us in Russia <br />to that end. And secondly, I propose that we <br />set before ourselves as our policy the unification <br />of that larger Rumania which includes Trans- <br />sylvania, and the gathering together into a con- <br />federation of the Swiss type of all the Servian <br />and quasi-Servian provinces of the Austrian <br />Empire. Let us, as the price greater Servia will <br />pay for its unity, exact the restoration to Bulgaria <br />of any Bulgarian-speaking districts that are now <br />under Servian rule ; let us save Scutari from the <br />iniquity of a nose-slashing occupation by Mon- <br />tenegrins and try to effect another Swiss confed- <br />eration of the residual Bohemian, Slavic and <br />Hungarian fragments. I am convinced that the <br />time has come for the substitution of Swiss <br />associations for the discredited Imperialisms and <br />kingdoms that have made Europe unstable for <br />so long. Every emperor and every king, we now <br />perceive, means a national ambition more organic, <br />concentrated and dangerous than is possible <br />under Republican conditions. Our own peculiar <br />monarchy is the one exception that proves this <br />rule. There is no reason why we should multiply <br />these centres of aggression. <br /><br />Probably neither Bulgaria nor Servia would <br />miss their kings very keenly, and anyhow, I do <br />not see any need for more of these irritating <br />ambition-pimples upon the fair face of the world. <br />Let us cease to give indigestible princes to the <br />new States that we Schweitzerize. Albania, par- <br />ticularly, with its miscellaneous tribes has cer- <br />tainly no use for monarchy, and the suggestion <br /><br /><br /><br />52 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />that has been made for its settlement, as a con- <br />federation of small tribal cantons is the only <br />one I have ever heard that seemed to contain a <br />ray of hope for that distracted patch of earth. <br />There is certainly no reason why these people <br />should be exploited by Italy, since Italy can <br />claim a more legitimate gratification. There, in <br />a paragraph, is a sketch of the map of Europe <br />that may emerge from the present struggle. It <br />is my personal idea of our purpose in this war. <br /><br />Quite manifestly in all these matters I am a <br />fairly ignorant person. Quite manifestly this is <br />crude stuff. And I admit a certain sense of <br />presumptuous absurdity as I sit here before the <br />map of Europe like a carver before a duck and <br />take off a slice here and decide on a cut there. <br />None the less it is what everyone of us has to do. <br />I intend to go on redrawing the map of Europe <br />with every intelligent person I meet. We are <br />all more or less ignorant ; it is unfortunate but <br />it does not alter the fact that we cannot escape <br />either decisions or passive acquiescences in these <br />matters. If we do not do our utmost to under- <br />stand the new map, if we make no decisions, <br />then still cruder things will happen ; Europe <br />will blunder into a new set of ugly complications <br />and prepare a still more colossal Armageddon <br />than this that is now going on. No one, I hope, <br />will suggest after this war that we should still <br />leave things to the diplomatists. Yet the altern- <br />ative to you and me is diplomacy. If you want <br />to see where diplomacy and Welt Politik have <br />landed Europe after forty years of anxiety and <br /><br /><br /><br />THE NEED OF A NEW MAP OF EUROPE 53 <br /><br />armament, you must go and look into the ditches <br />of Liege. These bloody heaps are the mere <br />first samples of the harvest. The only alternative <br />to diplomacy is outspoken intelligence, yours and <br />mine and every articulate person's. We have all <br />of us to undertake this redrawing of the map of <br />Europe, in the measure of our power and capacity. <br />That our power and capacity are unhappily not <br />very considerable does not absolve us. It is for <br />us to secure a lasting settlement of all the European <br />frontiers if we can. If we common intelligent <br />people at large do not secure that, nobody will. <br />If we have no intentions with regard to the <br />map of Europe, we shall soon be going on with <br />the war for nothing in particular. The Prussian <br />spirit has broken itself beyond repair, and the <br />north coast of France and the integrity of Belgium <br />are saved. All the fighting that is still to come <br />will only be the confirmation and development <br />of that. If we have no further plan before us <br />our task is at an end. If that is all, we may stand <br />aside now with a good conscience and watch a <br />slower war drag to an evil end. Left to herself a <br />victorious Russia is far more likely to help herself <br />to East Prussia and set to work to Russianise its <br />inhabitants than to risk an indigestion of more <br />Poles ; Italy may go into Albania and a new <br />conflict with Servia ; it is even conceivable that <br />France may be ungenerous. She will have a <br />good excuse for being ungenerous. Meanwhile, <br />German-speaking populations will find them- <br />selves under instead of upper dogs in half the <br />provinces of Austria-Hungary ; mischievous little <br /><br /><br /><br />54 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />kings, with chancellors and national policies and <br />ambitions all complete, will rise and fluctuate and <br />fall upon that slippery soil, and a bloody and <br />embittered Germany, continually stung by the <br />outcries of her subject kindred, will sit down <br />grimly to grow a new generation of soldiers and <br />prepare for her revenge. . . . <br /><br />That is why I think we liberal English should <br />draw our new map of Europe now, first of all <br />on paper and then upon the face of the earth. <br /><br />We ought to draw that map now, and propagate <br />the idea of it, and make it our national purpose, <br />and call the intelligence and consciences of the <br />United States and France and Scandinavia to <br />our help. Openly and plainly we ought to discuss <br />and decide and tell the world what we mean to <br />do. The reign of brutality, cynicism, and secretive <br />treachery is shattered in Europe. Over the ruins <br />of the Prussian War-Lordship, reason, public <br />opinion, justice, international good faith and <br />good intentions will be free to come back and <br />rule the destinies of man. But things will not <br />wait for reason and justice, if just and reasonable <br />men have neither energy nor unity. <br /><br />; ^ ta <br />toi^lfe/ 4& ^ali tcouir <br /><br />'I'Utftr O3cfc <br /><br />. vrt<&,. <br /><br />(J% <br /><br />A\at <br /><br /><br /><br /><br />VII. <br /><br />THE OPPORTUNITY OF <br />LIBERALISM <br /><br />The opportunity of Liberalism has come at <br />last, an overwhelming opportunity. The age <br />of militarism has rushed to its inevitable and yet <br />surprising climax. The great soldier empire, <br />made for war, which has dominated Europe for <br />forty years has pulled itself up by the roots and <br />flung itself into the struggle for which it was <br />made. Whether it win or lose, it will never put <br />itself back again. All Europe, following that <br />lead, is a-field for war. The good harvests stand <br />neglected, the factories are idle, a thin, uncertain <br />trickle of paper money replaces the chinking flow <br />of commerce ; whichever betide, defeat or <br />deadlock, the capitalist military civilisation up- <br />roots itself and ends. The war may burn itself <br />out more quickly than those who regard its <br />immensity think, but the war itself is the mere <br />smash of the thing. The reality is the uprooting, <br />the incurable dislocation. <br /><br />Trying to map and measure that dislocation <br />is rather like one's first effort to think in sun's <br />distances. It is to transfer one's mind to a new <br />and overwhelming scale. Never did any time <br />carry so swift a burthen of change as this time. <br />It is manifest that in a year or so the world of <br /><br /><br /><br />56 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />men is going to alter more than it has altered in <br />the last century and a half, more indeed than it <br />ever altered before these last centuries since <br />history began. Think of the mere geographical <br />dislocation. There is scarcely a country in Europe <br />that will not emerge from this struggle with <br />entirely fresh frontiers, sovereign powers will <br />vanish from the map, new sovereign powers will <br />come. In the disorders that are upon us and of <br />which this war itself is the mere preliminary <br />phase in uniform, inevitably there must be social <br />reconstruction. Who can doubt it ? Who can <br />doubt the break-up of confidence and usage that <br />is in progress ? Plainly you can see famine <br />coming in France, in Germany, in Russia. Does <br />anyone suppose that those sham efficient Germans <br />have fully worked out the care and feeding of the <br />madly distended hosts they have hurled at <br />France ? Does anyone dream that they have <br />reckoned for a check and halt ? Does anyone <br />imagine their sanitary arrangements are perfect ? <br />There will be pestilence. And can one believe <br />that whatever feats of financial fiction we con- <br />trive, their financial crash can be staved off, and <br />that the bankers of Hamburg and Frankfort are <br />likely to be shovelling gold next January in a still <br />methodical world ? The German State machine <br />has probably already done all that it was <br />ever made to do. It stands now exhausted <br />amidst the turmoil of its consequences. Its <br />mobilization arrangements are said to have been <br />astonishingly complete. Ten million men for <br />and against have been got into the field with <br /><br /><br /><br />THE OPPORTUNITY OF LIBERALISM 57 <br /><br />ammunition. Prussian Germany has carried out <br />its arrangements and committed the business to <br />Gott. German foresight has exhausted itself. If <br />Gott fail Germany, I do not believe that Germany <br />has the remotest idea what to do next. For <br />the most part those millions will never get <br />home any more. They will certainly never get <br />back to their work again, because it will have <br />disappeared. <br /><br />When I think of European statecraft presently <br />trying to put all these things back again I am <br />reminded of a story of a friend whose neighbour <br />tried to cut his throat and then repented. He <br />came round to her with a towel about his neck <br />making peculiar noises. It was a distressing but <br />illuminating experience for her. She was a <br />plucky and resourceful woman, and she did her <br />best. " There was such a lot of it," she said. <br />" I hadn't an idea things were packed so tight <br /><br /><br /><br />in us." <br /><br /><br /><br />It is characteristic of such times as this that <br />much in the world, and, more particularly, much <br />in the minds of men, much that has seemed as <br />invincible as the mountains and as deeply rooted <br />as the sea, magically loses its solidity, fades, <br />changes, vanishes. When one looked at the map <br />of Europe a month ago most of the lines of its <br />frontiers seemed almost as stable as the coastlines. <br />Now they waver under one's eyes. When one <br />thought of the heritage of the Crown Prince of <br />Germany, it seemed as fixed as a constellation, <br />and now in a little while it may be worth as little <br />as a bloody rag in the trenches of Liege. In <br /><br /><br /><br />58 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />little things as in great, one is suddenly confronted <br />by undreamt-of instabilities. The Reform Club, <br />which has been a cheerful and refreshing trickle <br />of gold to me for years, now yields me reluctantly <br />for my cheque two inartistic pound notes. My <br />other club has ceased the kindly custom of <br />cashing cheques altogether. One is glad that <br />poor Bagehot did not live to see this day. Each <br />day now I marvel to wake and find I have still <br />a banker. . . . And I perceive too, that if <br />presently my banker dissolved into the rest of <br />this dissolving world a thing I should have <br />thought an unendurable calamity a month ago <br />I shall laugh and go on. . . . Ideas that have <br />ruled life as though they were divine truths are <br />being chased and slaughtered in the streets. <br />The rights of property, for example, the sturdy <br />virtues of individualism, all toleration for the <br />rewards of abstinence, vanished last week suddenly <br />amidst the execrations of mankind upon a hurrying <br />motor-car loaded with packages of sugar and <br />flour. They bolted, leaving Socialism and Col- <br />lectivism in possession. The State takes over <br />flour mills and the food supply, not merely for <br />military purposes, but for the general welfare <br />of the community. The State controls the <br />railways with a sudden complete disregard of <br />shareholders. There is not even a letter to the <br />'limes to object. If the State sees fit to keep <br />its hold upon these things for good, or loosens <br />its hold only to improve its grip, I question if <br />there is very much left in the minds of men, <br />even after the mere preliminary sweeping of <br /><br /><br /><br />THE OPPORTUNITY OF LIBERALISM 59 <br /><br />the last two weeks, to dispute possession. Society <br />as we knew it a year ago has indeed already <br />broken up ; it has lost all real cohesion ; only <br />the absence of any attraction elsewhere keeps us <br />bunched together. We keep our relative posi- <br />tions because there is nowhither to stampede. <br />Dazed, astonished people fill the streets ; and we <br />talk of the national calm. The more intelligent <br />men thrown out of their jobs make for the recruit- <br />ing offices, because they have nothing else to <br />do ; we talk of the magnificent response to Lord <br />Kitchener's appeal. Everybody is offering ser- <br />vices. Everybody is looking for someone to tell <br />him what to do. It is not organisation ; it is <br />the first phase of dissolution. <br /><br />I am not writing prophecies now, and I am <br />not " displaying imagination." I am just running <br />as hard as I can by the side of the marching facts, <br />and pointing to them. Institutions and conven- <br />tions crumble about us, and release to unprece- <br />dented power the two sorts of rebel that ordinary <br />times suppress, will and ideas. <br /><br />The character of the new age that must come <br />out of the catastrophies of this epoch will be no <br />mechanical consequence of inanimate forces. <br />Will and ideas will take a larger part in this swirl- <br />ahead than they have even taken in any previous <br />collapse. No doubt the mass of mankind will <br />still pour along the channels of chance, but the <br />desire for a new world of a definite character will <br />be a force, and if it is multitudinously unanimous <br />enough, it may even be a guiding force, in shaping <br />the new time. The common man and base men <br /><br /><br /><br />60 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />are scared to docility. Rulers, pomposities, <br />obstructives are suddenly apologetic, helpful, <br />asking for help. This is a time of incalculable <br />plasticity. For the men who know what they <br />want, the moment has come. It is the supreme <br />opportunity, the test or condemnation of con- <br />structive liberal thought in the world. <br /><br />Now what does Liberalism mean to do ? It <br />has always been alleged against Liberalism that <br />it is carpingly critical, disorganised, dispersed, <br />impracticable, fractious, readier to " resign " and <br />" rebel " than help. That is the common excuse <br />of all modern autocracies, bureaucracies, and <br />dogmatisms. Are they right ? Is Liberal thought <br />in this world-crisis going to present the spectacle <br />of a swarm of little wrangling men swept before <br />the mindless besom of brute accident, or shall we <br />be able in this vast collapse or re-birth of the <br />world, to produce and express ideas that will <br />rule ? Has it all been talk ? Or has it been <br />planning ? Is the new world, in fact, to be <br />shaped by the philosophers or by the Huns ? <br /><br />First, as to peace. Do Liberals realise that <br />now is the time to plan the confederation and <br />collective disarmament of Europe, now is the <br />time to re-draw the map of Europe so that there <br />may be no more rankling sores or unsatisfied <br />national ambitions ? Are the Liberals as a body <br />going to cry " Peace ! Peace ! " and leave the <br />questions alone, or are they going to take hold <br />of them ? If Liberalism throughout the world <br />develops no plan of a pacified world until the <br />diplomatists get to work, it will be too late. <br /><br /><br /><br />THE OPPORTUNITY OF LIBERALISM 61 <br /><br />Peace may come to Europe this winter as swiftly <br />and disastrously as the war. <br /><br />And next, as to social reconstruction. Do <br />Liberals realise that the individualist capitalist <br />system is helpless now ? It may be picked up <br />unresistingly. It is stunned. A new economic <br />order may be improvised and probably will in <br />some manner be improvised in the next two or <br />three years. What are the intentions of Liberal- <br />ism ? What will be the contribution of Liberal- <br />ism ? One poor Liberal, I perceive, is possessed, <br />to the exclusion of every other consideration, <br />by the idea that we were not legally bound to <br />fight for Belgium. A pretty point, but a petty <br />one. Liberalism is something greater than un- <br />favourable comment on the deeds of active men. <br />Let us set about defining our intentions. Let <br />us borrow a little from the rash vigour of the <br />types that have contrived this disaster. Let us <br />make a truce of our finer feelings and control our <br />dissentient passions. Let us re-draw the map <br />of Europe boldly, as we mean it to be re-drawn, <br />an let us re-plan society as we mean it to be <br />reconstructed. Let us get to work while there <br />is still a little time left to us. Or while our <br />futile fine intelligences are busy, each with its <br />particular exquisitely-felt point, the Northclirfes <br />and the diplomatists, the Welt-Politik whisperers, <br />and the financiers, and militarists, the armaments <br />interests, and the Cossack Tsar, terrified by the <br />inevitable red dawn of leaderless social democracy, <br />by the beginning of the stupendous stampede <br />that will follow this great jar and displacement, <br /><br /><br /><br />62 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />will surely contrive some monstrous blundering <br />settlement, and the latter state of this world <br />will be worse than the former. <br /><br />Now is the opportunity to do fundamental <br />things that will otherwise not get done for <br />hundreds of years. If Liberals throughout the <br />world and in this matter the Liberalism of <br />America is a stupendous possibility will insist <br />upon a World conference at the end of this <br />conflict, if they refuse all partial settlements and <br />merely European solutions, they may re-draw <br />every frontier they choose, they may reduce <br />a thousand chafing conflicts of race and language <br />and government to a minimum, and set up a <br />Peace League that will control the globe. The <br />world will be ripe for it. And the world will be <br />ripe, too, for the banishment of the private <br />industry in armaments and all the vast corruption <br />that entails from the earth for ever. It is possible <br />now to make an end to Kruppism. It may never <br />be possible again. Henceforth let us say weapons <br />must be made by the State, and only by the <br />State ; there must be no more private profit in <br />blood. That is the second great possibility for <br />Liberalism, linked to the first. And, thirdly, <br />we may turn our present social necessities to the <br />most enduring social reorganization ; with an <br />absolute minimum of effort now, we may help <br />to set going methods and machinery that will <br />put the feeding and housing of the population <br />and the administration of the land out of the <br />reach of private greed and selfishness for ever. <br />^Wi ^H&dM ,, :<***> <br /><br />(1M k I <br /><br /><br /><br />VIII. <br /><br />THE LIBERAL FEAR <br />OF RUSSIA <br /><br />It is evident that there is a very considerable <br />dread of the power and intentions of Russia in <br />this country. It is well that the justification of <br />this dread should be discussed now, for it is <br />likely to affect the attitude of British and American <br />Liberalism very profoundly, both towards the <br />continuation of the war and towards the ultimate <br />settlement. <br /><br />It is, I believe, an exaggerated dread arising <br />out of our extreme ignorance of Russian realities. <br />English people imagine Russia to be more pur- <br />poseful than she is. more concentrated, more <br />inimical to Western civilisation. They think of <br />Russian policy as if it were a diabolically clever <br />spider in a dark place. They imagine that the <br />tremendous unification of State and national <br />pride and ambition which has made the German <br />Empire at last insupportable, may presently be <br />repeated upon an altogether more gigantic scale, <br />that Pan-Slavism will take the place of Pan- <br />Germanism, as the ruling aggression of the <br />world. <br /><br />This is a dread due, I am convinced, to funda- <br />mental misconceptions and hasty parallelisms. <br />Russia is not only the vastest country in the <br /><br /><br /><br />64 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />world, but the laxest ; she is incapable of that <br />tremendous unification. Not for two centuries <br />yet, if ever, will it be necessary for a reasonably <br />united Western Europe to trouble itself, once <br />Prussianism has been disposed of, about the risk <br />of definite aggression from the East. I do not <br />think it will ever have to trouble itself. <br /><br />Socially and politically, Russia is an entirely <br />unique structure. It is the fashion to talk of <br />Russia as being "in the fourteenth century," or <br />" in the sixteenth century." As a matter of <br />fact, Russia, like everything else, is in the twen- <br />tieth century, and it is quite impossible to find <br />in any other age a similar social organisation. In <br />bulk, she is barbaric. Between eighty and ninety <br />per cent, of her population is living at a level <br />very little above the level of those agricultural <br />Aryan races who were scattered over Europe <br />before the beginning of written history. It is <br />an illiterate population. It is superstitious in a <br />primitive way, conservative and religious in a <br />primitive way, it is incapable of protecting itself <br />in the ordinary commerce of modern life ; against <br />the business enterprise of better educated races <br />it has no weapon but a peasant's poor cunning. <br />It is, indeed, a helpless, unawakened mass. Above <br />these peasants come a few millions of fairly well- <br />educated and actively intelligent people. They <br />are all that corresponds in any way to a Western <br />community such as ours. Either they are officials, <br />clerical or lay, in the great government machine <br />that was consolidated chiefly by Peter the Great <br />to control the souls and bodies of the peasant <br /><br /><br /><br />THE LIBERAL FEAR OF RUSSIA 65 <br /><br />mass, or they are private persons more or less <br />resentfully entangled in that machine. At the <br />head of this structure, with powers of interference <br />strictly determined by his individual capacity, <br />is that tragic figure, the Tsar. That, briefly, is <br />the composition of Russia, and it is unlike any <br />other State on earth. It will follow laws of its <br />own and have a destiny of its own. <br /><br />Involved with the affairs of Russia are certain <br />less barbaric States. There is Finland, which is <br />by comparison highly civilised, and Poland, which <br />is not nearly so far in advance of Russia. Both <br />these countries are perpetually uneasy under the <br />blundering pressure of foolish attempts to " Rus- <br />sianize " them. In addition, in the South and <br />East are certain provinces thick with Jews, whom <br />Russia can neither contrive to tolerate nor <br />assimilate, who have no comprehensible projects <br />for the help or reorganisation of the country, <br />and who deafen all the rest of Europe with their <br />bitter, unhelpful tale of grievances, so that it is <br />difficult to realise how local and partial are their <br />wrongs. There is a certain " Russian idea," <br />containing within itself all the factors of failure, <br />inspiring the general policy of this vast amorphous <br />State. It found its completest expression in the <br />works of the now defunct Pobedonostsev, and it <br />pervades the bureaucracy. It is obscurantist, <br />denying the common people education ; it is <br />orthodox, forbidding free thought and preferring <br />conformity to ability ; it is bureaucratic and <br />autocratic ; it is Pan-Slavic, Russianizing, and <br />aggressive. It is this " Russian idea " that <br /><br /><br /><br />66 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />Western Liberalism dreads, and, as I want to <br />point out, dreads unreasonably. I do not want <br />to plead that it is not a bad thing ; it is a bad <br />thing. I want to point out that, unlike Prussian- <br />ism, it is not a great danger to the world at <br />large. <br /><br />So long as this Russian idea, this Russian <br />Toryism, dominates Russian affairs, Russia can <br />never be really formidable either to India, to <br />China, or to the Liberal nations of Western <br />Europe. And whenever she abandons this Tory- <br />ism and becomes modern and formidable, she <br />will cease to be aggressive. That is my case. <br />While Russia has the will to oppress the world <br />she will never have the power ; when she has <br />the power she will cease to have the will. Let <br />me state my reasons for this belief as compactly <br />as possible, because if I am right a number of <br />Liberal-minded people in Great Britain and <br />America and Scandinavia, who may collectively <br />have a very great influence upon the settlement <br />of Europe that will follow this war, are wrong. <br />They may want to bolster up a really dangerous <br />and evil Austria-cum-Germany at the expense <br />of France, Belgium, and subject Slav populations, <br />because of their dread of this Russia which can <br />never be at the same time evil and dangerous. <br /><br />Now, first let me point out what the Boer <br />War showed, and what this tremendous conflict <br />in Belgium is already enforcing, that the day of the <br />unintelligent common soldier is past ; that men <br />who are animated and individualised can, under <br />modern conditions, fight better than men who <br /><br /><br /><br />THE LIBERAL FEAR OF RUSSIA 67 <br /><br />are unintelligent and obedient. Soldiering is <br />becoming more specialised. It is calling for the <br />intelligent handling of weapons so elaborate and <br />destructive that great masses of men in the field <br />are an encumbrance rather than a power. Battles <br />must spread out, and leading give place to <br />individual initiative. Consequently Russia can <br />only become powerful enough to overcome any <br />highly civilised European country by raising its <br />own average of education and initiative, and this <br />it can do only by abandoning its obscurantist <br />methods, by liberalising upon the Western Euro- <br />pean model. That is to say, it will have to teach <br />its population to read, to multiply its schools, <br />and increase its universities ; and that will make <br />an entirely different Russia from this one we <br />fear. It involves a relaxation of the grip of <br />orthodoxy, an alteration of the intellectual out- <br />look of officialdom, an abandonment of quasi- <br />religious autocracy in short, the complete aban- <br />donment of the " Russian idea " as we know it. <br />And it means also a great development of local <br />self-consciousness. Russia seems homogeneous <br />now, because in the mass it is so ignorant as to be <br />unaware of its differences ; but an educated <br />Russia means a Russia in which Ruthenian and <br />Great Russian, Lett and Tartar will be mutually <br />critical and aware of one another. The existing <br />Russian idea will need to give place to an entirely <br />more democratic, tolerant, and cosmopolitan <br />idea of Russia as a whole, if Russia is to merge <br />from its barbarism and remain united. There is <br />no cheap " Deutschland, Deutschland u'ber alles " <br /><br /><br /><br />68 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />sentiment ready-made to hand. National quality <br />is against it. Patience under patriotism is a <br />German weakness. Russians could no more go <br />on singing and singing, " Russia, Russia over all," <br />than Englishmen could go on singing " Rule, <br />Britannia." It would bore them. The tem- <br />perament of none of the Russian peoples justifies <br />the belief that they will repeat on a larger scale <br />even as much docility as the Germans have <br />shown under the Prussians. No one who has <br />seen the Russians, who has had opportunities of <br />comparing Berlin with St. Petersburg or Moscow, <br />or who knows anything of Russian art or Russian <br />literature, will imagine this naturally wise, <br />humourous, and impatient people reduplicating <br />the self-conscious, drill-dulled, soulless culture <br />of Germany, or the political vulgarities of Pots- <br />dam. This is a terrible world, I admit, but <br />Prussianism is the sort of thing that does not <br />happen twice. <br /><br />Russia is substantially barbaric. Who can <br />deny it ? State-stuff rather than a State. But <br />people in Western Europe are constantly writing <br />of Russia and the Russians as though the qualities <br />natural to barbarism were qualities inherent in <br />the Russian blood. Russia massacres, sometimes <br />even with official connivance. But Russia in all <br />its history has no massacres so abominable as we <br />gentle English were guilty of in Ireland in the <br />sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Russia, <br />too, " Russianizes," sometimes clumsily, some- <br />times rather successfully. But Germany has <br />sought to Germanise in Bohemia and Poland, <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />THE LIBERAL FEAR OF RUSSIA 69 <br /><br /><br /><br />for instance, with conspicuous violence and <br />failure. We " Anglicised " Ireland. These for- <br />cible efforts to create uniformity are natural to a <br />phase of social and political development, from <br />which no people on earth have yet fully emerged. <br />And if we set ourselves now to create a reunited <br />Poland under the Russian crown, if we bring all <br />the great influence of the Western Powers to <br />bear upon the side of the liberalising forces in <br />Finland, if we do not try to thwart and stifle <br />Russia by closing her legitimate outlet into the <br />Mediterranean, we shall do infinitely more for <br />human happiness than if we distrust her, check <br />her, and force her back upon the barbarism from <br />which, with a sort of blind pathetic wisdom, she <br />seeks to emerge. <br /><br />It is unfortunate for Russia that she has come <br />into conspicuous conflict with the Jews. She has <br />certainly treated them no worse than she has <br />treated her own people, and she has treated them <br />less atrociously than they were treated in England <br />during the Middle Ages. The Jews by their <br />particularism invite the resentment of all uncul- <br />tivated humanity. Civilisation and not revolt <br />emancipates them. And while Russian reverses <br />will throw back her civilisation and intensify the <br />sufferings of all her subject Jews, Russian success <br />in this alliance will inevitably spell Westernisation, <br />progress, and amelioration for them. But un- <br />happily this does not seem to be patent to many <br />Jewish minds. They have been embittered by <br />their wrongs, and, in the English and still more <br />in the American Press, a heavy weight of grievance <br /><br /><br /><br />yo THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />against Russia finds voice, and distorts the issue <br />of this. While we are still only in the opening <br />phase of this struggle for life against the Prussian- <br />ised German Empire, this struggle to escape <br />from the militarism that has been slowly strang- <br />ling civilisation, it is a huge misfortune that this <br />racial resentment, which, great as it is, is still a <br />little thing beside the world issues involved, <br />should break the united front of western civilisa- <br />tion, and that the confidence of Russia should be <br />threatened, as it is threatened now by doubt and <br />disparagement in the Press. We are not so sure <br />of victory that we can estrange an ally. We have <br />to make up our minds to see all Poland reunited <br />under the Russian Crown, and if the Turks <br />choose to play a foolish part, it is not for us to <br />quarrel now about the fate of Constantinople. <br />The Allies are not to be tempted into a quarrel <br />about Constantinople. The balance of power in <br />the Balkans, that is to say, incessant intrigue <br />between Austria and Russia, has arrested the <br />civilisation of South-eastern Europe for a century. <br />Let it topple. An unchallenged Russia will be <br />a wholesome check, and no great danger for the <br />new greater Servia and the new greater Rumania <br />and the enlarged and restored Bulgaria this war <br />renders possible. <br /><br />One civilised country only does Russia really <br />" threaten," and that country is Sweden. Sweden <br />has a vast wealth of coal and iron within reach of <br />Russia's hand. And I confess I watch Scandi- <br />navia with a certain terror during these days. <br />Sweden is the only European country in which <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />THE LIBERAL FEAR OF RUSSIA 71 <br /><br />there is a pro-German militarist party, and she <br />may be tempted I do not know how strongly <br />she may not have been tempted already to <br />drag herself and Norway into this struggle on <br />the German side. If she does, our Government <br />will be not a little to blame for not having given <br />her, and induced Russia to give her, the strongest <br />joint assurances and guarantees of her integrity <br />for ever. But if the Scandinavian countries <br />abstain from any participation in this present <br />war, then I do not see what is to prevent us <br />and France and Russia from making the most <br />public, definite, and binding declaration of our <br />common interest in Sweden's integrity and our <br />common determination to preserve it. <br /><br />Beyond that, I see no danger to civilisation in <br />Russia anywhere at least, no danger so con- <br />siderable as the Kaiser-Krupp power we fight to <br />finish. This war, even if it brings us the utmost <br />success, will still leave Russia face to face with a <br />united and chastened Germany. For it must be <br />remembered that the downfall of Prussianism <br />and the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian <br />Empire, will leave German Germany not smaller <br />but larger than she is now. To India, decently <br />governed and guarded, with an educational level <br />higher than her own, and three times her gross <br />population, Russia can only be dangerous through <br />the grossest misgovernment on our part, and <br />her powers of intervention in China will be <br />restricted for many years. But all our powers <br />of intervention in China will be restricted for <br />many years. A breathing space for Chinese <br /><br /><br /><br />72 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />reconstruction is one of the most immediate and <br />least equivocal blessings of this war. Unless the <br />Chinese are unteachable and only stupid people <br />suppose them a stupid race the China of 1934 <br />will not be a China for either us or Russia to <br />meddle with. So where in all the world is this <br />danger from Russia ? <br /><br />The danger of a Krupp-cum-Kaiser dominance <br />of the whole world, on the other hand, is imme- <br />diate. Defeat, or even a partial victory for the <br />Allies, means nothing less than that. <br /><br />*n <br /><br />' <br /><br /><br /><br />- *fa- <br /><br />. <br /><br /><br /><br />IX. <br /><br />AN APPEAL TO THE <br />AMERICAN PEOPLE <br /><br />This appeal comes to you from England at <br />war, and it is addressed to you because upon your <br />nation rests the issue of this conflict. The <br />influence of your States upon its nature and <br />duration must needs be enormous, and at its <br />ending you may play a part such as no nation <br />has ever played since the world began. <br /><br />For it rests with you to establish and secure <br />or to refuse to establish and secure the permanent <br />peace of the world, the final ending of war. <br /><br />This appeal comes to you from England, but <br />it is no appeal to ancient associations or racial <br />affinities. Your common language is indeed <br />English, but your nation has long since outgrown <br />these early links, the blood of every people in <br />Europe mingles in the unity of your States, and <br />it is to the greatness of your future rather than <br />the accidents of your first beginnings, to the <br />humanity in you, and not to the English and <br />Irish and Scotch and Welsh in you that this <br />appeal is made. Half the world is at war, or on <br />the very verge of war ; it is impossible that you <br />should disregard or turn away from this conflict. <br />Unavoidably you have to judge us. Unavoidable <br />is your participation in the ultimate settlement <br /><br /><br /><br />74 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />which will make or mar the welfare of mankind <br />for centuries to come. We appeal to you to <br />judge us, to listen patiently to our case, to exert <br />the huge decisive power, you hold in the balance <br />not hastily, not heedlessly. For we do not <br />disguise from ourselves that you can shatter all <br />our hopes in this conflict. You are a people <br />more than twice as numerous as we are, and still <br />you are only the beginning of what you are to be, <br />with a clear prospect of expansion that mocks the <br />limits of these little islands, with illimitable and <br />still scarcely tapped sources of wealth and power. <br />You have already come to a stage when a certain <br />magnanimity becomes you in your relation to <br />European affairs. <br /><br />Now, while you, because of your fortunate <br />position, and because of the sane and brotherly <br />relations that have become a fixed tradition along <br />your northern boundary we English had a share <br />in securing that while you live free of the sight <br />and burthen of military preparations, free as it <br />seems for ever, all Europe has for more than half <br />a century bent more and more wearily under a <br />perpetually increasing burthen of armaments. <br />For many years Europe has been an armed camp, <br />with millions of men continually under arms, <br />with the fear of war universally poisoning its life, <br />with its education impoverished, its social devel- <br />opment retarded, with everything pinched but <br />its equipment for war. It would be foolish to <br />fix the blame for this state of affairs upon any <br />particular nation ; it has grown up, as most <br />great evils grow, quietly, unheeded. One may <br /><br /><br /><br />AN APPEAL TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 75 <br /><br />cast back in history to the Thirty Years' War, <br />to such names as Frederick the Great, Napoleon <br />the First, Napoleon the Third, Bismarck ; what <br />does it matter now who began the thing, and <br />which was most to blame ? Here it is, and we <br />have to deal with it. <br /><br />But we English do assert that it is the Govern- <br />ment of the German Emperor which has for the <br />last 40 years taken the lead and forced the pace <br />in these matters, which has driven us English <br />to add warship to warship in a pitiless competition <br />to retain that predominance at sea upon which <br />our existence as a free people depends, and which <br />has strained the strength of France almost beyond <br />the pitch of human endurance, so that the <br />education and the welfare of her people have <br />suffered greatly, so that Paris to-day is visibly <br />an impoverished and over-taxed city. And this <br />perpetual fear of the armed strength of Germany <br />has forced upon France alliances and entangle- <br />ments she would otherwise have avoided. <br /><br />Let us not attempt to deny the greatness of <br />Germany and of Germany's contributions to <br />science and art and literature and all that is good <br />in human life. But evil influences may over- <br />shadow the finest peoples, and it is our case that <br />since the victories of 1871 Germany has been <br />obsessed by the worship of material power and <br />glory and scornful of righteousness ; that she <br />has been threatening and overbearing to all the <br />world. There has been a propaganda of cynicism <br />and national roughness, a declared contempt for <br />treaties and pledges, so that all Europe has been <br /><br /><br /><br />76 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />uneasy and in fear. And since none of us are <br />saints, and certainly no nations are saintly, we have <br />been resentful ; there is not a country in Europe <br />that has not shown itself resentful under this <br />perpetual menace of Germany. And now at <br />last and suddenly the threatened thing has come <br />to pass and Germany is at war. <br /><br />Because of a murder committed by one of her <br />own subjects Austria made war upon Servia, <br />Russia armed to protect a kindred country, and <br />then with the swiftness of years of premeditation <br />Germany declared war upon Russia and struck <br />at France, striking through the peaceful land <br />of Belgium, a little country we English had <br />pledged ourselves to protect, a little country that <br />had never given Germany the faintest pretext <br />for hostility, and in the hope of finding France <br />unready. Of course, we went to war. If we <br />had not done so, could we English have ever <br />looked the world in the face again ? <br /><br />And it is with scarcely a dissentient voice that <br />England is at war. Never were the British people <br />so unanimous ; all Ireland is with us, and the <br />conscience of all the world. And, now this war <br />has begun, we are resolved to put an end to <br />militarism in the world for evermore. We are <br />not fighting to destroy Germany ; it is the firm <br />resolve of England to permit no fresh " conquered <br />provinces " to darken the future of Europe. <br />Whatever betide, all German Germany will come <br />out of this war undivided and German still. <br />Her own " conquests " she may have to relinquish, <br />her Poles and other subject peoples, but that is the <br /><br /><br /><br />AN APPEAL TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 77 <br /><br />utmost we shall exact of her. With the accession <br />of Austria, Germany may even come out of this <br />war a larger Germany than at the beginning. <br />We have no hatred of things German and German <br />people. But we are fighting to break this huge <br />fighting machine for ever this fighting machine <br />which has been such an oppression as no native- <br />born American can dream of, to every other <br />nation in Europe. We are fighting to end <br />Kaiserism and Kruppism for ever and ever. <br />There, shortly and plainly, is our case and our <br />object. Now let us come to the immediate <br />substance of this appeal. <br /><br />We do not ask you for military help. Keep <br />the peace which it is your unparalleled good <br />fortune to enjoy so securely. But keep it fairly. <br />Remember that we fight now for national <br />existence, and that in the night, even as this is <br />written, within a hundred miles or so of this <br />place, the dark ships feel their way among the <br />floating mines with which the Germans have <br />strewn the North Sea, and our sons and the sons <br />of Belgium and France go side by side, not by the <br />hundred nor by the thousand, but by the hundred <br />thousand, rank after rank, line beyond line to <br />death. Even as this is written the harvest of <br />death is being reaped. Remember our tragic <br />case. Europe is full of a joyless determination <br />to end this evil for ever ; she plunges grimly <br />and sadly into the cruel monstrosities of war, <br />and assuredly there will be little shouting for <br />the victors whichever side may win. At the <br />end we do most firmly believe there will be <br /><br /><br /><br />78 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />established a new Europe, a Europe riddened of <br />rankling oppressions, with a free Poland, a free <br />Finland, a free Germany, the Balkans settled, <br />the little nations safe, and peace secure. And <br />it is of supreme importance that we should ask <br />you now What are you going to do throughout <br />the struggle, and what will you do at the end ? <br /><br />One thing we are told in England that you <br />mean to do, a thing that has moved me to this <br />appeal. For it is not only a strange thing in <br />itself, but it may presently be followed by other <br />similar ideas. Come what may, all the liberal <br />forces in England and France are resolved to <br />respect the freedom of Holland. But the position <br />of Holland is, as you may see in any atlas, a very <br />peculiar one in this war. The Rhine runs along <br />the rear of the long German line as if it were a <br />canal to serve that line with supplies, and then <br />it passes into Holland and so by Rotterdam to <br />the sea. So that it is possible for any neutral <br />power, such as you are, to pour a stream of food <br />supplies and war material by way of Holland <br />almost into the hands of the German combatant <br />line. Even if we win our battles in the field <br />this will enormously diminish our chance of <br />concluding this war. But we shall suffer it ; <br />it is within the rights of Holland to victual the <br />Germans in this way, and we cannot prevent it <br />without committing just such another outrage <br />upon the laws of nations as Germany was guilty <br />of in invading Belgium. <br /><br />And here is where your country comes in. In <br />your harbours lie a great number of big German <br /><br /><br /><br />AN APPEAL TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE <br /><br />ships that dare not venture to sea because of our <br />fleet. It is proposed, we are told, to arrange a <br />purchase of these ships by American citizens, to <br />facilitate by special legislation their transfer to <br />your flag, and then to load them with food and <br />war material and send them across the Atlantic <br />and through the narrow seas, seas that at the <br />price of a cruiser and many men we have painfully <br />cleared of German contact mines, to get war <br />prices in Rotterdam and supply our enemies. <br />It is, we confess, a smart thing to do ; it will give <br />your people not only huge immediate profits but <br />a mercantile marine at one coup ; it will certainly <br />prolong the war, and so it will mean the killing <br />and wounding of scores of thousands of young <br />Germans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Belgians, <br />who might otherwise have escaped. It is within <br />your legal rights, and we will tell you plainly now <br />that we shall refuse to quarrel with you about it, <br />but we ask you not to be too easily offended if <br />we betray a certain lack of enthusiasm for this <br />idea. <br /><br />And begun such enterprises as this, what are <br />you going to do for mankind and the ultimate <br />peace of the world ? You know that the Tsar <br />has restored the freedom of Finland and promised <br />to re-unite the torn fragments of Poland into a <br />free kingdom, but probably you do not know <br />that he and England have engaged themselves <br />to respect and protect from each other and all <br />the world the autonomy of Norway and Sweden, <br />and of Sweden's vast and tempting stores of <br />mineral wealth close to the Russian boundary. <br /><br /><br /><br />So THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />We ask you not to be too cynical about the Tsar's <br />promises, and to be prepared to help us and <br />France and him to see that they become real. <br />And this with regard to Scandinavia, is not only <br />Russia's promise but ours. This is more than a <br />war of armies ; it is a great moral upheaval, and <br />ou must not judge of the spirit of Europe to-day <br />y the history of her diplomacies. When this <br />w T ar is ended, all Europe will cry for disarmament. <br />Are you going to help then or are you going to <br />thwart that cry ? In Europe we shall attempt <br />to extinguish that huge private trade in war <br />material, that " Kruppism " which lies so near <br />the roots of all this monstrous calamity. We <br />cannot do that unless you do it too. Are you <br />prepared to do that ? Are you prepared to come <br />into a conference at the end of this war to ensure <br />the peace of the world, or are you going to stand <br />out, make difficulties for us out of our world <br />perplexities, snatch advantages, carp from your <br />infinite security at our Allies, and perhaps in the <br />crisis of our struggle pick a quarrel with us upon <br />some secondary score ? Are you indeed going <br />to play the part of a merely numerous little <br />people, a cute trading, excitable people, or are <br />you going to play the part of a great nation in <br />this life and death struggle of the old world <br />civilisations ? Are you prepared now to take <br />that lead among the nations to which your <br />greatness and freedom point you ? It is not <br />for ourselves we make this appeal to you ; it <br />is for the whole future of mankind. And we <br />make it with the more assurance because <br /><br /><br /><br />AN APPEAL TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 81 <br /><br />already your Government has stood for peace <br />and the observation of treaties against base <br />advantages. <br /><br />Already the wounds of our dead cry out to <br />you. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />X. <br /><br />COMMON SENSE AND <br />THE BALKAN STATES <br /><br />The Balkan States never have been a problem, <br />they have only been a part of a problem. That <br />is why no human being has ever yet produced <br />even a paper solution acceptable to another <br />human being. <br /><br />The attempt to settle Balkan affairs with the <br />Austro-Hungarian Empire left out of the problem <br />has been like an attempt to deal with a number of <br />hospital cases in which the head and shoulders <br />of one patient, the legs of another, the abdomen <br />of a third had to be disregarded. The bulk of <br />the Servian people and a great mass of the Ru- <br />manians were in the Austro-Hungarian system, <br />and it was the Austrian bar to any development <br />of Servia towards the Adriatic that forced that <br />country back into its unhappy conflict with <br />Bulgaria. Now everything has altered. English <br />people need trouble no longer about Austrian <br />susceptibilities, and not merely our interests but <br />our urgent necessities march with the reasonable <br />ambitions of the four Balkan nations. <br /><br />Let us begin by clearing away a certain amount <br />of nonsense that is said and believed by many <br />good people about two of these States. It is too <br /><br /><br /><br />COMMON SENSE AND THE BALKAN STATES 83 <br /><br />much the custom to speak and write of Servia <br />and Bulgaria as though they were almost hopelessly <br />barbaric and criminal communities, incapable of <br />participation in the fellowship of European <br />nations. The murder of the late King and Queen <br />of Servia, the assassination of Serajevo, the foolish <br />onslaught of Bulgaria upon Servia that led to the <br />break-up of the Balkan League, and the endless <br />cruelties and barbarities of the warfare in Mace- <br />donia, are allowed to weigh too much against the <br />clear need of a reunited Greater Servia, a restored <br />Bulgaria, and the reasonable prospect of a re- <br />habilitated Balkan League. <br /><br />Now there is no getting over the hard facts of <br />these crimes and cruelties. But they have to be <br />kept in their proper proportion to the tremendous <br />issues now before the world. Let us call in a few <br />figures that will fix the scale. The Servian people <br />number altogether over ten millions, the Ruma- <br />nians as many, there are more than twenty million <br />Poles, and perhaps seven millions Bulgarians. The <br />Czechs and Slovenes total six or seven millions, <br />the Magyars exceed ten millions, and the Ruthe- <br />nians still under Austrian control four millions. <br />It is manifest to every reasonable Englishman now <br />that very few of these sixty or seventy million <br />people are likely to be socially and politically <br />happy until they have got themselves disen- <br />tangled from intimate subjection to alien rulers <br />speaking unfamiliar tongues, and it is equally <br />manifest that until they are reasonably content, <br />the peace of the rest of Europe will remain <br />uncertain. So that it is upon these regions that <br /><br /><br /><br />84 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />the peace of England, France, Germany, Russia <br />and Italy rests. <br /><br />The lives, therefore, of hundreds of millions of <br />people must be affected, for good or evil, by the <br />sane re-mapping and pacification of south-eastern <br />Europe. In that sane re-mapping and pacifica- <br />tion we are, in fact, dealing with matters so <br />gigantic that the mere assassination of this person <br />or the murder of that dwindles almost to the <br />vanishing point. It is surely preposterous that <br />the murder of an unwise young King, who sub- <br />ordinated his nation's destinies to a romantic <br />love affair, a murder done, not by a whole nation, <br />not even by a mob, but by less than a hundred <br />officers, who were at least as patriotic as they were <br />cruel, or even the net of conspiracy that killed <br />the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, should stand in <br />the way of the liberation and unity of millions <br />of Serbs who were as innocent of these things as <br />any Wiltshire farmer. All nations have had their <br />criminal and sanguinary phase ; the British and <br />American people who profess such a horror of <br />Servia's murders and Bulgaria's massacres must <br />be blankly ignorant of the history of Scotland <br />and Ireland and the darker side of the Red <br />Indians' destiny. If murder conspiracy was <br />hatched in Servia, were there no Fenians in Ireland <br />and America ? We English, at any rate, have not <br />let the highly-organised Phoenix Park murders <br />drown the freedom of Ireland for ever, or cause a <br />war with America. The sooner we English and <br />Americans clear our minds of this self-righteous <br />cant against the whole Servian race because of <br /><br /><br /><br />COMMON SENSE AND THE BALKAN STATES 85 <br /><br />a few horrors inevitable in a state of barbaric <br />disturbance, the sooner we shall be able to help <br />these peoples forward to the freedom and security <br />that alone can make such barbarities impossible. <br />It would be just as reasonable to vow undying <br />hatred and pitiless vengeance against the whole <br />German-speaking race (of seventy millions or <br />so) because of the burning and killing in Liege. <br />Stifled nations, outraged races, are the fortresses <br />of resentful cruelty. This war is no cinemato- <br />graph melodrama. The deaths of Queen Draga <br />and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand are scarcely <br />in this picture at all. It is not the business of <br />statecraft to avenge the past, but to deal with the <br />possibilities of the present and the hope of the <br />future. <br /><br />And the open possibility of the present is for <br />us to bring about a revival of the Balkan League, <br />and identify ourselves with the reasonable hopes <br />of these renascent peoples. In that revival <br />England may play an active and directing part. <br />The break-up of the first Balkan League was a <br />deep disappointment to liberal opinion through- <br />out the w r orld ; but it was not an irrevocable <br />disaster. The wonder was, indeed, not the rupture <br />but the union. And the rupture itself w r as very <br />largely due to the thwarting of Servia, not by her <br />associates, but by Austria. Now Austria is out <br />of consideration. For Rumania and for each of <br />the three Balkan Powers, there is a plain, honour- <br />able and reasonable advantage in a common <br />agreement and concerted action with us now. <br />There are manifest compensations for Greece in <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />86 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Epirus and the islands and we can spare it <br />Cyprus. For Bulgaria there is a generous recti- <br />fication of Macedonia. The natural expansion <br />of the two northern States has been already <br />indicated. And should Turkey be foolish and <br />blunder at this crisis, then further very natural <br />v, and quite desirable readjustments become possible. <br />!What holds these States back from concerted <br />'action on our side now, is merely the distrusts <br />and enmities left over from the break-up of the <br />first Balkan League. They will not readily trust <br />one another again. But they would trust England. <br />They would sit down now at a conference in <br />which England and Russia and Italy were repre- <br />sented, and to which England and Russia and <br />Italy would bring assurances of a permanent <br />settlement and arrange every detail of their <br />prospective boundaries in a day. They would <br />arrange a peace that would last a century. <br />England could do more than reconcile ; she could <br />finance. And the attack upon Vienna and the <br />German rear would then be reinforced immedi- <br />ately by six or seven hundred thousand seasoned <br />soldiers. <br /><br />Moreover, it is scarcely possible that Italy <br />could refuse to come into this war if a reunited <br />Balkan League did so. With the Servians in <br />Dalmatia it would be scarcely possible to keep <br />the Italians out of Trieste and Fiume, and long <br />before that earnestly awaited Russian avalanche <br />won its way to Berlin, this southern attack might <br />be in Vienna. The time when the scope of this <br />war could be restricted is past long ago, and every <br /><br /><br /><br />COMMON SENSE AND THE BALKAN STATES 87 <br /><br />fresh soldier who goes into action now shortens <br />the agony of Europe. <br /><br />But it is not with the immediate military <br />advantages of a Balkan League that I am most <br />concerned. A Balkan League of Peace, for <br />mutual protection, will be an absolute necessity <br />in a regenerated Europe. It is necessary for the <br />tranquility of the world. It is necessary if the <br />Wiltshire farmer is to herd his sheep in peace ; <br />it is necessary if people are to be prosperous and <br />happy in Chicago and Yokohama. Perhaps <br />" Balkan League " is now an insufficiently exten- <br />sive word, since Rumania is not in the Balkan <br />Peninsula, and Italy must necessarily be involved <br />in any enduring settlement. But it is clear that <br />the settlement of Europe upon liberal lines <br />involves the creation of these various ten-to- <br />twenty-million-people States, none of them <br />powerful enough to be secure alone, but amount- <br />ing in the aggregate to the greatest power in <br />Europe, and it is equally clear that they must <br />be linked by some common bond and under- <br />standing. <br /><br />There can be no doubt of the very serious <br />complication of all these possibilities by the <br />jerry-built dynastic interests that have been <br />unhappily run up in these new States. It is <br />unfortunate that we have to reckon not only with <br />peoples but kings. Such a monarchy as that of <br />Servia or Bulgaria narrows, personifies, intensifies <br />and misrepresents national feeling. National <br />hatreds and national ambitions can no doubt be <br />at times very malign influences in the world's <br /><br /><br /><br /><br />88 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />affairs, but it is the greed and vanities of excep- <br />tional monarchs, of the Napoleons and Fredericks <br />the Great, and so forth, that bring these vague, <br />vast feelings to an edge and a crisis. And it will <br />be these same concentrated and over individualised <br />purposes, these little gods of the coin and postage <br />stamp that will stand most in the way of a <br />reasonable Schweitzerisation and pacification of <br />south-eastern Europe. The more clearly this <br />is recognised in Europe now, the less likely are <br />they, the less able will they be to obstruct a sane <br />settlement. On our side, at least, this is a war <br />of nations and not of princes. <br /><br />It is for that reason that we have to make the <br />discussion of these national arrangements as open <br />and public as we possibly can. This is not a <br />matter for the quiet little deals of the diplomatists. <br />This is no chance for kings. All the civilised <br />peoples of the earth have to form an idea of the <br />general lines upon which a pacific Europe can <br />be established, an idea clear and powerful <br />enough to prevent and override the manoeuvres <br />of the chancelleries. The nations themselves <br />have to become the custodians of the common <br />peace. In Italy, indeed, this is already the case. <br />The Italian monarchy is a strong and Liberal <br />monarchy, secure in the confidence of its people ; <br />but were it not so, it is a fairly evident fact that <br />no betrayal by its rulers would induce the Italian <br />people to make war upon France in the interests <br />of Austria and Prussia. I doubt, too, if the <br />present King of Bulgaria can afford to blunder <br />again. The world moves steadily away from the <br /><br /><br /><br />COMMON SENSE AND THE BALKAN STATES 89 <br /><br />phase of Court-centred nationalism to the phase <br />of a collective national purpose. It is for the <br />whole strength of western liberalism to throw <br />itself upon the side of that movement, and in no <br />direction can it make its strength so effective at <br />the present time as in the open and energetic <br />promotion of a new and greater Balkan League. <br /><br />, Ja tffat uwrfq <br /><br /><br /><br />Cf <br /><br /><br /><br />/. <br /><br />VfaM*^ ( <br /><br />' <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />XL <br />THE WAR OF THE MIND <br /><br />All the realities of this war are things of the <br />mind. This is a conflict of cultures, and nothing <br />else in the world. All the world-wide pain and <br />weariness, fear and anxieties, the bloodshed and <br />destruction, the innumerable torn bodies of men <br />and horses, the stench of putrefaction, the misery <br />of hundreds of millions of human beings, the <br />waste of mankind, are but the material conse- <br />quences of a false philosophy and foolish thinking. <br />We fight not to destroy a nation, but a nest of <br />evil ideas. <br /><br />We fight because a whole nation has become <br />obsessed by pride, by the cant of cynicism and <br />the vanity of violence, by the evil suggestion of <br />such third-rate writers as Gobineau and Stewart <br />Chamberlain that they were a people of peculiar <br />excellence destined to dominate the earth, by <br />the base offer of advantage in cunning and <br />treachery held out by such men as Delbruck and <br />Bernhardi, by the theatricalism of the Kaiser, <br />and by two stirring songs about Deutschland and <br />the Rhine. These things, interweaving with the <br />tradesmen's activities of the armaments trust and <br />the common vanity and weaknesses of unthinking <br />men, have been sufficient to release disaster <br />we do not begin to measure the magnitude of <br /><br /><br /><br />THE WAR OF THE MIND 91 <br /><br />(M#( <br /><br />the disaster. On the back of it all, spurring it <br />on, are the idea-mongers, the base-spirited writing <br />men, pretentious little professors in frock coats <br />scribbling colonels. They are the idea. They <br />pointed the way and whispered " Go ! " They <br />ride the world now to catastrophe. It is as if <br />God in a moment of wild humour had lent his <br />whirlwinds for an outing to half-a-dozen fleas. <br /><br />And the real task before mankind is quite <br />beyond the business of the fighting line, the simple <br />awful business of discrediting and discouraging <br />these stupidities by battleship, artillery, rifle and <br />the blood and courage of seven million men. <br />The real task of mankind is to get better sense <br />into the heads of these Germans, and therewith <br />and thereby into the heads of humanity generally, <br />and to end not simply a war, but the idea of war. <br />What printing and writing and talking have done, <br />printing and writing and talking can undo. Let <br />no man be fooled by bulk and matter. Rifles <br />do but kill men, and fresh men are born to follow <br />them. Our business is to kill ideas. The ultimate <br />purpose of this war is propaganda, the destruction <br />of certain beliefs, and the creation of others. <br />It is to this propaganda that reasonable men <br />must address themselves. <br /><br />And when I write propaganda, I do not for a <br />moment mean the propaganda with which the <br />name of Mr. Norman Angell is associated ; this <br />great modern gospel that war does not pay. <br />That is indeed the only decent and attractive <br />thing that can still be said for war. Nothing that <br />is really worth having in life does pay. Men live <br /><br /><br /><br />92 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />in order that they may pay for the unpaying <br />things. Love does not pay, art does not pay, <br />happiness does not pay, honesty is not the best <br />policy, generosity invites the ingratitude of the <br />mean ; what is the good of this huckster's argu- <br />ment ? It revolts all honourable men. But <br />war, whether it pay or not, is an atrociously ugly <br />thing, cruel, destroying countless beauties. Who <br />cares whether war pays or does not pay, when <br />one thinks of some obstinate Belgian peasant <br />woman being interrogated and shot by a hectoring <br />German officer, or of the weakly whimpering <br />mess of some poor hovel with little children in <br />it, struck by a shell ? Even if war paid twelve- <br />and-a-half per cent, per annum for ever on every <br />pound it cost to wage, would it be any the less <br />a sickening abomination to every decent soul ? <br />And, moreover, it is a bore. It is an unendurable <br />bore. War and the preparation for war, the <br />taxes, the drilling, the interference with every <br />free activity, the arrest and stiffening up of life, <br />the obedience to third-rate people in uniform, <br />of which Berlin-struck Germans have been the <br />implacable exponents, have become an unbearable <br />nuisance to all humanity. Neither Belgium nor <br />France nor Britain is fighting now for glory or <br />advantage. I do not believe Russia is doing so ; <br />we are all, I believe, fighting in a fury of resent- <br />ment because at last after years of waste and worry <br />to prevent it, we have been obliged to do so. <br />Our grievance is the grievance of every decent <br />life-loving German, of every German mother <br />and sweetheart who watched her man go off <br /><br /><br /><br />THE WAR OF THE MIND 93 <br /><br />under his incompetent leaders to hardship and <br />mutilations and death. And our propaganda <br />against the Prussian idea has to be no vile argu- <br />ment to the pocket, but an appeal to the common <br />sense and common feeling of humanity. We have <br />to clear the heads of the Germans, and keep the <br />heads of our own people clear about this war. <br />Particularly is there need to dissuade our people <br />against the dream of profit-filching, the " War <br />against German Trade." We have to reiterate <br />over and over again that we fight, resolved that <br />at the end no nationality shall oppress any <br />nationality or language again in Europe for ever, <br />and by way of illustration, we want not those <br />ingenious arrangements of figures that touch the <br />Angell imagination, but photographs of the <br />Kaiser in his glory at a review, and photographs <br />of the long, unintelligent side-long face of the <br />Crown Prince, his son, photographs of that great <br />original Krupp taking his pleasures at Capri and, <br />to set beside these, photographs pitilessly showing <br />men killed and horribly torn upon the battlefield, <br />and men crippled and women and men murdered, <br />and homes burnt and, to the verge of indecency, <br />all the peculiar filthiness of war. And the case <br />that has thus to be stated has to be brought before <br />the minds of the Germans, of Americans, of <br />French people, and English people, of Swedes <br />and Russians and Italians as our common evil, <br />which, though it be at the expense of several <br />Governments, we have to end. <br /><br />Now, how is this literature to be spread ? <br />How are we to reach the common people of the <br /><br /><br /><br />94 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />Western European countries with these explan- <br />ations, these assurances, these suggestions that are <br />necessary for the proper ending of this war ? <br />I could wish we had a Government capable of <br />something more articulate than " Wait and see ! " <br />a Government that dared confess a national <br />intention to all the world. For what a Govern- <br />ment says is audible to all the world. King <br />George, too, has the ear of a thousand million <br />people. If he saw fit to say simply and clearly <br />what it is we fight for and what we seek, his voice <br />would be heard universally, through Germany, <br />through all America. No other voice has such <br />penetration. He is, he has told us, watching <br />the war with interest, but that is not enough ; <br />we could have guessed that, knowing his spirit. <br />As a nation, we need expression that shall reach <br />the other side. But our Government is, I fear, <br />one of those that obey necessity ; it is only very <br />reluctantly creative ; it rests, therefore, with us <br />who, outside all formal government, represent <br />the national will and intention, to take this <br />work into our hands. By means of a propaganda <br />of books, newspaper articles, leaflets, tracts in <br />English, French, German, Dutch, Swedish, <br />Norwegian, Italian, Chinese and Japanese we <br />have to spread this idea, repeat this idea, and <br />impose upon this war the idea that this war must <br />end war. We have to create a wide common <br />conception of a re-mapped and pacified Europe, <br />released from the abominable dangers of a private <br />trade in armaments, largely disarmed and pledged <br />to mutual protection. This conception has <br /><br /><br /><br />THE WAR OF THE MIND 95 <br /><br />sprung up in a number of minds, and there have <br />been proposals at once most extraordinary and <br />feasible for its realisation, projects of aeroplanes <br />scattering leaflets across Germany, of armies <br />distributing tracts as they advance, of prisoners <br />of war much afflicted by such literature. These <br />ideas have the absurdity of novelty, but otherwise <br />they are by no means absurd. They will strike <br />many soldiers as being indecent, but the world <br />is in revolt against the standards of soldiering. <br /><br />Never before has the world seen clearly as it <br />now sees clearly, the rdle of thought in the making <br />of war. This new conception carries with it <br />the corollary of an entirely new campaign. <br /><br />How can we get at the minds of our enemies ? <br />How can we make explanation more powerful <br />than armies and fleets ? Failing an articulate <br />voice at the head of our country, we must needs <br />look for the resonating appeal we need in other <br />quarters. We look to the Church that takes for <br />its purposes the name of the Prince of Peace. <br />In England, except for the smallest, meekest <br />protest against war, any sort of war, on the part <br />of a handful of Quakers, Christianity is silent. <br />Its universally present organisation speaks , no <br />coherent counsels. Its workers for the most <br />part are buried in the loyal manufacture of flannel <br />garments and an inordinate quantity of bed- <br />socks for the wounded. It is an extraordinary <br />thing to go now and look at one's parish church <br />and note the pulpit, the orderly arrangements <br />for the hearers, the proclamations on the doors, <br />to sit awhile on the stone wall about the graves <br /><br /><br /><br />96 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />and survey the comfortable vicarage, and to <br />reflect that this is just the local representation <br />of a universally present organisation for the <br />communication of ideas ; that all over Europe <br />there are such pulpits, such possibilities of gather- <br />ing and saying, and that it gathers nothing and <br />has nothing to say. Pacific, patriotic sentiment <br />it utters perhaps, but nothing that anyone can <br />act upon, nothing to draw together, will, and make <br />an end. It is strange to sit alive in the sunshine <br />and realise that, and to think of how tragically <br />that same realisation came to another mind in <br />Europe. <br /><br />Several things have happened during the past <br />few weeks with the intensest symbolical quality ; <br />the murder of Jaures, for example ; but surely <br />nothing has occurred so wonderful and touching <br />as the death of the Pope, that faithful, honest, <br />simple old man. The war and the perplexity <br />of the war darkened his last hours. " Once the <br />Church could have stopped this thing," he said, <br />with a sense of threads missed and controls that <br />have slipped away it may be with a sense of <br />vivifying help discouraged and refused. The <br />Tribuna tells a story that, if not true, is marvell- <br />ously invented, of the Austrian representative <br />coming to ask him for a blessing on the Austrian <br />arms. He feigned not to hear, or perhaps he <br />did not hear. The Austrian asked again, and <br />again there was silence. Then, at the third <br />request, when he could be silent no longer, he <br />broke out : " No ! Bless peace ! " As the <br />temperature of his weary body rose, his last clear <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />THE WAR OF THE MIND 97 <br /><br /><br /><br />moments were spent in attempts to word tele- <br />grams that should have some arresting hold upon <br />the gigantic crash that was coming, and in his <br />last delirium he lamented war and the impotence <br />of the Church. . . . <br /><br />Intellect without faith is the devil, but faith <br />without intellect is a negligent angel with rusty <br />weapons. This European catastrophe is the <br />tragedy of the weak though righteous Christian <br />will. We begin to see that to be right and <br />indolent, or right and scornfully silent, or right <br />and abstinent from the conflict is to be wrong. <br />Righteousness has need to be as clear and efficient <br />and to do things as sedulously in the right way <br />as any evil doer. There is no meaning in the <br />Christianity of a Christian who is not now a <br />propagandist for peace who is not now also <br />a politician. There is no faith in the Liberalism <br />that merely carps at the manner of our entangle- <br />ment in a struggle that must alter all the world <br />for ever. We need not only to call for peace, <br />but to seek and show and organise the way of <br />peace. ... <br /><br />One thinks of Governments and the Church <br />and the Press, and then, turning about for some <br />other source of mental control, we recall the <br />organisations, the really quite opulent organisa- <br />tions, that are professedly devoted to the <br />promotion of peace. There is no voice from <br />The Hague. The so-called peace movement <br />in our world has consumed money enough and <br />service enough to be something better than a weak <br />little grumble at the existence of war. What is <br /><br /><br /><br />98 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR <br /><br />this movement and its organisations doing now ? <br />Ninety-nine people in Europe out of every <br />hundred are complaining of war now. It needs <br />no specially endowed committees to do that. <br />They preach to a converted world. The question <br />is how to end it and prevent its recurrence. But <br />have these specially peace-seeking people ever <br />sought for the secret springs of war, or looked <br />into the powers that war for war, or troubled to <br />learn how to grasp war and subdue it ? All <br />Germany is knit by the fighting spirit, and armed <br />beyond the rest of the world. Until the mind of <br />Germany is changed, there can be no safe peace <br />on earth. But that, it seems, does not trouble <br />the professional peace advocate if only he may <br />cry Peace, and live somewhere in comfort, and <br />with the comfortable sense of a superior dissent <br />from the general emotion. <br /><br />How are we to gather together the wills and <br />understanding of men for the tremendous necessi- <br />ties and opportunities of this time ? Thought, <br />speech, persuasion, an incessant appeal for clear <br />intentions, clear statements for the dispelling of <br />suspicion and the abandonment of secrecy and <br />trickery ; there is work for every man who writes <br />or talks and has the slightest influence upon <br />another creature. This monstrous conflict in <br />Europe, the slaughtering, the famine, the con- <br />fusion, the panic and hatred and lying pride, it <br />is all of it real only in the darkness of the mind. <br />At the coming of understanding it will vanish <br />as dreams vanish at awakening. But never will <br />it vanish until understanding has come. It goes <br /><br /><br /><br />THE WAR OF THE MIND 99 <br /><br />on only because we, who are voices, who suggest, <br />who might elucidate and inspire, are ourselves <br />such little scattered creatures that though we <br />strain to the breaking point, we still have no <br />strength to turn on the light that would save <br />us. There have been moments in the last three <br />weeks when life has been a waking nightmare, <br />one of those frozen nightmares when, with <br />salvation within one's reach, one cannot move, <br />and the voice dies in one's throat <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />WA, y\ <br /><br /><br /><br />tf..t#tfb <br /><br /><br /><br />&*d (jttfifA <br /><br />*,M <br /><4 M <br /><br />'iitiW' <br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Brave Belgium <br /><br />HER HISTORY AND HER PEOPLE <br />BY DR. ANGELO S. RAPPOPORT <br /><br />Author of " Leopold II., King of the Belgians," etc. <br />Decorative Cover, 6d. net. 56 pp <br /><br />WHO is there with soul so dead that will not respond to the <br />deeds of valour, and the unflinching heroism of the gallant <br />defenders of Liege ? Go where you will in this England of <br />ours and Brave Belgium is on the lips of all. The land of the <br />Belgians has ever been the " cock-pit " of Europe, for on its <br />territory some of the world's greatest battles have been fought. <br />To-day, the greatest of all is being waged and no matter what <br />the outcome of it may be, brave little Belgium has assured for <br />her nation an imperishable record of great deeds of daring and <br />heroism of her soldiers and fortitude and self-sacrifice of her <br />people. The hour is propitious, then, for we in England to <br />know something of the history of the Belgians and her country ; <br />and who better qualified to introduce us than the author of <br />the life of the late Leopold II., King of the Belgians and uncle <br />of King Albert, the reigning monarch. In " Brave Belgium " <br />Dr. Rappoport has written a book teeming full of interest. <br />It deals in turn with the Soul of Belgium, the Country and the <br />People, Legislation, Religion, Public Education, Justice, the <br />Army, Military Education, Science and Art. A chapter on <br />Belgian History is perhaps one of the most important and <br />interesting in the volume for it gives the reader an illuminating <br />historical sketch from the time of Caesar to Charlemagne. <br />" Brave Belgium " is a book which every patriotic Britisher <br />must read. <br /><br />FRANK AND CECIL PALMER <br /><br />12-14 RED LION COURT, LONDON, E.C. <br /><br /><br /><br />Your Navy as a Fighting <br />Machine <br /><br />BY FRED T. JANE <br /><br />(Author of " Fighting Ships," etc.) <br />Decorative cover^ I/- net. With explanatory Diagrams. <br /><br />CONTENTS <br /><br />WHAT is A CAPITAL SHIP. AIRSHIPS. <br /><br />THE BATTLE CRUISER. MINES. <br /><br />CRUISERS. PERSONNEL : OFFICERS. <br /><br />TORPEDO CRAFT. MEN. <br /><br />SUBMARINES. etc. THE ROYAL MARINES. <br /><br />THIS little book is an attempt to produce an entirely non- <br />technical handbook for the use of those who, till this war came <br />along, did not interest themselves in naval matters. Till now <br />a vast number of people have taken the Navy for granted. It <br />has existed to them much as St. Paul's Cathedral exists. To <br />the great majority there has been no occasion to trouble about <br />anything, save perhaps one or two of the more picturesque <br />features of the Fleet. Now, however, after a hundred years of <br />peace the Navy is engaged in naval warfare, and the entire <br />situation is changed accordingly. <br /><br />It is true that during this past century the Navy has been <br />engaged in various operations. In the Crimean War, for <br />instance, two considerable fleets were employed. Both before <br />and since our ships have bombarded forts and places, like <br />Algiers and Alexandria, but in all the hundred years there has <br />been no war between British fleets and the fleets of a foreign <br />Power. And so it comes about that all eyes are now upon the <br />Navy, which somewhere on the seas started facing the unknown <br />directly Austria sent her ultimatum to Servia. <br /><br />So soon as that incident occurred everything which has <br />happened since became a vivid possibility. From that moment <br />the Fleet had to be on watch and guard lest Germany should <br />fall on us unawares. That she intended to attempt it was <br />perfectly well-known it had been known for years to all in <br />authority. <br /><br />The British Navy, for which the public has paid, is now <br />undergoing the supreme test <br /><br /><br /><br />The War Lord <br /><br />A CHARACTER STUDY OF EMPEROR WILLIAM II., BY MEANS OF <br />His LETTERS, SPEECHES & TELEGRAMS. <br /><br />COMPILED BY J. M. KENNEDY <br /><br />Wrapper (with portrait) Jd. net. 96 pp> <br /><br />THE German eagle has never really looked like the dove of peace, in spite of <br />all the German War Lord's whitewashing. The following pages will testify <br />how assiduous that whitewashing process has been. For twenty year* <br />William II. has passionately assured the world that the whole aim of the <br />German Empire is peace. With disgusting religiosity he has pleaded that <br />as the Divinely-appointed representative of God on earth he dare not <br />encourage the " criminal folly " of war. Yet to-day, without pretext, he <br />has driven all Europe to arms, and is drenching the earth with torrents of <br />innocent blood. <br /><br />William II. showed at an early age the stuff he was made of. When <br />nineteen he wrote in the Golden Book of Alsace that the Ruler must be <br />supreme even over his own relatives. A little later he declared that for <br />Prussian nobles to oppose the king was " a monstrosity." <br /><br />The Kaiser has never learned from great men : he has merely aped them. <br />Of old Prince Bismarck he merely absorbed brutality 5 of young Count <br />Herbert, boorishness. Of his illustrious grandfather, whose name was <br />always on his lips, he saw the assiduity rather than the genius. He has <br />prinked himself out in fragments of their wardrobe, the stern brutality of <br />this, the crude religiosity of that, a bit of ruthless world-ambition here, a <br />scrap of monomania there and so he presents himself, a sort of music-hall <br />impersonation of Greatness, for the polite wonder of the world. Under it <br />all shows forth the intellectual weakling. A bigger man would never have <br />" dropped the pilot," a wiser man would have kept his strutting heroics for <br />his own bedchamber. <br /><br />To-day he stands revealed as the shameless prophet of a new Teutonism. <br />Treaties are broken, territory violated, floating mines strewn in the open <br />sea, women and children violated and slaughtered, non-combatants shot and <br />their houses burned. It is a simple creed, one very fashionable some centuries <br />ago among the savage cave-men and the barbarian pirates. It has the <br />drawback of commonly leading to a summary end, and like most of the <br />Kaiser's mental equipment, is extravagantly out of date. <br /><br />Perhaps when a civilised and sane world has disarmed this crazy maniac <br />and herded him back into his cell we shall judge him less harshly ; but <br />meantime a perusal of the sanctimonious pratings collected here can only <br />increase our anger. <br /><br />ALL BRITISHERS SHOULD READ " THE WAR LORD," AND KNOW <br />THE KAISER FOR WHAT HE REALLY is. <br /><br /><br /><br />Little Wars <br /><br />BY H. G. WELLS <br /><br />Pcap 4*0 cloth. 2/6 net. 115 pp. <br /><br />With 20 photographs of battle-fields, and 80 marginal drawings <br /><br />by T. R. Sinclair. <br /><br />This book is a further contribution by Mr. H. G. Wells to <br />the difficult art of teaching children to amuse themselves. <br />In Floor Games he showed what could be done on the nursery <br />floor in the peaceful art of running towns, railways, and all <br />kinds of municipal and commercial enterprises in miniature. <br />Tn Little Wars he shows us the same general principles applied <br />to warfare. Here you will find no meaningless shifting of <br />groups of soldiers, every man is moved some definite step in <br />a carefully planned campaign. Mistakes quickly bring their <br />own punishment in loss of guns or soldiers, bad gunnery <br />for the guns really shoot wooden shot may lead to the utter <br />rout of one's army ; in a word every essential to good general- <br />ship in actual warfare is also required here before a victory <br />can be won. So much is this the case that the game has been <br />taken up in earnest by a number of prominent military men, <br />who find in it a really instructive substitute for the somewhat <br />dull and complicated Krieg-spiel of older days. In Mr. Wells's <br />own words : <br /><br />" I offer my game, for a particular as well as a general end ; <br />let us put this prancing monarch and that silly scaremonger, <br />and these excitable ' patriots ' into one vast Temple of War, <br />with cork carpets everywhere, and plenty of little trees and <br />little houses to knock down, and cities and fortresses, and <br />unlimited soldiers tons, cellars-full and let them lead their <br />own lives there away from us. My game is just as good as <br />their game, and saner by reason of its size." <br /><br /><br /><br />4130 <br /><br /><br /><br />Wells <br /><br />523* <br /><br />The war that will end war .W38devorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-34798848808383482722009-10-18T08:56:00.000-07:002009-10-18T09:07:57.194-07:00The Labour Unrest<a href="http://www.everyauthor.com/writing/books/h_g_wells_englishman_looks_at_the_world/the_labour_unrest">Fuente en inglés</a>. Se puede descargar desde <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/11502">project gutenberg</a> en inglés.devorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-40214628983210370602009-10-18T07:31:00.000-07:002009-10-18T07:43:35.047-07:00Socialism and the family<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/socialismandfam01wellgoog">Fuente</a>.<br /><br /><pre>These are two papers written by Mr. H. G. Wells. The<br />first was read to the Fabian Society in October, 1906, under<br />the title of " Socialism and the Middle Classes.' 1 The<br />second appeared first in the " Independent Review.'*<br />Together they state pretty completely the attitude of Modern<br />Socialism to family life.<br /><br />I<br /><br />IN this paper I am anxious to define and<br />discuss the relationship between three<br />distinct things :<br /><br />(1) Socialism, i.e. a large, a slowly elabor-<br />ating conception of a sane and organized J<br />state and moral culture to replace our present<br />chaotic way of living,<br /><br />(2) the Socialist movement, and<br /><br />(3) the Middle Classes.<br /><br />The first is to me a very great thing in-<br />deed, the jorm and substance of my ideal lif e,<br />and all the religion I possess. Let me make<br /><br /><br /><br />T"<br /><br /><br /><br />"V<br /><br /><br /><br />6 SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />my confession plain and clear. I am, by a<br />sort of predestination, a Socialist. I perceive,<br />I cannot help talking and writing about<br />Socialism, and shaping and forwarding So*-<br />cialism. I am one of a succession — one of a *<br />growing multitude of witnesses, who will<br />continue. It does not — in the larger sense —<br />matter how many generations of us must -'<br />toil and testify. It does not matter, except<br />. as our individual concern, how individually .<br />we succeed or fail, what blunders we make;<br />what thwartings we encounter, what follies<br />and inadequacies darken our private hopes<br />and level our personal imaginations to the<br />dust. We have the light. We know what<br />we are for, and that the light that now glim-<br />mers so dimly through us must in the end<br />prevail./To us Socialism is no piece of politi-<br />V cal strategy, no economic opposition of class<br />to class ; it is a plan for the reconstruction<br />of human life, for the replacement of a dis-<br />order by order, for the making of a state in<br />which mankind shall live bravely and bea»ti-<br />fully beyond our present unaginingy<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY 7<br /><br />So, largely, I conceive of Socialism. But<br />Socialism and the Socialist movement are twoj<br />fc yer^different things. The Socialist movement<br />^is an itemm^rallogether different scale.<br /><br />I must confess that the organized Socialist<br />jl movement, all the Socialist societies and<br />leagues and federations and parties together<br />in England, seem to me no more than'' the<br />rustling hem of the garment of advancing<br />Socialism. For some years the whole organ-<br />ized Socialist movement seemed to me so<br />/unimportant, so irrelevant to that progressive<br />development and realization of a great system<br />of ideas which is Socialism, that, like very<br />many other Socialists, I did not trouble to<br />connect myself with any section of it.fl<br />don'trbelieve that the Socialist idea is as yet<br />nearly enough thought out and elaborated for<br />very much of it to be realized of set intention<br />now^y Socialism is still essentially education,<br />is study, is a renewal, a prof ound change in<br />the circle of human thought and motive.<br />Tfee institutions which will express this<br />changed circle of thought are important in-<br /><br /><br /><br />8 SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />xleed, but with a secondary importance.<br />Socialism is the still incomplete, the still<br />sketchy and sketchily indicative plan of a<br />new life for the world, a new and better way<br />of living, a change of spirit and substance<br />from the narrow selfishness «uid immediacy<br />and cowardly formalism, the chaotic life of<br />individual accident that is human life to-day,<br />a life that dooms itself and all of us to th wait-<br />ings and misery. Socialism, therefore, is<br />to be served by thought and expression, in<br />art, in literature, in scientific statement and<br />life, in discussion and the quickening exercise<br />of propaganda ; but the Socialist movement,<br />as one finds it, is too often no more than a<br />hasty attempt to secure a premature realiza-<br />tion of some fragmentary suggestion ef this<br />great, still plastic design, to the neglect of<br />all other of its- aspects. As my own sense of<br />Socialism has enlarged and intensified, I have<br />become more and more impressed by the<br />imperfect Socialism of almost every Socialist<br />movement that is going on ; by its nece^arily<br />partial and limited projection from thdxlotted<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY 9<br /><br />cajits>knd habituations of things as they are.<br />Some Socialists quarrel with the Liberal<br />Party and with the Socialist section of the<br />Liberal Party because it does not go far<br />enough, because it does not embody a Social-<br />ism uncompromising and complete, because<br />it has not definitely cut itself off from the<br />old traditions, the discredited formulae, that<br />jeryed before the coming of our great idea.<br />They are blind to the fact that there is no<br />organized Socialism at present, uncompromis-<br />ing and complete, and the Socialists who flat-<br />ter themselves they represent as much are<br />merely those who have either never grasped<br />or who have forgotten the full implications<br />of Socialism^/ They are just a little step<br />further, a very little step further in their<br />departure from existing prejudices, in their<br />subservience to existing institutions and exist-<br />ing imperatives.<br /><br />Take, for example, the Socialism that is<br />popular in New York and Chicago and Ger-<br />many, and that finds its exponents here<br />typically in the inferior ranks of the Social<br /><br /><br /><br />xo SOCIALISM AND THBT^FAMILY<br /><br />Democratic Federation-/the crude Marxite<br />teaching. It still awaits permeation by true<br />Socialist conceptions. It is a version of life<br />adapted essentially to the imagination of the<br />working wage earner, and limited by his<br />limitations. It is the vision of poor souls<br />perennially reminded each Monday morning<br />of the shadow and irksomeness of life, per-<br />petually recalled each Saturday pay time to<br />a watery gleam of all that life might be. J One<br />of the numberless relationships oiAne, the<br />relationship of capital or the employer to the<br />employed, is made to overshadow all other<br />Vrelations. Get that put right, " expropriate<br />the idle rich," transfer all capital to the<br />State, make the State the humane, amenable,<br />universal employer — that, to innumerable 4<br />Socialist working men, is the horizon. The '.<br />rest he sees in the forms of the life to which<br />he is accustomed. A little home, a trifle<br />larger and brighter than his present one, a<br />more abounding table, a cheerful missus x<br />released from factory work and unhealthy<br />competition with men, a bright and healthy<br /><br /><br /><br />4'<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY zz<br /><br />family going to and fro to the public free I<br />schools, free medical attendance, universal<br />State insurance for old age, free trams to<br />Burnham Beeches, shorter hours of work and<br />higher wages, no dismissals, no hunting for<br />work that eludes one. All the wide world of<br />collateral consequences that will follow from<br />the cessation of the system of employment<br />under conditions of individualist competition,<br />he does not seem to apprehend. Such phrases<br />as the citizenship and economigjndependence<br />of women leave him cold./rhat Socialism<br />has anything to say about the economic<br />basis of the family, about the social aspects<br />of marriage, about the rights of the parent,<br />doesn't, I think, at first occur to him at all.<br />Nor does he realize for a long time that for<br />Socialism and under Socialist institutions<br />will there be needed any system of self -disci-<br />pline, any rules of conduct further than the<br />natural impulses and the native goodness of<br />maxu^Ale takes just that aspect oi Socialism<br />that appeals to him, and that alone, and it is<br />only exceptionally at present, ajid very slowly,<br /><br /><br /><br />12 SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />as a process of slow habituation and enlarge-<br />ment, that he comes to any wider conceptioris.<br />And, as a consequence, directly we pass to<br />any social type to which weekly or monthly<br />wages is not the dominating fact of life, and<br />a simple unthinking faith in Yes or No deci-<br />sions its dominant habit, the phrasings, the<br />formulae, the statements and the discreet<br />omissions of the leaders of working-class<br />Socialism fail to appeal.<br /><br />Socialism commends itself to a considerable<br />proportion of the working class simply as a<br />beneficial change in the conditions of work<br />and employment ; to other sections of the<br />community it presents itself through equally<br />limited aspects. Certain ways of living it<br />seems to condemn root and branch. To the<br />stockbroker and many other sorts of trader,<br />to the usurer, to the company promoter, to<br />the retired butler who has invested his money<br />in " weekly property," for example, it stands<br />for the dissolution of all comprehensible social<br />order. It simply repudiates the way of living<br />to which they have committed themselves.<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY 13<br /><br />And to great numbers of agreeable unintelli-<br />gent people who live upon rent and interest<br />it is a projected severing of every bond that<br />holds man and man, that keeps servants<br />respectful, tradespeople in order, railways and<br />hotels available, and the whole procedure of<br />life going. They class Socialism and Anarch-<br />ism together in a way that is as logically<br />unjust as it is from their point of view justi-<br />fiable. Both cults have this in common, that<br />they threaten to wipe out the whole world of<br />the villa resident. And this sense of a threat-<br />ened profound disturbance in their way of<br />living pervades the attitude of nearly all the<br />comfortable classes towards Socialism.<br /><br />When we discuss the attitude of the middle<br />classes to Socialism we must always bear this<br />keener sense of disconcerting changes in<br />mind. It is a part of the queer composition<br />of the human animal that its desire for hap-<br />penings is balanced by an instinctive dread<br />of real changes of condition. People, especi-<br />ally fully adult people, are creatures who<br />have grown accustomed to a certain method<br /><br /><br /><br />14 SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />of costume, a certain system of meals, a cer-<br />tain dietary, certain apparatus, a certain<br />routine. They know their way about in<br />life as it is. They would be lost in Utopia*<br />Quite little alterations "put them out/' as<br />they say — create a distressing feeling of<br />inadequacy, make them " feel odd." What-<br />ever little enlargements they may contem-<br />plate in reverie, in practice they know they<br />want nothing except, perhaps, a little more<br />of all the things they like. That's the way<br />wiui mosToF us, anyiiow. To make a fairly<br />complete intimation of the nature of Socialism<br />to an average, decent, middle-aged, middle-<br />class person would be to arouse emotions<br />of unspeakable terror, if the whole project<br />didn't also naturally clothe itself in a quality<br />of incredibility. And you will find, as a<br />matter of fact, that your middle-class Socialists<br />belong to two classes ; either they are amiable<br />people who don't understand a bit what<br />Socialism is — and some of the most ardent<br />and serviceable workers for Socialism are of<br />this type — or they are people so unhappily<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY 15<br /><br />situated and so unfortunate, or else of such<br />exceptional imaginative force or training<br />(which is itself, perhaps, from the practical<br />point of view, a misfortune), as to be capable<br />of a discontent with life as it is, so passionate<br />as to outweigh instinctive timidities and<br />discretions. Rest assured that/to make any<br />large section of the comfortable upper middle<br />class Socialists, you must 'either misrepresents<br />and more particularl y jinder-repr esent Social-<br />ism, or you must quicken their imaginations<br />far beyond the present state of affairs^<br /><br />Some of the most ardent and serviceable<br />of Socialist workers, I have said, are of the<br />former type. For the most part they are<br />philanthropic people, or women and men of<br />the managing temperament shocked into a<br />sort of Socialism by the more glaring and<br />melodramatic cruelties of our universally<br />cruel social system. They are t he district<br />visitors of Soci a lism. ^ Th ey do not rea lize<br />that Socialism demands anyj :hange in them-<br />X selves or in their way of living, they per-<br />ceive in it simply a way of hope from the<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />/<br /><br /><br /><br />16 SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />failures of vulgar charity. Chiefly they assail<br />the bad conditions of life of the lower classes.<br />They don't for a moment envisage a time<br />when there will be no lower classes — that<br />is beyond them altogether. Much less can<br />they conceive of a time when there will be no<br />governing class distinctively in possession of<br />means. They exact respect from inferiors ;<br />no touch of Socialist warmth or light qualifies<br />their arrogant manners. Perhaps they, too,<br />broaden their conception of Socialism as time<br />goes on, but so it begins with them. Now<br />to make Socialists of this type the appeal<br />is a very different one from the talk of class<br />war and expropriation, and the abolition of<br />the idle rich, wh ich is so serviceable with a<br />roomful of swe ated work ers^ These people"<br />are moved partly by pity, and the best of<br />them by a hatred for the squalor and waste<br />of the present regime. Talk of the expro-<br />priated rich simply raises in their minds<br />painful and disconcerting images of distres sed<br />g entlewome n. But one necessary aspect of<br />the Socialist's vision that sends the coldest<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY 17<br /><br />shiver down the spine of the working class<br />Socialist is extraordinarily alluring and con-<br />genial to them, namely, the official and<br />organized side. They love to think of houses<br />and factories open to competent inspection,<br />of municipal milk, sealed and certificated for<br />every cottager's baby, of old age pensions<br />and a high and rising minimum standard of<br />life. They have an admirable sense of sani-<br />tation. They are the philanthropic and ad-<br />ministrative Socialists as distinguished from<br />the economic revolutionaries.<br /><br />This class of Socialist passes insensibly into<br />the merely Socialistic philanthropist of the<br />wealthy middle class to whom we owe so<br />much helpful expenditure upon experiments<br />in housing, in museum and school construc-<br />tjOH^in educational endowment, and so forth.<br />Their activities are not for one moment to<br />be despised ; they are a constant demon-<br />stration to dull and sceptical persons that<br />things may be different, better, prettier,<br />kindlier and more orderly. Many people<br />impervious to tracts can be set thinking by<br /><br />B<br /><br /><br /><br />i8 SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />a model village or a model factory. How-<br />ever petty much of what they achieve may<br />be, there it is achieved — in legislation, in<br />bricks and mortar. Among other things,<br />these administrative Socialists serve to cor-<br />rect the very perceptible tendency of most<br />w orking men Socialists to sentimental anar-<br />tliism in regard to questions of control and<br />conduct, a tendency due entirely to their<br />Social and administrative inexperience.<br /><br />For more thorough-going Socialism among<br />the middle classes one must look to those<br />strata and sections in which quickened imagi-<br />nations and unsettling influences are to be<br />found. The artist should be extraordinarily<br />attracted by Socialism. A mind habitually^<br />directed to beauty as an end must necessarily<br />be exceptionally awake to the ugly conges- "<br />tions of our contemporary civilization, to<br />the prolific futile production of gawky, ill- .<br />mannered, jostling new things, to the shabby<br />profit-seeking that ousts beauty from life and<br />poisons every enterprise of man. And not<br />only artistic work, but the better sort of<br /><br /><br /><br />v<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY 19<br /><br />scientific investigation, the better sort of<br />literary work, and every occupation that<br />involves the persistent free use of thought,<br />must bring the mind more and more towards<br />the definite recognition of our social incoher-<br />ence and waste. But this by no means<br />exhausts the professions that ought to have<br />a distinct bias for Socialism, The engineer,<br />the architect, the mechanical inventor, the<br />industrial organizer, and every sort of maker<br />must be at one in their desire for emanci-<br />pation from servitude to the promoter, the<br />trader, the lawyer, and the forestaller, from<br />the perpetually recurring obstruction of the<br />claim of the private proprietor to every large<br />and hopeful enterprise, and ready to respond<br />to the immense creative element in the<br />Socialist idea. Only it is th^tjar eative jg e-<br />ment which has so far found least expression<br />-in Socialist literature, which appears neither<br />in the " class war " literature of the working<br />class Socialist nor the litigious, inspecting,<br />fining, and regulating tractiTand proposals<br />of the ajn^str^t iye S ocialist. To too many<br /><br /><br /><br />ao SOCIALISM ANQ THE FAMILY<br /><br />of these men in the constructive professions<br />the substitution of a Socialist State for our<br />present economic method carries with it no<br />promise of emancipation at all. They think<br />that to work for the public controls which<br />an advance towards Socialism would set up,<br />would be worse for them and for all that they<br />desire to do than the profit-seeking, expense-<br />cutting, mercenary making of the present<br />rigime.<br /><br />This is, I believe, a temporary and alter-<br />able state, contrary to the essential and per-<br />manent spirit of those engaged in constructive<br />work. It is due very largely to the many<br />misrepresentations and partial statements<br />of Socialism that have rendered it palatable<br />and assimilable to the working men and the<br />administrative Socialist. Socialism has been<br />presented on the one hand as a scheme of<br />expropriation to a damoroujjpopular govern-<br />ment of working men/Tar more ignorant<br />and incapable of management than a share-<br />holders' meetingyAnd, on the other, as a<br />scheme for the encouragement of stupid little<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY ai<br /><br />municipal authorities of the contemporary<br />type in impossible business undertakings<br />under the guidance of fussy, energ etic,,<br />minded and totally unscientific instigators.<br />Except for the quite recent development of *<br />Socialist thought that is now being embodied<br />in the New Heptarchy Series of the Fabian<br />Society, scarcely anything has been done to<br />dispel these reasonable dreads. I should<br />think that from the point of view of Socialist<br />propaganda, the time is altogether ripe now for<br />a fresh and more vigorous insistence upon<br />the materi^^CTeative aspect of the vision of<br />Socialism, anaspe^^<br /><br />more cardinal and characteristic than any<br />aspect that has hitherto been presented sys-<br />tematically to the world. An enormous re-<br />building, remaking, an^Kgansion is integral<br />in the Socialist dreamy We want to get the<br />land out of the control of the private owners<br />among whom it is cut up, we want to get<br />houses, factories, railways, mines, farms<br />out of the dispersed management of their<br />proprietors, not in order to secure their<br /><br /><br /><br />zz SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />present profits and hinder development, but<br />in order to rearrange these things in a saner<br />and finer fashion. An immense work of<br />replanning, rebuilding, redistributing lies in<br />the foreground of the Socialist vista. We<br />contemplatean enormous clearance of exist-<br />ing things/ / We want an unfettered hand to<br />make beautiful and convenient homes, splen-<br />did cities, noiseless great highways, beautiful<br />bridges, clean, swift and splendid electric<br />railways ; we are inspired by a faith in the<br />coming of clean, wide and simple methods<br />of agricultural production. But it is only<br />now that Socialism is beginning to be put in<br />these terms. So put it, and the engineer and<br />the architect and the scientific organizer,<br />agricultural or industrial — all the best of<br />them, anyhow — will find it correspond extra-<br />ordinarily to their way of thinking.<br /><br />Not all of them, of course. A middle-aged<br />architect with a note-book full of bits of<br />gothic, and a reputation for suburban churches,<br />or full of bits of " Queen Anne " and a con-<br />nexion among villa builders, or an engineer<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY 23<br /><br />paterfamilias who has tasted blood as an<br />expert witness, aren't to be won by these<br />suggestions. They're part of things as they<br />axe. But that is only a temporary incon-<br />venience to Socialism. The young men do<br />respond, and they are the future and what<br />Socialism needs.<br /><br />And there's another great constructive<br />profession that should be Socialist altogether,<br />and that is the medical profession. Espe-<br />cially does Socialism claim the younger men<br />who haven't yet sunken from the hospitals<br />J ^ the tradin g individualis m of a practice.<br />And then there are tlie teachers, the set<br />masters and schoolmistresses. The idea of<br />a great organized making is innate in the<br />quality of their professions ; the making<br />of sound bodies and healthy conditions, the<br />making of informed and disciplined minds.<br />The methods of the profit-seeking school-<br />master, the practice-buying doctor are im-<br />posed upon them by the necessities of an<br />individualist world. Both these two great<br />professions present nowadays, side by side><br /><br /><br /><br />24 SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />two types — the new type, highly qualified,<br />official, administrative, scientific, public-<br />spirited ; the old type, capitalistic, with a<br />pretentious house and equipment, the doctor<br />with a brougham, and a dispensary, the<br />schoolmaster or schoolmistress with some<br />huge old stucco house converted by jerry-<br />built extensions to meet scholastic needs.<br />Who would not rather, one may ask, choose<br />the former way who was not already irre-<br />vocably committed to the latter ? Well, I<br />with my Socialist dreams would like to answer<br />" No one," but I'm learning to check my<br />buoyant optimism. The imagination and<br />science in a young man may cry out for the<br />public position, for the valiant public work,<br />fpr the hard, honourable, creative years.<br />He may sit with his fellow-students and his<br />fellow- workers in a nocturnal cloud of tobacco<br />smoke and fine talk, and vow himself to<br />research and the creative world state. In the<br />morning he will think he has dreamed ; he<br />will recall what the world is, what Socialists<br />are, what he has heard wild Socialists say<br /><br /><br /><br />/<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY 2$<br /><br />about science and his art. He will elect<br />for the real world and a practice.<br /><br />Something more than a failure to state<br />the constructive and educational quality in<br />Socialism on the part of its exponents has to<br />be admitted in accounting for the unnatural*<br />want of sympathetic co-operation between<br />them and the bulk of these noble professions.<br />I cannot disguise from myself certain curiously<br />irrelevant strands that have interwoven with<br />the partial statements of Socialism current<br />in England, and which it is high- time, I<br />think, for Socialists to repudiate. Socialism<br />is something more than an empty criticisiji<br />of our contemporary disorder and waste of<br />life, it is a great intimation of construction,<br />organization, science and education. But<br />concurrently with its extension and its de-<br />structive criticism of the capitalistic individ-<br />ualism of to-day, there has been another<br />movement, essentially an anarchist move-<br />jnent, hostile to machinery and apparatus,<br />hostile to medical science, hostile to order,<br />lostile to education, Y"""Rousseauite move-<br /><br /><br /><br />26 SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />ment in the direction of a sentimentalized<br />naturalism, a Tolstoyan movement in the<br />direction of a non-resisting pietism^ which<br />has not simply been confused with the<br />Socialist movement, but has really affected<br />and interwoven with it. It is not simply<br />that wherever discussion and destructive<br />criticism of the present conventional bases<br />of society occur, both ways of thinking crop<br />up together; they occur all too often a*~<br />alternating phases in the same individuals<br />Few of us are so clear-headed as to be free<br />from profound self-contradictions, flso that<br />it is no great marvel, after all, if tjie presen-<br />tation of Socialism has got mixed up with<br />Return-to-Nature ideas, with proposals for<br />living in a state of unregulated primitive<br />virtue in purely hand-made houses, upon<br />rain water and uncooked fruit. We Socialists<br />have to disentangle it from these things now.<br />We have to disavow, with all necessary<br />emphasis, that gibing at science and the<br />medical profession, at schools and books and<br />the necessary apparatus for collective think-<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY 37<br /><br />ing, which has been one of our little orna-<br />mental weaknesses in the past^^That has,<br />I know, kept a very considerable number of<br />intelligent professional men from inquiring<br />further into Socialist theories and teachings<br />As a consequence there are, especially in the<br />medical profession, quite a number of uncon-<br />scious Socialists, men, often with a far clearer<br />grip uponjh^rentral ide^s^ofSocialism than<br />many of its prole35e3«qx>nents, who _have<br />worked out these ideas for themselves, and<br />are incredulous to hear them called Socialistic!.<br />So much for the specifically creative and<br />imagination-using professions. Throughout<br />the whole range of the more educated middle<br />classes, however, there are causes at work<br />that necessarily stimulate thought towards<br />Socialism, that engender scepticisms, promote<br />inquiries leading towards what is at present<br />the least expounded of all aspects of Socialism<br />—the relation of Socialism to the institution<br />of the Family. ... —<br /><br />The Fa mily, and not the individual, js stilly<br />the unit in contemporary civilization, and<br /><br /><br /><br />38 SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />indeed in nearly all social systems that have<br />ever existed. The adult male, the head of<br />the family, has been the citizen, the sole<br />representative of the family in the State.<br />About him have been grouped his one or<br />more wives, his children, his dependents.<br />His position towards them has always been<br />— is still in many respects to this day — one<br />of ownership. He was owner of them all,<br />and in many of the less sophisticated systems<br />of the past his ownership was as complete<br />as over his horse and house and land — more<br />complete than over his land. He could sell<br />his children into slavery, barter his wives.<br />There has been a secular mitigation. of the<br />rights of this sort of private property ; the<br />establishment, of monogamy, for instance,<br />did for the family what President Roosevelt's<br />proposed legislation against large accumu-<br />lations might do for industrial enterprises,<br />\>ut to this day in our own coiQinunity, for<br />all such mitigations and many euphe misms,<br />the ownership of the head of the family IS<br />still a manifest fact. He votes. He keeps<br /><br /><br /><br />v<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY tg<br /><br />and protects. He determines the education<br />and professions of his children- He is entitled<br />to monetary consolation for any infringe-<br />ment of his rights over wife or daughter.<br />Every intelligent woman understands that, as<br />a matter of hard fact, beneath all the civilities<br />of to-day, she is actual or potential property,<br />and has to treat herself and keep herself as<br />that. She may by force or subtlety turn<br />her chains into weapons, she may succeed in<br />exacting a reciprocal property in a man, the<br />fact remains fundamental that she is either<br />isolated or owned.<br /><br />But I need not go on writing facts with<br />which every one is acquainted. My con-<br />cern now is to point out that Socialism<br />idiates the private ownership of the head<br />of the family as completely as it repudiates<br />any oth er sort of private ownership. Social-<br />Ismlnvolves^ of<br /><br />women, their economic independence of men,<br />and all the personal freedom that follows that,<br />4t intervenes jfretween the children and the<br />parents, claiming to support them, protect<br /><br /><br /><br />30 SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />them, and educate them for its own ampler<br />purposes. Socialism, in fact, is the S^ate<br />family . y OThe old family of the private indi-<br />vidual must vanish before it, just as the old<br />water' works of private enterprise, or the old<br />v*gas company. They are incompatible with<br />/ ^it. Socialism aqqaiTq flip ^^"Tllp hant egotism<br />•■ of the famil y to-day, just as Chnstiamty<br />did in its earlier and more vital centuries.<br />So far as English Socialism is concerned<br />(and the thing is still more the case in America)<br />I must confess that the assault has displayed<br />a quite extraordinary instinct for taking<br />cover, but that is a question of tactics rather<br />than of essential antagonism.<br /><br />It is possible to believe that so far as the<br />middle classes are concerned t his dis c retion<br />has beencarri^^together too far. Social-<br />ists would have forwarded their cause better if<br />they had been more outspoken. It has led to<br />preposterous misunderstandings ; and among<br />others to the charge that Socialism implied<br />free-love. . . . The middle^class family, I<br />am increasingly convinced, is a group in a<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AJJJXTHE FAMILY 31<br /><br />state of tension. ( I believe that a modest<br />but complete statement of the Socialist criti-<br />cism of the family and the proposed Socialist<br />substitute for the conventional rela tionsh ips<br />might awaken extraordinary responses at the<br />present time^The great terror of the eighties<br />and early nineties that crushed all reasonable<br />discussion of sexual relationship is, I believe,<br />altogether over.<br /><br />The whole of the present system is riddled<br />with discontents. One factor is the enhanced<br />sense of the child in middle-class life : the old<br />sentiment was that the parent owned the<br />child, the new is t hat the children own the<br />arents. There has come an intensified re-<br />spect for children, an immense increase in the<br />trouble, attention and expenditure devoted<br />to them — and a very natural and human<br />accompaniment in the huge fall in the middle-<br />class birth-rate. It is felt that to bear and<br />rear children is the most noble and splendid<br />C and responsible thing in life, and an iijcreasing<br />number of people modestly evade it. People<br />see more clearly the social service of paren-<br /><br /><br /><br />32 SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />tage, and are more and more inclined to<br />demand a recognition from the State for this<br />service. The middle-class parent might<br />conceivably be horrified if you suggested the<br />State^should pay him for his offspring f but<br />he would have no objection whatever to<br />being indirectly and partially paid by a<br />differential income tax graduated in relation<br />to the size of his family.<br />With this increased sense of the virtue and<br /><br />% public service of parentage there has gone on<br />a great development of the criticism of schools<br />and fl&aching. The more educated middle-<br />class parent has become an amateur educa-<br />tionist of considerable virulence. He sees<br />more and more distinctly the inadequacy of<br />his own private attempts to educate, the<br />necessa ry charlata nry and insufficiency of the<br />private a dventu re school-THe finds much to<br />envy in~the elementary schools. If he is<br />ignorant and* shortsighted, he joins in the<br />bitter cry of the middle classes, and clamours<br /><br />' against the pampering of the working class,<br />and the rising of the rates which renders his<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY 33<br /><br />efforts to educate his own children more diffi-<br />cult. But a more intelligent type of middle-<br />class parent sends his boy in for public scholar-<br />ships, sets to work to get educational endow-<br />ment for his own class also, and makes another<br />step towards Socialism. Moreover, the in-<br />creasing intelligence of the middle-class parent<br />and the st eady swallowing^ up of the smaller ^<br />capitalists a nd smaller sha reholders b y the<br />larger enterprises and fortunes, alike bring<br />home to him the temporary and uncertain<br />nature of the advantages his private eiterts<br />give his children over those of the working<br />man. He sees no more than a brief respite<br />for them against the economic cataclysms of<br />the coming time. He is more and more alive<br />to the presence of secular change in the world.<br />He does not feel sure his sons will carry on the<br />old business, continue the old practice, fie<br />begins to appreciate the concentration of<br />wealth. The secular development of the<br />capitalistic system robs him mot e and more of<br />his sense of securities. He is uneasier than<br />he used to be about investments. He no<br /><br /><br /><br />34 SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />longer has that complete faith in private<br />insurance companies that once sustained him.<br />His mind broadens out to State insurance<br />as to State education. He is fa^ more amen-<br />able than he used to be to the idea that the<br />only way to provide for one's own posterity is<br />to provide for every one's posterity, to merge<br />parentage in citizenship. The family of the<br />middle-class man which fights for itself alone,<br />is lost.<br /><br />Socialism comes into the middle-class family<br />offering education, offering assurances for the<br />future, and only very distantly intimating<br />the price to be paid in weakened individual<br />control. But far profounder disintegrations<br />are at work. The internal character of the<br />middle-class family is altering fundamentally<br />with the general growth of intelligence, with<br />the higher education of women, with the<br />comings and goings for this purpose and that,<br />the bicycles and games, the enlarged social<br />-ajroetites and opportunities of a new time.<br />The more or less conscious Strike against<br />Parentage is having far-reaching effects. The<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY 35<br /><br />family proper becomes a numerically smaller<br />group. Enormous numbers of childless fami-<br />lies appear ; the middle-class family with two,<br />or at most three, children is the rule rather<br />than the exception in certain strata. This<br />makes the family a less various and interest-<br />ing group, with a smaller demand for atten-<br />tion, emotion, effort. Quite apart from the<br />general mental quickening of the time, it<br />leaves more and more social energy, curiosity,<br />enterprise free, either to fret within the narrow<br />family limits or to go outside them. The<br />Strike against Parentage takes among other<br />forms the form of a .strike against marriage ;<br />great numbers of men and women stand out<br />from a relationship which every year seems<br />more limiting and (except for its temporary<br />passional aspect) purposeless. The number<br />of intelligent and healthy women inadequately<br />employed, who either idle as wives in atten-<br />uated modern families, childless or with an<br />insufficient child or so, or who work for an<br />unsatisfying subsistence as unmarried women,<br />increases. To them the complete concep-<br /><br /><br /><br />36 SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />tions of Socialism should have an extra-<br />ordinary appeal.<br /><br />The appearance of the feminine mind and<br />soul in the world as something distinct and<br />self-conscious, is the appearance of a distinct<br />new engine of criticism against the individ-<br />ualist family, against this dwindling property<br />of the once-ascendant male — who no longer<br />effectually rules, no longer, in many cases,<br />either protects or sustains, who all too often<br />is so shorn of his beams as to be but a vexa-<br />tious power of jealous restriction and inter-<br />ference upon his wife and children. The<br />educated girl resents the proposed loss of her<br />freedom in marriage, the educated married<br />woman realizes as well as resents the losses<br />• of scope and interest marriage entails. Ai it<br />were not for the economic disadvantages that<br />make intelligent women dread a solitary old<br />age in bitter poverty, vast numbers of w omen<br />who arFmsuried to-day would have remained<br />single independent women. This discontent<br />of women is a huge available force for Social-<br />ism. The wife of the past was, to put it<br /><br /><br /><br />IALISM AND THE FAMILY 37<br /><br />brutally/caught younger — so young that she<br />had had no time to think — she began forthwith<br />to bear babies, rear babies, and (which she<br />did in a quite proportionate profusion) bury<br />babies — she never had a moment to think.<br />Now the wife with double the leisure, double<br />the education and half the emotional scope<br />of her worn prolific grandmother, sits at home<br />and thinks things over. You find her letting<br />herself loose in clubs* in literary enterprises,<br />in schemes for joint households to relieve her-<br />self a nd her husband from the continuation of<br />"ir^duoiogue th at lias exhausted^its interest.<br />The husband finds himself divided between<br />his sympathetic sense of tedium and the pro-<br />prietary tradition in which we live.<br /><br />For these tensions in the disintegration of<br />the old proprietary family no remedy offers<br />itself to-day except the solutions that arise<br />as essential portions of the Socialist scheme.<br />The alternative is hypocrisy and disorder.<br /><br />There is yet another and still more effec-<br />tual system of strains at work in the existing<br />social unit, and that is the strain between<br /><br /><br /><br />38 SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />parents and children. That has always<br />existed, /itis one of our most transparent<br />sentimental pretences that there is any<br />natural subordination of son to father, of<br />daughter to mother^/Vs a matter of fact<br />a good deal of naf ural antagonism aggea^<br />aTthe adolescence of the young. Something<br />very TDEeTan instmct stirs in them, to rebel,<br />to go out. The old habits of solicitude,<br />control and restraint in the parent become<br />more and more hampering, irksome, and<br />exasperating to the offspring. The middle-<br />class son gets away in spirit and in fact to<br />school, to college, to business — his sister<br />does all she can to follow his excellent example.<br />In a world with vast moral and intellectual<br />changes in progress the intelligent young<br />find the personal struggle for independence<br />intensified by a conflict of ideas. The modern<br />tendency to cherish and preserve youthful-<br />ness ; the keener desire for living that pre-<br />vents women getting fat and ugly, and men<br />bald and incompetent by forty-five, is another<br />dissolvent factor among these stresses. The<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY 39<br /><br />daughter is not only restrained by her<br />mother's precepts, but inflamed by her ex-<br />ample. The son finds his father's coevals<br />treating him as a contemporary. X<br /><br />Well, into these conflicts and disorders<br />comes Socialism, and Socialism alone, to<br />explain, to justify, to propose new conven-<br />tions and new interpretations of relationship,<br />to champion the reasonable claims of the<br />young, to mitigate the thwarted ownership<br />of the old. Socialism comes, constructive<br />amid the wreckage.<br /><br />Let me at this point, and before I conclude,<br />put one thpg with the utmost possible<br />clearness, ^he Socialist does not propose to<br />destroy something that conceivably would<br />otherwise last for ever, when he proposes<br />a new set of institutions, and a new system<br />of conduct to replace the old pr opriet;<br />famil y. He no more regards the ins&fution of<br />marriage as a permanent thing than he regards<br />a state of compeHHve industrialism as a<br />permanent thing. In the economic sphere,<br />quite apart from any Socialist ideas or<br /><br /><br /><br />40 SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />SociahsF^activi ties, jt i s manifest that<br />competitive^ iijdividualism ""Ttestroys itself.<br />This was reasoned out long ago in the Capital<br />of Marx ; it is receiving its first gigantic<br />practical demonstration in the United States<br />ofA merica. Whatever happens, we believe<br />tKatcompetitive industrialism will change<br />and end — and we Socialists at least believe<br />that the alternative to some form of Socialism<br />is tyranny and social ruin. So, too, in the<br />social sphere, whether Socialists succeed<br />altogether or fail altogether, or in whatever<br />measure they succeed or fail, it does not alter<br />Iftie fact that the family is weakening, dwind-<br />ling, breaking up, disintegrating. The alter-<br />native to a planned and organized Socialism<br />is not the maintenance of the present system,<br />but its logical development, and that is all<br />too plainly a growing complication of pretends<br />as the old imperatives weaken and fade. ^We<br />already live in a world of stupendous hypo-<br />crisies, a world wherein rakes and rascals<br />champion the sacred institution of the family,<br />and a network of sexual secrets, vaguely<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY . 41<br /><br />suspected, disagreeably present, and only<br />half-concealed, pervades every social group<br />one enters. Cynicism, a dismal swamp of<br />base intrigues, cruel restrictions and habitual<br />insincerities, is the manifest destiny of the<br />present rigime unless we make some revo-<br />lutionary turn. It cannot work out its own<br />salvation without the profoundest change in<br />its determining ideas. And what change in<br />those ideas is offered except by the Socialist ?<br />In relation to all these most intimate aspects<br />of lif e, Socialism, and Socialism alone, supplies<br />the hope and suggestions of clean and prac-<br />ticable solutions. So far, Socialists have either<br />been silent or vague^Ar— 1^<br />in relation tc y this central tan gle of life^ To<br />begin to speak plainly among theTsilences<br />and suppressions, the " find out for your-<br />self " of the current time, would be, I think,<br />to grip the middle-class woman and the<br />middle-class youth of both sexes with an<br />extraordinary new interest/'to i rradiate the<br />dissensions of every bored couple and every<br />•^^^squaESlmg family with broaH^onceptions,<br /><■* ' /<br /><br /><br /><br />L<br /><br /><br /><br />42 SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />and enormously to enlarge and stimulate the<br />Socialist movement at the present time.<br /><br />Here ends the paper read by Mr. WeUs to the Fabian<br />Society, but in this that follows he sets out the Socialist<br />conception of the new relations that must follow the old<br />much more clearly.<br /><br /><br /><br />II<br /><br />I DO not think that the general reader at<br />all appreciates the steady develop-<br />ment of Socialist thought during the past<br />two decades. Directly one comes into close<br />contact with contemporary Socialists one<br />discovers in all sorts of ways the evidence of<br />the synthetic work that has been and still is<br />in process, the clearing and growth of guid-<br />ing ideas, the qualification of primitive state-<br />ments, the consideration, the adaptation to<br />meet this or that adequate criticism. A<br />quarter of a century ago Socialism was still<br />to a very large extent a doctrine of negative,<br />a passionate criticism and denial of the<br />theories that sustained and excused the<br />injustices of contemporary life, a repudiation<br />of social and economic methods then held to<br />be indispensable and in the very nature of<br />things. Its positive proposals were as sketchy<br /><br /><br /><br />44 SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />as they were enthusiastic, sketchy and, it<br />must be confessed, fluctuating. One needs<br />to turn back to the files of its every-day<br />publications to realize the progress that has<br />been made, the secular emergence of a con-<br />sistent and continually more nearly com-<br />plete and directive scheme of social recon-<br />struction from the chaotic propositions and<br />hopes and denials of the earlier time. In no<br />direction is this more evident than in the<br />steady clearing of the Socialistic attitude<br />towards marriage and the family; in the<br />disentanglement of Socialism from much<br />idealist and irrelevant matter with which it<br />was once closely associated and encumbered,<br />in the orderly incorporation of conceptions<br />that at one time seemed not only outside of,<br />but hostile to, Socialist ways of thinking. . . .<br />Nothing^could have brought out this more<br />clearly than the comical attempt made re-<br />cently by the Daily Express to suggest that<br />Mr. Keir Hardie and the party he leads was<br />mysteriously involved with my unfortunate<br />self in teaching Free Love to respectable<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY 45<br /><br />working men. When my heat and indig-<br />nation had presently a little subsided, I found<br />myself asking how it came about, that any<br />one could bring together such discrepant<br />things as the orderly proposals of Socialism<br />as they shape themselves in the projects of<br />Mr. Keir Hardie, let us say, and the doctrine<br />of sexudgo-as-you-please. And so inquiring,<br />my mind driff^"baclTtb the days — it is a<br />hazy period to me — when Godwin and Mary<br />Wollstonecraft were alive, when Shelley ex-<br />plained his views to Harriet. These people<br />were in a sort of way Socialists ; Palaeo-<br />Socialists. They professed also verf*~lKs-<br />tinctljTTtiat uncovenanted freedom of action<br />in sexual matters which is, I suppose, Free<br />Love. Indeed, so near are we to these old<br />confusions that there is still, Ij find, one<br />Palaeo-Socialist surviving — Mr. Belfort Bax.<br />p Inthat large undifferentiated past, all sorts<br />of ideas, as yet too ill defined to eliminate<br />one another, socialist ideas, communist ideas,<br />anarchist ideas, Rousseauism, seethed together<br />and seemed akin. In a sense they were akin<br /><br /><br /><br />46 SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />in that they were the condemnation of the<br />existing order, the outcome of the destructive<br />criticism of this of its aspects or that. They<br />were all breccia. But in all else, directly<br />they began to find definite statement, they<br />were flatly contradictory one with another.<br />"* Or at least they stood upon different levels<br />of assumption and application.<br /><br />The formulae of Anarchism and Socialism<br />4re, no doubt, almost diametrically opposed ;<br />| Anarchism denies government, Socialism<br />1 would concentrate all controls in the State ><br />yet it is after all possible in different relations<br />and different aspects to entertain the two.<br />When one comes to dreams, when one tries<br />to imagine one's finest sort of people, one<br />must surely imagine them too fine for con-<br />trol and prohibitions, doing right by a sort<br />of inner impulse, " above the Law." One's<br />^dreamland perfection is Anarchy — just as no<br />one would imagine a policeman (or for the<br />matter of that a drain-pipe) in Heaven.<br />But come down to earth, to men the de-<br />scendants of apes, to men competing to live,<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY 47<br /><br />and passionately jealous and energetic, and<br />for the highways and market-places of life at<br />any rate, one asks for law and convention.<br />In Heayen or any Perfection there will be<br />f no Socialism , just as there will be no Bimet-^<br />/^^allism; there is the sphere of communism, an-<br />archism, universal love and universal service,<br />/ylt is in the workaday world of limited and ;<br />egotistical souls that Socialism has its place.<br />All men who dream at all of noble things are<br />Anarchists in their dreams, and half at least of<br />the people who are much in love, I suppose,<br />want to be this much Anarchistic that they<br />do not want to feel under a law or compulsion<br />one with another. They may want to possess,<br />they may want to be wholly possessed, but<br />they do not want a law court or public<br />opinion to protect that possession as a u right."<br />But it's still not clearly recognized how<br />distinct are the spheres of Anarchism and<br />Socialism. • The last instance of this con-<br />fusion that has seriously affected the common<br />idea of the Socialist was as recent as the late<br />Mr. Grant Allen. He was not, I think, even<br /><br /><br /><br />48 SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />in his time a very representative Socialist,<br />but certainly he did present, as if it were a<br />counsel of perfection for this harsh and grimy<br />world, something very like reckless abandon-<br />ment to the passion or mood of the moment.<br />I doubt if he would have found a dozen sup-<br />porter in the Fabian Society in his own time.<br />I should think his teaching would Eave ap-<br />pealed far more powerfully to extreme indivi-<br />dualists of the type of Mr. Auberon Herbert.<br />However that may be, I do not think there<br />is at present among English and American<br />Socialists any representative .figure at all<br />counseling Free Lo ve._ The modern tend-<br />ency is all towards an amou nt of control o ver<br />the function of reproduction, if anything, in<br />excess j>f that exercised by the State and<br />public usage tcniay. Let me make a brief^<br />comparison oi existing conditions with 'what<br />I believe to be the ideals of most of my fellow<br />Socialists in this matter, and the reader can<br />then judge for himself between the two systems<br />of intervention.<br /><br />And first let me run over the outline of the<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY 49<br /><br />thing we are most likely to forget and have<br />wrong in such a discussion, the thing<br />directly under our noses, the thing that is.<br />People have an odd way of assuming in such<br />a comparison that we are living under an<br />obligation to conform to the moral code of<br />the Christian church at the present time.<br />As a matter of fact we are living in an epoch<br />of extraordinary freedom in sexual matters,<br />mitigated only by certain economic impera-<br />tives. Anti-socialist writers have a way of<br />pretending that Socialists want to make<br />Free Love possible, while in reality Free<br />Love is open to any solvent person to-day.<br />People who do not want to marry are as free<br />as air to come together and part again as they<br />choose, there is no law to prevent them, the<br />State taKes it out~6f Their Children ~ witir a -<br />certain mild malignancy — that is all. Married<br />people are equally free, saving certain limited<br />proprietary claims upon one another, claims<br />that can always be met by the payment of<br />damages. The restraints are purely restraints<br />of opinion, that Would be aspowerful tomorrow<br /><br /><br /><br />50 SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />if legal marriage was altogether abolished.<br />There was a time, no doubt, when there<br />were actual legal punishments for unchastity<br />in women, but that time has gone, it might<br />seem, for ever. Our State retains only, from<br />an age^ thaTTheld mercantile Methods in less<br />honour, a certain habit of persecuting women<br />who sell themselves by retail for money,<br />but this is done in the name of public order<br />and not on account of the act. Such a woman<br />must exact cash payments, she cannot recover<br />debts, she is placed at a ridiculous disadvan-<br />tage towards her landlord (which makes<br />accommodating her peculiarly lucrative), and<br />she is exposed to various inconveniences of<br />street regulation and status that must ulti-<br />matel} Mgrrupt any jw lice force in the w orld<br />— for all that she seems to continue in the<br />land with a certain air of prosperity. Be-<br />yond that our control between man and<br />woman is nil. Our society to-day has in<br />fact no complete system of sexual morals at<br />all. It has the remains of a system.<br />It has the remains of a monogamic pat-<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY 51<br /><br />riarchal system, in which a responsible man J<br />owned nearly absolutely wife and offspring.<br />All its laws and sentiments alike are derived<br />from the reduction and qualification of that.<br />These are not the pretensions indeed of the<br />present system such as it is, but they are the<br />facts. And even the present disorder, one<br />gathers, is unstable. One hears on every<br />hand of its further decadence. From Father<br />Vaughan to President Roosevelt, and volley-<br />ing from the whole bench of bishops, comes<br />the witness to that. Not only the old breaches<br />grow wider and more frequent, but in the<br />very penetralia of the family the decay goes<br />on. The birth-rate falls — and falls. The<br />family fails more and more in its essential l<br />object. This is a process absolutely inde-<br />L pe ndent o f any Socialist propa ganda; it is<br />parf oi the normal developments the exist-<br />ing social and economic system. It makes<br />for sterilization, for furtive wantonness and<br />dishonour. The existing system produces<br />no remedies at all. Prominent people break<br />out ever and again into vehement scoldings<br /><br /><br /><br />52 SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />f<br /><br />of this phenomenon ; the newspapers aud<br />magazines re-echo " Race Suicide/' but there<br />is no sign whatever in the statistical curves<br />of the smallest decimal per cent, of response<br />to these exhortations.<br /><br />Our existing sexual order is a system in<br />decay. What are the alternatives to its<br />steady process of collapse ? That is the<br />question v,we have to ask ourselves. To<br />heap foul abuse, as many quite honest but<br />terror-stricken people seem disposed to do,<br />on any one who attempts to discuss any alter-<br />native, is simply to accelerate this process.<br />To me it seems there are three main direc-<br />tions along which things may go in the future,<br />and between which rational men have to<br />choose.<br /><br />The first is to regard the present process<br />as inevitable and moving towards the elimi-<br />nation of weak and gentle types, to clear one's<br />mind of the prejudices of one's time, and to<br />contemplate a disintegration of all the realities<br />of the family into an epoch of Free Love, miti-<br />gated by mercantile necessities and a few<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY 53<br /><br />transparent hypocrisies. Rich men will be<br />free to live lives of irresponsible polygamy ;<br />poor men will do what they cail ; women's<br />life will be adventurous, the population will<br />decline in numbers and perhaps in quality.<br />(To guard against that mischievous quoter<br />who lies in wait for all Socialist writers, let<br />me say at once that this state of affairs is<br />anti-socialist, is. Ibeliftv^„anria11^d estructife T<br />and does not commend itself to me at all.)<br />The second direction is towards reaction,<br />an attempt to return to the simple old con-<br />ceptions of our past, to the patriarchal family,<br />that is to say, of the middle ages. This I<br />take to be the conception of suoh a Liberal<br />as Mr. G. K. Chesterton, or <«ffch a Conser- v<br />vative as Lord Hugh Cecil, and to be also as<br />much idea as one can find Underlying most<br />tirades against modern morals. The rights<br />of the parent will be insisted on and restored,<br />and the parent means pretty distinctly the v<br />father. Subject to the influence of a powerful<br />and well-organized Church, a rejuvenescent<br />Church, he is to resume that control over<br /><br /><br /><br />54 SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />wife and children of which the modern State<br />has partially deprived him. The develop-<br />ment of secular education is to be arrested,<br />particular stress is to be laid upon the wicked-<br />ness of any intervention with natural repro-<br />ductive processes, the spread of knowledge<br />in certain directions is to be made criminal,<br />and early marriages are to be encouraged. . . .<br />I do not by any means regard this as an im-<br />possible programme ; I believe that in many<br />directions it is quite a practicable one ; it is<br />in harmony with great masses of feeling in the<br />country, and with many natural instincts.<br />It would not of course affect the educated<br />wealthy and leisurely upper class in the com-<br />munity, who would be able and intelligent<br />enough to impose their own private glosses<br />upon its teaching, but it would " moralize "<br />the general population, and reduce them to<br />a state of prolific squalor. Its realization<br />would be, I believe, almost inevitably accom-<br />panied by a decline in sanitation, and a cor-<br />related rise in birth-rate and death-rate, for<br />life would be cheap, and drainpipes and<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY 55<br /><br />antiseptics dear, and it is quite conceivable<br />that after some stresses, a very nearly stable<br />social equilibrium would be attained. After<br />all it is this simple sort of life, without drains<br />and without education, with child labour (in<br />the open air for the most part until the eigh-<br />teenth century — though that is a detail) and a<br />consequent straightforward gesiref or remuner-<br />* a tive children that has been th e norm a l life<br />of humanity for many thousands of years.<br />We might not succeed in getting back to a<br />landed peasantry, we might find large masses<br />of the population would hang up obstinately<br />in industrial towns — towns that in their<br />simple naturalness of congestion might come<br />to resemble the Chinese pattern pretty closely ;<br />but I have no doubt we could move far in that<br />direction with very little difficulty indeed.<br /><br />The third direction is towards the develop-<br />ing conceptions of Socialism. And it must<br />be confessed at once that these, as they<br />emerge steadily and methodically from mere<br />generalities and confusions, do present them-<br />selves as being in many aspects, novel and<br /><br /><br /><br />56 SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY<br /><br />untried. They are as untested, and in many<br />respects as alarming, as steam traction or<br />iron shipping were in 1830. They display,<br />clearly and unambiguously, principles al-<br />readyitimidly admitted in practice and senti-<br />ment to-day, but as yet admitted only con-<br />fusedly and amidst a cloud of contradictions.<br />Essentially the Socialist position is a denial<br />of property in huma n being s ; not only must<br />landand the means oi production be liberated<br />from the multitude of little monarchs among<br />whom they are distributed, to the general 4<br />injury and inconvenience, but women and<br />children, just as much as men and things,<br />must cease to be owned. Socialism indeed<br />proposes to abolish altogether the patriarchal<br />family amidst whose disintegrating ruins we<br />live, and to raise women to an equal citizen-<br />ship with men. It proposes to give a man no<br />more property in a woman than a woman has<br />in jijnan. To stupid people who cannot see<br />the difference between a woman and a thing,<br />the abolition of the private ownership of<br />women takes the form of having " wives in<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY 57<br /><br />common," and suggests the Corroboree. It<br />is obviously nothing of the sort. It is the \<br />recognition in theory of what in many classes i<br />is already the fact, — the practical equality of I<br />men and women in a civilized state. It is j<br />*quite compatible with a marriage contract of<br />far greater stringency than that recognized<br />throughout Christendom to-day.<br /><br />iTow what sort of contract will the Socialist<br />state require for marriage ? Here again there<br />are perfectly clear and simple principles.<br />Socialism states definitely what almost every-<br />body recognizes nowadays with greater oi^_<br />less clearness, and tha t is the concern of III<br />thejgtatef or childre n. The children people f •<br />bring into tEe workTcan be no more their pri-<br />vate concern entirely, than the disease germs<br />they disseminate or the noises a man'makes in" J<br />a thin-floored flat. Socialism says boldly<br />the Stetejs Jthe Over-Parent, the Outer-<br />Parent. People rear cWlcTfSnTfor the State<br />and the future ; if they do that well, they do<br />the whole world a service, and deserve pay-<br />ment just as much as if they built a bridge<br /><br />i<br /><br /><br /><br />58 Socialism and the ^family ^ x 'v<br /><br />or raised a crop of wheat ; if they do it unpro-<br />pitiously and ill, they have done the world an<br />injury. Socialism denies altogether the right<br />of any one to beget children carelessly and<br />promiscuously, and for the pr evention of dis-<br />ease and evil births alike/the Socialist is pre-<br />pared for an insistence upon intelligence and<br />self-restraint quite beyond the current prac-<br />tice-/ At present we deal with all that sort of<br />tKmg as an infringement of private proprie-<br />tary rights ; the Socialist holds it is the world<br />(_that is injured.-<br /><br />Iff olio ws th at motherhoodjjv hich we still in<br />a muddle-headed way seem to regard as partly<br />self-indulgence and partly a service paid to<br />a man by a woman, is regarded by the Soci al-<br />ists as a benefit to society , a public duty don e<br />It may be in many cases a duty full of pr J<br />and happiness — that is beside the mark. The<br />State will pay for children born legitimately<br />in the marriage it will sanction. A woman<br />with healthy and successful 'offspring will<br />draw a wage for each one of them from the<br />State, so lonff as they go on wqII. It will be<br />her wage. Under the State she will control<br /><br /><br /><br />r<br /><br /><br /><br />al-<br />he?<br /><br /><br /><br />/<br /><br /><br /><br />\<br /><br /><br /><br />l SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY 59 .<br /><br />her child's up brin^i ng. How far her husband<br />will share in the power of direction is a matter<br />of detail upon which opinion may vary — and<br />does vary widely among Socialists. I sup-<br />pose for the most part they incline to the<br />conception of a joint control. So the mon-<br />strous injustice of the present time which<br />makes a mother dependent upon the economic<br />accidents of her man, which plunges the best<br />of wives and the most admirable of children<br />into abject poverty if he happens to die, which<br />visits his sins of waste and carelessness upon<br />them far more than upon himself, will dis-<br />appear. So too the still more monstrous<br />absurdity of women discharging their supreme<br />social function, bearing and rearing children<br />in their spare time, as it were, while they<br />" earn their living " by contributing some half<br />mechanical element to some trivial industrial<br />product, will disappear. ~— , -~<br /><br />That is the,/gi&£)of the Socialist attitude 1<br />towards marriage ; the repudiation of private j<br />ownership of women and children, and the j<br />payment of mothers. Partially but already ]<br />very extensively, socialistic ideas have spread<br /><br /><br /><br />60 SOCIALISM ANIKTHE FAMILY<br /><br />through the whole body of our community ;<br />they are the saving element in what would<br />otherwise be a moral catastrophe now, and<br />the Socialist simply puts with precise definition<br />the conclusions to which ^all but foolish, ignor-<br />ant, base or careless people are moving — albeit<br />some are moving thither with averted faces.<br />Already we have the large, still incomplete<br />edifice of free education, and a great mass of<br />legislation against child labour ; we have free<br />baths, free playgrounds, free libraries, — more<br />and more people are coming to admit the<br />social necessity of saving our children from<br />the p rivate en terprise of the milkman who<br />does not sterilize his cans, f ronftEe'private en-<br />terprise of the schoolmaster who cannot teach,<br />from the private enterprise of the employer<br />who takes them on at small wages at thirteen<br />or fourteen to turn them back on our hands<br />as ignorant hooligans and social wastrels at<br />eighteen or twenty. . . . But the straight-<br />forward payment to the mother still remains<br />to be brought within the sphere of practical<br />application. To that we shall come.<br /><br />BntUr * Tanner, The Belwood Printing Work* From*, and London,<br /><br /><br /><br />A. C.JIFIELiyS NMW LIST. „<br /><br />THE BISHOPS AS<br />LEGISLATORS :<br /><br /><br /><br />A<br /><br /><br /><br />• r<br /><br /><br /><br />A Record of the Speeches and Votes of the Bishops in the House<br />of Lords during the last ipo years. '<br /><br />By, JOSEPH ' CLAYTON<br /><br />Author of " Father Dolling " ; " Bishop Westeott."<br /><br />2nd Edition, is. nett, Postage 2d. Cloth gilt, 2s. nett.<br /><br />" It will be difficult for the hardiest episcopolater to /<br /><br />make anything good out of this book. It is a bad record,<br />whether we regard it as citizens or as churchmen." — Pall<br />Mall Gazette.<br /><br />"This is a tremendous and terrible indictment, which<br />can only be supported by an appeal to facts. Unfortunately<br />for the bishops, the record is black. It could not be much<br />worse." — Daily News.<br /><br />"The importance of Mr. Clayton's investigations lies<br />in their cumulative effect. In view of their calling, nearly<br />every intervention and every abstention of the bishops in<br />political affairs has been melancholy. Taken together,<br />the record is overwhelming. What we have here is a<br />history of the absolute uniformity with which popular<br />causes, involving no menace to the church, have found<br />the bishops against them. ... It is a record of hopeless,<br />unredeemed failure. It has been sectarian. It has been<br />selfish. It has never once been national. It has never<br />once been right, never even magnificently wrong. Its<br />mistakes have all been mean." — Morning Leader.<br /><br />LONDON: A. C. FIFIELD, 44, FLEET ST., E.C.<br /><br /><br /><br />A. C. FIFIELD'S NEW LIST.<br /><br />THE<br />WOMAN'S CALENDAR<br /><br />A Quotation for every Day of the Year.<br />Selected by DORA B. MONTEFIORE.<br /><br />Artistic wrapper in 2 colours, is. nett. Quarter cloth,<br />gilt top, 2s. netu<br /><br />PATRIOTISM & ETHICS<br /><br />By J. G. GODARD.<br /><br />New and Cheaper Issue. 374 pages. Cloth, is. nett. Postage, \d.<br />" A powerful picture of the excesses committed in the name<br />of Patriotism. ... A particularly valuable piece of work." —<br />Daily News. " A serious and painstaking contribution to the<br />discussion of a profound ethical problem." — Daily Chronicle.<br /><br />CAMDEN'S SURVEY OF<br />SURREY AND SUSSEX<br /><br />Quarter cloth, js. 6d. nett. Half leather, 10s. 6d. nett. Postage, \d.<br /><br />A book for book collectors and craftsmen. Hand set type,<br />hand made paper, hand printed and hand bound. One hundred<br />and fifty copies only offered to the public. Reigate Press work*<br /><br />THE CONSOLATIONS<br />OF A FADDIST<br /><br />Verses Reprinted from "The Humanitarian."<br /><br />By HENRY S. SALT.<br /><br />Crown Svo. Wrappers, 6d. nett. Postage, id.<br />LONDON: A. C. FIFIELD, 44, FLEET ST., E.C.<br /><br /><br /><br />A. C. FIFIELD'S NEW LIST.<br /><br />WALT WHITMAN<br /><br />By WILLIAM CLARKE, M.A.<br /><br />A new and cheaper edition, with Portrait.<br />Foolscap Svo, cloth, is. 6d. nett. Postage $d.<br /><br />"Still perhaps the best life of Whitman."— A. E.<br />Fletcher.<br /><br />" A fine appreciation. . . . More wisdom and sound<br />thinking are compressed in this little volume than you<br />will find in tons of other books." — The Clarion.<br /><br />"An able study of a remarkable personality, which<br />should be widely read." — Scotsman.<br /><br />" An appreciative and luminous criticism, which our<br />readers will do well to get." — New Age.<br /><br />GARRISON THE<br />NON-RESISTANT<br /><br />. By ERNEST CROSBY.<br /><br />Foolscap Svo, cloth, is. 6d. nett. Postage $d.<br /><br />" We recommend Mr. Crosby's book to those who like<br />a good morsel of morally inspiring and intellectually stimu-<br />lating reading. He first tells, and tells well, the life-story<br />of a man who lived, and would have died, for a noble idea<br />— the abolition of [slavery. He then discusses very<br />fruitfully both that idea, and another, the idea of Non-<br />Resistance, which still remains only an idea, and some<br />will say a dream. . . . His view on the subject will sur-<br />prise, but in the end will impress, the reader, . . . and he<br />is none the less effective because his temper isjphilosophic<br />and his words are measured." — Sunday School Chronicle.<br /><br />LONDON: A. C. FI FIELD, 44, FLEET ST., B.C.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />MET US$t k>ft*^<br /><br />FARM OF TW<br />ACRES<br /><br />By HARRIET MARTINEAU.<br /><br />j&\ r,^ — "~ vr \ The Cottage Farm Series No. i.<br /><br />' f W'T ^ ^' net ' ^°'*» Is * net - Postage, id. and 2d.<br /><br />' , A reprint of Miss Martineau's famous story of her cottage<br /><br />farm which she ran for over twelve year^in tie middle of the<br />nineteenth century.<br /><br /><br /><br />\ja<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />V<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />FORK A]<br /><br />HUSBANDRY : "'• *' "JT '"""<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />L.ll<br /><br /><br /><br />Sillett was one of the pioneers of the small holdings, and his<br />booklet ran into a dozen editions fifty years ago. His accounts<br />show a net profit of £51 ia at Jeast oneyyear, by forkand spade<br /><br />HUMANE EDUCATION<br /><br />JJ.'. n By REV. A. M. MITCHELL, M,A.<br /><br />Vicar of Burton Wood.<br /><br /><br /><br />Small Crown Svo. 32 pages. 3d. net. Post free $id. '<br /><br />A plea for a more humane and rational system of child-<br />training in the elementary schools.<br /><br />LONDON : A. C. FI FIELD, 44, FLEET ST., E.C.<br /><br />"V 11.<br /><br /><br /><br />This book should be returned to<br />the Lj^rary on or before the last date<br />stamjj&i below.<br /><br />A ftjffl$ is incurred by retaining it<br />beyond tfre specified time.<br /><br />Please return promptly.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />0*/a '68<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />\<br /><br /></pre>devorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-25984604326021423342009-10-17T15:26:00.000-07:002009-10-17T15:37:31.574-07:00The Shape of Things to come: The Ultimate Revolution<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Things_to_Come">Wikipedia</a> y <a href="http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/w/h-g-wells/shape-of-things-to-come.htm">fantasticfiction</a>.devorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-4723136987021664122009-10-12T11:40:00.000-07:002009-10-12T11:44:03.542-07:00The New World OrderH. G. WELLS<br /><br />THE NEW WORLD ORDER<br /><br />Fuente, <a href="http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/new_world_order_hgwells.htm">parte 1</a> y <a href="http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/new_world_order_hgwells_pt2.htm">parte 2</a>.<br /><br />Whether it is attainable, how it can be attained, and what sort of world a world at peace will have to be.<br /><br />First Published . . January 1940.<br /><br /> <br /><br />1<br /><br />THE END OF AN AGE<br /><br /> <br /><br />IN THIS SMALL BOOK I want to set down as compactly, clearly and usefully as possible the gist of what I have learnt about war and peace in the course of my life. I am not going to write peace propaganda here. I am going to strip down certain general ideas and realities of primary importance to their framework, and so prepare a nucleus of useful knowledge for those who have to go on with this business of making a world peace. I am not going to persuade people to say "Yes, yes" for a world peace; already we have had far too much abolition of war by making declarations and signing resolutions; everybody wants peace or pretends to want peace, and there is no need to add even a sentence more to the vast volume of such ineffective stuff. I am simply attempting to state the things we must do and the price we must pay for world peace if we really intend to achieve it.<br /><br />Until the Great War, the First World War, I did not bother very much about war and peace. Since then I have almost specialised upon this problem. It is not very easy to recall former states of mind out of which, day by day and year by year, one has grown, but I think that in the decades before 1914 not only I but most of my generation - in the British Empire, America, France and indeed throughout most of the civilised world - thought that war was dying out.<br /><br />So it seemed to us. It was an agreeable and therefore a readily acceptable idea. We imagined the Franco-German War of 1870-71 and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 were the final conflicts between Great Powers, that now there was a Balance of Power sufficiently stable to make further major warfare impracticable. A Triple Alliance faced a Dual Alliance and neither had much reason for attacking the other. We believed war was shrinking to mere expeditionary affairs on the outskirts of our civilisation, a sort of frontier police business. Habits of tolerant intercourse, it seemed, were being strengthened every year that the peace of the Powers remained unbroken.<br /><br />There was in deed a mild armament race going on; mild by our present standards of equipment; the armament industry was a growing and enterprising on; but we did not see the full implication of that; we preferred to believe that the increasing general good sense would be strong enough to prevent these multiplying guns from actually going off and hitting anything. And we smiled indulgently at uniforms and parades and army manœuvres. They were the time-honoured toys and regalia of kings and emperors. They were part of the display side of life and would never get to actual destruction and killing. I do not think that exaggerates the easy complacency of, let us say, 1895, forty-five years ago. It was a complacency that lasted with most of us up to 1914. In 1914 hardly anyone in Europe or America below the age of fifty had seen anything of war in his own country.<br /><br />The world before 1900 seemed to be drifting steadily towards a tacit but practical unification. One could travel without a passport over the larger part of Europe; the Postal Union delivered one’s letters uncensored and safely from Chile to China; money, based essentially on gold, fluctuated only very slightly; and the sprawling British Empire still maintained a tradition of free trade, equal treatment and open-handedness to all comers round and about the planet. In the United States you could go for days and never see a military uniform. Compared with to-day that was, upon the surface at any rate, an age of easy-going safety and good humour. Particularly for the North Americans and the Europeans.<br /><br />But apart from that steady, ominous growth of the armament industry there were other and deeper forces at work that were preparing trouble. The Foreign Offices of the various sovereign states had not forgotten the competitive traditions of the eighteenth century. The admirals and generals were contemplating with something between hostility and fascination, the hunger weapons the steel industry was gently pressing into their hands. Germany did not share the self-complacency of the English-speaking world; she wanted a place in the sun; there was increasing friction about the partition of the raw material regions of Africa; the British suffered from chronic Russophobia with regard to their vast apportions in the East, and set themselves to nurse Japan into a modernised imperialist power; and also they "remembered Majuba"; the United States were irritated by the disorder of Cuba and felt that the weak, extended Spanish possessions would be all the better for a change of management. So the game of Power Politics went on, but it went on upon the margins of the prevailing peace. There were several wars and changes of boundaries, but they involved no fundamental disturbance of the general civilised life; they did not seem to threaten its broadening tolerations and understandings in any fundamental fashion. Economic stresses and social trouble stirred and muttered beneath the orderly surfaces of political life, but threatened no convulsion. The idea of altogether eliminating war, of clearing what was left of it away, was in the air, but it was free from any sense of urgency. The Hague Tribunal was established and there was a steady dissemination of the conceptions of arbitration and international law. It really seemed to many that the peoples of the earth were settling down in their various territories to a litigious rather than a belligerent order. If there was much social injustice it was being mitigated more and more by a quickening sense of social decency. Acquisitiveness conducted itself with decorum and public-spiritedness was in fashion. Some of it was quite honest public-spiritedness.<br /><br />In those days, and they are hardly more than half a lifetime behind us, no one thought of any sort of world administration. That patchwork of great Powers and small Powers seemed the most reasonable and practicable method of running the business of mankind. Communications were far too difficult for any sort of centralised world controls. Around the World in Eighty Days, when it was published seventy years ago, seemed an extravagant fantasy. It was a world without telephone or radio, with nothing swifter than a railway train or more destructive than the earlier types of H.E. shell. They were marvels. It was far more convenient to administer that world of the Balance of Power in separate national areas and, since there were such limited facilities for peoples to get at one another and do each other mischiefs, there seemed no harm in ardent patriotism and the complete independence of separate sovereign states.<br /><br />Economic life was largely directed by irresponsible private businesses and private finance which, because of their private ownership, were able to spread out their unifying transactions in a network that paid little attention to frontiers and national, racial or religious sentimentality. "Business" was much more of a world commonwealth than the political organisations. There were many people, especially in America, who imagined that "Business" might ultimately unify the world and governments sink into subordination to its network.<br /><br />Nowadays we can be wise after the event and we can see that below this fair surface of things, disruptive forces were steadily gathering strength. But these disruptive forces played a comparatively small rôle in the world spectacle of half a century ago, when the ideas of that older generation which still dominates our political life and the political education of its successors, were formed. It is from the conflict of those Balance of Power and private enterprise ideas, half a century old, that one of the main stresses of our time arises. These ideas worked fairly well in their period and it is still with extreme reluctance that our rulers, teachers, politicians, face the necessity for a profound mental adaptation of their views, methods and interpretations to these disruptive forces that once seemed so negligible and which are now shattering their old order completely.<br /><br />It was because of this belief in a growing good-will among nations, because of the general satisfaction with things as they were, that the German declarations of war in 1914 aroused such a storm of indignation throughout the entire comfortable world. It was felt that the German Kaiser had broken the tranquillity of the world club, wantonly and needlessly. The war was fought "against the Hohenzollerns." They were to be expelled from the club, certain punitive fines were to be paid and all would be well. That was the British idea of 1914. This out-of-date war business was then to be cleared up once for all by a mutual guarantee by all the more respectable members of the club through a League of Nations. There was no apprehension of any deeper operating causes in that great convulsion on the part of the worthy elder statesmen who made the peace. And so Versailles and its codicils.<br /><br />For twenty years the disruptive forces have gone on growing beneath the surface of that genteel and shallow settlement, and twenty years there has been no resolute attack upon the riddles with which their growth confronts us. For all that period of the League of Nations has been the opiate of liberal thought in the world.<br /><br />To-day there is war to get rid of Adolf Hitler, who has now taken the part of the Hohenzollerns in the drama. He too has outraged the Club Rules and he too is to be expelled. The war, the Chamberlain-Hitler War, is being waged so far by the British Empire in quite the old spirit. It has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. There is the same resolute disregard of any more fundamental problem.<br /><br />Still the minds of our comfortable and influential ruling-class people refuse to accept the plain intimation that their time is over, that the Balance of Power and uncontrolled business methods cannot continue, and that Hitler, like the Hohenzollerns, is a mere offensive pustule on the face of a deeply ailing world. To get rid of him and his Nazis will be no more a cure for the world’s ills than scraping will heal measles. The disease will manifest itself in some new eruption. It is the system of nationalist individualism and unco-ordinated enterprise that is the world’s disease, and it is the whole system that has to go. It has to be reconditioned down to its foundations or replaced. It cannot hope to "muddle through" amiably, wastefully and dangerously, a second time.<br /><br />World peace means all that much revolution. More and more of us begin to realise that it cannot mean less.<br /><br />The first thing, therefore that has to be done in thinking out the primary problems of world peace is to realise this, that we are living in the end of a definite period of history, the period of the sovereign states. As we used to say in the eighties with ever-increasing truth: "We are in an age of transition". Now we get some measure of the acuteness of the transition. It is a phase of human life which may lead, as I am trying to show, either to a new way of living for our species or else to a longer or briefer dégringolade of violence, misery, destruction, death and the extinction of mankind. These are not rhetorical phrases I am using here; I mean exactly what I say, the disastrous extinction of mankind.<br /><br />That is the issue before us. It is no small affair of parlour politics we have to consider. As I write, in the moment, thousands of people are being killed, wounded, hunted, tormented, ill-treated, delivered up to the most intolerable and hopeless anxiety and destroyed morally and mentally, and there is nothing in sight at present to arrest this spreading process and prevent its reaching you and yours. It is coming for you and yours now at a great pace. Plainly in so far as we are rational foreseeing creatures there is nothing for any of us now but to make this world peace problem the ruling interest and direction of our lives. If we run away from it it will pursue and get us. We have to face it. We have to solve it or be destroyed by it. It is as urgent and comprehensive as that.<br /><br />2<br /><br />OPEN CONFERENCE<br /><br /> <br /><br />BEFORE WE EXAMINE WHAT I have called so far the "disruptive forces" in the current social order, let me underline one primary necessity for the most outspoken free discussion of the battling organisations and the crumbling institutions amidst which we lead our present uncomfortable and precarious lives. There must be no protection for leaders and organisations from the most searching criticism, on the plea that out country is or may be at war. Or on any pretence. We must talk openly, widely and plainly. The war is incidental; the need for revolutionary reconstruction is fundamental. None of us are clear as yet upon some of the most vital questions before us, we are not lucid enough in our own minds to be ambiguous, and a mumbling tactfulness and indirect half-statements made with an eye upon some censor, will confuse our thoughts and the thoughts of those with whom we desire understanding, to the complete sterilisation and defeat of every reconstructive effort.<br /><br />We want to talk and tell exactly what our ideas and feelings are, not only to our fellow citizens, but to our allies, to neutrals and, above all, to the people who are marshalled in arms against us. We want to get the same sincerity from them. Because until we have worked out a common basis of ideas with them, peace will be only an uncertain equilibrium while fresh antagonisms develop.<br /><br />Concurrently with this war we need a great debate. We want every possible person in the world to take part in that debate. It is something much more important than the actual warfare. It is intolerable to think of this storm of universal distress leading up to nothing but some "conference" of diplomatists out of touch with the world, with secret sessions, ambiguous "understandings." . . . Not twice surely can that occur. And yet what is going to prevent its recurring?<br /><br />It is quite easy to define the reasonable limits of censorship in a belligerent country. It is manifest that the publication of any information likely to be of the slightest use to an enemy must be drastically anticipated and suppressed; not only direct information, for example, but intimations and careless betrayals about the position and movements of ships, troops, camps, depots of munitions, food supplies, and false reports of defeats and victories and coming shortages, anything that may lead to blind panic and hysteria, and so forth and so on. But the matter takes on a different aspect altogether when it comes to statements and suggestions that may affect public opinion in one’s own country or abroad, and which may help us towards wholesome and corrective political action.<br /><br />One of the more unpleasant aspects of a state of war under modern conditions is the appearance of a swarm of individuals, too clever by half, in positions of authority. Excited, conceited, prepared to lie, distort and generally humbug people into states of acquiescence, resistance, indignation, vindictiveness, doubt and mental confusion, states of mind supposed to be conductive to a final military victory. These people love to twist and censor facts. It gives them a feeling of power; if they cannot create they can at least prevent and conceal. Particularly they poke themselves in between us and the people with whom we are at war to distort any possible reconciliation. They sit, filled with the wine of their transitory powers, aloof from the fatigues and dangers of conflict, pulling imaginary strings in people’s minds.<br /><br />In Germany popular thought is supposed to be under the control of Herr Dr Goebbels; 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. 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.<br /><br />But here I have to make amends to Lord Lloyd. I was led to believe that the British Council was responsible for Mr. Teeling, the author of Crisis for Christianity, and I said as much in The Fate of Homo Sapiens. I now unsay it. Mr. Teeling, I gather, was sent out upon his journeys by a Catholic newspaper. The British Council was entirely innocent of him.<br /><br />It is not only that the Ministries of Information and Propaganda do their level best to divert the limited gifts and energies of such writers, lecturers and talkers as we possess, to the production of disingenuous muck that will muddle the public mind and mislead the enquiring foreigner, but that they show a marked disposition to stifle any free and independent utterances that my seem to traverse their own profound and secret plans for the salvation of mankind.<br /><br />Everywhere now it is difficult to get adequate, far-reaching publicity for outspoken discussion of the way the world is going, and the political, economic and social forces that carry us along. This is not so much due to deliberate suppression as to the general disorder into which human affairs are dissolving. There is indeed in the Atlantic world hardly a sign as yet of that direct espionage upon opinion that obliterates the mental life of the intelligent Italian or German or Russian to-day almost completely; one may still think what one likes, say what one likes and write what one likes, but nevertheless there is already an increasing difficulty in getting bold, unorthodox views heard and read. Newspapers are afraid upon all sorts of minor counts, publishers, with such valiant exceptions as the publishers of this matter, are morbidly discreet; they get Notice D to avoid this or that particular topic; there are obscure boycotts and trade difficulties hindering the wide diffusion of general ideas in countless ways. I do not mean there is any sort of organised conspiracy to suppress discussion, but I do say that the Press, the publishing and bookselling organisations in our free countries, provide a very ill-organised and inadequate machinery for the ventilation and distribution of thought.<br /><br />Publishers publish for nothing but safe profits; it would astound a bookseller to tell him he was part of the world’s educational organisation or a publisher’s traveller, that he existed for any other purpose than to book maximum orders for best sellers and earn a record commission - letting the other stuff, the highbrow stuff and all that, go hang. They do not understand that they ought to put public service before gain. They have no inducement to do so and no pride in their function. Theirs is the morale of a profiteering world. Newspapers like to insert brave-looking articles of conventional liberalism, speaking highly of peace and displaying a noble vagueness about its attainment; now we are at war they will publish the fiercest attacks upon the enemy - because such attacks are supposed to keep up the fighting spirit of the country; but any ideas that are really loudly and clearly revolutionary they dare not circulate at all. Under these baffling conditions there is no thorough discussion of the world outlook whatever, anywhere. The democracies are only a shade better than the dictatorships in this respect. It is ridiculous to represent them as realms of light at issue with darkness.<br /><br />This great debate upon the reconstruction of the world is a thing more important and urgent than the war, and there exist no adequate media for the utterance and criticism and correction of any broad general convictions. There is a certain fruitless and unproductive spluttering of constructive ideas, but there is little sense of sustained enquiry, few real interchanges, inadequate progress, nothing is settled, nothing is dismissed as unsound and nothing is won permanently. No one seems to hear what anyone else is saying. That is because there is no sense of an audience for these ideologists. There is no effective audience saying rudely and obstinately: "What A. has said, seems important. Will B. and C., instead of bombinating in the void, tell us exactly where and why they differ from A.? And now we have got to the common truth of A., B., C., and D. Here is F. saying something. Will he be so good as to correlate what he has to say with A., B., C., and D.?"<br /><br />But there is no such background of an intelligently observant and critical world audience in evidence. There are a few people here and there reading and thinking in disconnected fragments. This is all the thinking our world is doing in the face of planetary disaster. The universities, bless them! are in uniform or silent.<br /><br />We need to air our own minds; we need frank exchanges, if we are to achieve any common understanding. We need to work out a clear conception of the world order we would prefer to this present chaos, we need to dissolve or compromise upon our differences so that we may set our faces with assurance towards an attainable world peace. The air is full of the panaceas of half-wits, none listening to the others and most of them trying to silence the others in their impatience. Thousands of fools are ready to write us a complete prescription for our world troubles. Will people never realise their own ignorance and incompleteness, from which arise this absolute necessity for the plainest statement of the realities of the problem, for the most exhaustive and unsparing examination of differences of opinion, and for the most ruthless canvassing of every possibility, however unpalatable it may seem at first, of the situation?<br /><br />Before anything else, therefore, in this survey of the way to world peace, I put free speech and vigorous publication. It is the thing best worth fighting for. It is the essence of your personal honour. It is your duty as a world citizen to do what you can for that. You have not only to resist suppressions, you have to fight your way out of the fog. If you find your bookseller or newsagent failing to distribute any type of publication whatever - even if you are in entire disagreement with the views of that publication - you should turn the weapon of the boycott upon the offender and find another bookseller or newsagent for everything you read. The would-be world citizen should subscribe also to such organisation as the National Council for Civil Liberties; he should use any advantage his position may give him to check suppression of free speech; and he should accustom himself to challenge nonsense politely but firmly and say fearlessly and as clearly as possible what is in his mind and to listen as fearlessly to whatever is said to him. So that he may know better either through reassurance or correction. To get together with other people to argue and discuss, to think and organise and then implement thought is the first duty of every reasonable man.<br /><br />This world of ours is going to pieces. It has to be reconstructed and it can only be effectively reconstructed in the light. Only the free, clear, open mind can save us, and these difficulties and obstructions on our line of thought are as evil as children putting obstacles on a railway line or scattering nails on an automobile speed track.<br /><br />This great world debate must go on, and it must go on now. Now while the guns are still thudding, is the time for thought. It is incredibly foolish to talk as so many people do of ending the war and then having a World Conference to inaugurate a new age. So soon as the fighting stops the real world conference, the live discussion, will stop, too. The diplomats and politicians will assemble with an air of profound competence and close the doors upon the outer world and resume - Versailles. While the silenced world gapes and waits upon their mysteries.<br /><br />3<br /><br />DISRUPTIVE FORCES<br /><br /> <br /><br />AND NOW LET US come to the disruptive forces that have reduced that late-nineteenth-century dream of a powerful world patchwork of more and more civilised states linked by an ever-increasing financial and economic interdependence, to complete incredibility, and so forced upon every intelligent mind the need to work out a new conception of the World that ought to be. It is supremely important that the nature of these disruptive forces should be clearly understood and kept in mind. To grasp them is to hold the clues to the world’s present troubles. To forget about them, even for a moment, is to lose touch with essential reality and drift away into minor issues.<br /><br />The first group of these forces is what people are accustomed to speak of as "the abolition of distance" and "the change of scale" in human operations. This "abolition of distance" began rather more than a century ago, and its earlier effects were not disruptive at all. It knit together the spreading United States of America over distances that might otherwise have strained their solidarity to the breaking-point, and it enabled the sprawling British Empire to sustain contacts round the whole planet.<br /><br />The disruptive influence of the abolition of distance appeared only later. Let us be clear upon its essential significance. For what seemed like endless centuries the swiftest means of locomotion had been the horse on the high-road, the running man, the galley and the uncertain, weather-ruled sailing ship. (There was the Dutchman on skates on skates on his canals, but that was an exceptional culmination of speed and not for general application.) The political, social and imaginative life of man for all those centuries was adapted to these limiting conditions. They determined the distances to which marketable goods could conveniently be sent, the limits to which the ruler could send his orders and his solders, the bounds set to getting news, and indeed the whole scale of living. There could be very little real community feeling beyond the range of frequent intercourse.<br /><br />Human life fell naturally therefore into areas determined by the interplay between these limitations and such natural obstacles as seas and mountains. Such countries as France, England, Egypt, Japan, appeared and reappeared in history like natural, necessary things, and though there were such larger political efforts as the Roman Empire, they never attained an enduring unity. The Roman Empire held together like wet blotting-paper; it was always falling to pieces. The older Empires, beyond their national nuclei, were mere precarious tribute-levying powers. What I have already called the world patchwork of the great and little Powers, was therefore, under the old horse-and-foot and sailing-ship conditions, almost as much a matter of natural necessity as the sizes of trees and animals.<br /><br />Within a century all this has been changed and we have still to face up to what that change means for us.<br /><br />First came steam, the steam-railway, the steamship, and then in a quickening crescendo came the internal combustion engine, electrical traction, the motor car, the motor boat, the aeroplane, the transmission of power from central power stations, the telephone, the radio. I feel apologetic in reciting this well-known story. I do so in order to enforce the statement that all the areas that were the most convenient and efficient for the old, time-honoured way of living, became more and more inconveniently close and narrow for the new needs. This applied to every sort of administrative area, from municipalities and urban districts and the range of distributing businesses, up to sovereign states. They were - and for the most part they still are - too small for the new requirements and far too close together. All over the social layout this tightening-up and squeezing together is an inconvenience, but when it comes to the areas of sovereign states it becomes impossibly dangerous. It becomes an intolerable thing; human life cannot go on, with the capitals of most of the civilised countries of the world within an hour’s bombing range of their frontiers, behind which attacks can be prepared and secret preparations made without any form of control. And yet we are still tolerant and loyal to arrangements that seek to maintain this state of affairs and treat it as though nothing else were possible.<br /><br />The present war for and against Hitler and Stalin and Mr. Chamberlain and so forth, does not even touch upon the essential problem of the abolition of distance. It may indeed destroy everything and still settle nothing. If one could wipe out all the issues of the present conflict, we should still be confronted with the essential riddle, which is the abolition of the boundaries of most existing sovereign states and their merger in some larger Pax. We have to do that if any supportable human life is to go on. Treaties and mutual guarantees are not enough. We have surely learnt enough about the value of treaties during the last half-century to realise that. We have, because of the abolition of distance alone, to gather human affairs together under one common war-preventing control.<br /><br />But this abolition of distance is only one most vivid aspect of the change in the conditions of human life. Interwoven with that is a general change of scale in human operations. The past hundred years has been an age of invention and discovery beyond the achievements of the preceding three millennia. In a book I published eight years ago, The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, I tried to summarise the conquest of power and substances that is still going on. There is more power expended in a modern city like Birmingham in a day than we need to keep the whole of Elizabethan England going for a year; there is more destructive energy in a single tank than sufficed the army of William I for the conquest of England. Man is able now to produce or destroy on a scale beyond comparison greater than he could before this storm of invention began. And the consequence is the continual further dislocation of the orderly social life of our great-great-grandfathers. No trade, no profession, is exempt. The old social routines and classifications have been, as people say, "knocked silly". There is no sort of occupation, fisheries, farming, textile work, metal work, mining which is not suffering from constant readjustment to new methods and facilities. Our traditions of trade and distribution flounder after these changes. Skilled occupations disappear in the general liquefaction.<br /><br />The new power organisations are destroying the forests of the world at headlong speed, ploughing great grazing areas into deserts, exhausting mineral resources, killing off whales, seals and a multitude of rare and beautiful species, destroying the morale of every social type and devastating the planet. The institutions of the private appropriation of land and natural resources generally, and of private enterprise for profit, which did produce a fairly tolerable, stable and "civilised" social life for all but the most impoverished, in Europe, America and East, for some centuries, have been expanded to a monstrous destructiveness by the new opportunities. The patient, nibbling, enterprising profit-seeker of the past, magnified and equipped now with the huge claws and teeth the change of scale has provided for him, has torn the old economic order to rags. Quite apart from war, our planet is being wasted and disorganised. Yet the process goes on, without any general control, more monstrously destructive even than the continually enhanced terrors of modern warfare.<br /><br />Now it has to be made clear that these two things, the manifest necessity for some collective world control to eliminate warfare and the less generally admitted necessity for a collective control of the economic and biological life of mankind, are aspects of one and the same process. Of the two the disorganisation of the ordinary life which is going on, war or no war, is the graver and least reversible. Both arise out of the abolition of distance and the change of scale, they affect and modify each other, and unless their parallelism and interdependence are recognised, any projects for world federation or anything of the sort are doomed inevitably to frustration.<br /><br />That is where the League of nations broke down completely. It was legal; it was political. It was devised by an ex-professor of the old-fashioned history assisted by a few politicians. It ignored the vast disorganisation of human life by technical revolutions, big business and modern finance that was going on, of which the Great War itself was scarcely more than a by-product. It was constituted as though nothing of that sort was occurring.<br /><br />This war storm which is breaking upon us now, due to the continued fragmentation of human government among a patchwork of sovereign states, is only one aspect of the general need for a rational consolidation of human affairs. The independent sovereign state with its perpetual war threat, armed with the resources of modern mechanical frightfulness, is only the most blatant and terrifying aspect of that same want of a coherent general control that makes overgrown, independent, sovereign, private business organisations and combinations, socially destructive. We should still be at the mercy of the "Napoleons" of commerce and the "Attilas" of finance, if there was not a gun or a battleship or a tank or a military uniform in the world. We should still be sold up and dispossessed.<br /><br />Political federation, we have to realise, without a concurrent economic collectivisation, is bound to fail. The task of the peace-maker who really desires peace in a new world, involves not merely a political but a profound social revolution, profounder even than the revolution attempted by the Communists in Russia. The Russian Revolution failed not by its extremism but through the impatience, violence and intolerance of its onset, through lack of foresight and intellectual insufficiency. The cosmopolitan revolution to a world collectivism, which is the only alternative to chaos and degeneration before mankind, has to go much further than the Russian; it has to be more thorough and better conceived and its achievement demands a much more heroic and more steadfast thrust.<br /><br />It serves no useful purpose to shut our eyes to the magnitude and intricacy of the task of making the world peace. These are the basic factors of the case.<br /><br />4<br /><br />CLASS-WAR<br /><br /> <br /><br />NOW HERE IT IS necessary to make a distinction which is far too frequently ignored. Collectivisation means the handling of the common affairs of mankind by a common control responsible to the whole community. It means the suppression of go-as-you-please in social and economic affairs just as much as in international affairs. It means the frank abolition of profit-seeking and of every devise by which human+beings contrive to be parasitic on their fellow man. It is the practical realisation of the brotherhood of man through a common control. It means all that and it means no more than that.<br /><br />The necessary nature of that control, the way to attain it and to maintain it have still to be discussed.<br /><br />The early forms of socialism were attempts to think out and try out collectivist systems. But with the advent of Marxism, the larger idea of collectivism became entangled with a smaller one, the perpetual conflict of people in any unregulated social system to get the better of one another. Throughout the ages this has been going on. The rich, the powerful generally, the more intelligent and acquisitive have got away with things, and sweated, oppressed, enslaved, bought and frustrated the less intelligent, the less acquisitive and the unwary. The Haves in every generation have always got the better of the Have-nots, and the Have-nots have always resented the privations of their disadvantage.<br /><br />So it is and so in the uncollectivised world it has always been. The bitter cry of the expropriated man echoes down the ages from ancient Egypt and the Hebrew prophets, denouncing those who grind the faces of the poor. At times the Have-nots have been so uneducated, so helplessly distributed among their more successful fellows that they have been incapable of social disturbance, but whenever such developments as plantation of factory labour, the accumulation of men in seaport towns, the disbanding of armies, famine and so forth, brought together masses of men at the same disadvantage, their individual resentments flowed together and became a common resentment. The miseries underlying human society were revealed. The Haves found themselves assailed by resentful, vindictive revolt.<br /><br />Let us note that these revolts of the Have-nots throughout the ages have sometimes been very destructive, but that invariably they have failed to make any fundamental change in this old, old story of getting and not getting the upper hand. Sometimes the Have-nots have frightened or otherwise moved the Haves to more decent behaviour. Often the Have-nots have found a Champion who has ridden to power on their wrongs. Then the ricks were burnt or the châteaux. The aristocrats were guillotined and their heads carried on exemplary pikes. Such storms passed and when they passed, there for all practical purposes was the old order returning again; new people but the old inequalities. Returning inevitably, with only slight variations in appearance and phraseology, under the condition of a non-collective social order.<br /><br />The point to note is that in the unplanned scramble of human life through the centuries of the horse-and-foot period, these incessantly recurring outbreaks of the losers against the winners have never once produced any permanent amelioration of the common lot, or greatly changed the features of the human community. Not once.<br /><br />The Have-nots have never produced the intelligence and the ability and the Haves have never produced the conscience, to make a permanent alteration of the rules of the game. Slave revolts, peasant revolts, revolts of the proletariat have always been fits of rage, acute social fevers which have passed. The fact remains that history produces no reason for supposing that the Have-nots, considered as a whole, have available any reserves of directive and administrative capacity and disinterested devotion, superior to that of the more successful classes. Morally, intellectually, there is no reason to suppose them better.<br /><br />Many potentially able people may miss education and opportunity; they may not be inherently inferior but nevertheless they are crippled and incapacitated and kept down. They are spoilt. Many specially gifted people may fail to "make good" in a jostling, competitive, acquisitive world and so fall into poverty and into the baffled, limited ways of living of the commonalty, but they too are exceptions. The idea of a right-minded Proletariat ready to take things over is a dream.<br /><br />As the collectivist idea has developed out of the original propositions of socialism, the more lucid thinkers have put this age-long bitterness of the Haves and the Have-nots into its proper place as part, as the most distressing part, but still only as part, of the vast wastage of human resources that their disorderly exploitation entailed. In the light of current events they have come to realise more and more clearly that the need and possibility of arresting this waste by a world-wide collectivisation is becoming continually more possible and at the same time imperative. They have had no delusions about the education and liberation that is necessary to gain that end. They have been moved less by moral impulses and sentimental pity and so forth, admirable but futile motives, as by the intense intellectual irritation of living in a foolish and destructive system. They are revolutionaries not because the present way of living is a hard and tyrannous way of living, but because it is from top to bottom exasperatingly stupid.<br /><br />But thrusting athwart the socialist movement towards collectivisation and its research for some competent directive organisation of the world’s affairs, came the clumsy initiative of Marxism with its class-war dogma, which has done more to misdirect and sterilise human good-will than any other misconception of reality that has ever stultified human effort.<br /><br />Marx saw the world from a study and through the hazes of a vast ambition. He swam in the current ideologies of his time and so he shared the prevalent socialist drive towards collectivisation. But while his sounder-minded contemporaries were studying means and ends he jumped from a very imperfect understanding of the Trades Union movement in Britain to the wildest generalisations about the social process. He invented and antagonised two phantoms. One was the Capitalist System; the other the Worker.<br /><br />There never has been anything on earth that could be properly called a Capitalist System. What was the matter with his world was manifestly its entire want of system. What the Socialists were feeling their way towards was the discovery and establishment of a world system.<br /><br />The Haves of our period were and are a fantastic miscellany of people, inheriting or getting their power and influence by the most various of the interbreeding social solidarity even of a feudal aristocracy or an Indian caste. But Marx, looking rather into his inner consciousness than at any concrete reality, evolved that monster "System" on his Right. Then over against it, still gazing into that vacuum, he discovered on the Left the proletarians being steadily expropriated and becoming class-conscious. They were just as endlessly various in reality as the people at the top of the scramble; in reality but not in the mind of the Communist seer. There they consolidated rapidly.<br /><br />So while other men toiled at this gigantic problem of collectivisation, Marx found his almost childlishy simple recipe. All you had to do was to tell the workers that they were being robbed and enslaved by this wicked "Capitalist System" devised by the "bourgeoisie". They need only "unite"; they had "nothing to lose but their chains". The wicked Capitalist System was to be overthrown, with a certain vindictive liquidation of "capitalists" in general and the "bourgeoisie" in particular, and a millennium would ensue under a purely workers’ control, which Lenin later on was to crystallise into a phrase of supra-theological mystery, "the dictatorship of the proletariat". The proletarians need learn nothing, plan nothing; they were right and good by nature; they would just "take over". The infinitely various envies, hatreds and resentments of the Have-nots were to fuse into a mighty creative drive. All virtue resided in them; all evil in those who had bettered them. One good thing there was in this new doctrine of the class war, it inculcated a much needed brotherliness among the workers, but it was balanced by the organisation of class hate. So the great propaganda of the class war, with these monstrous falsifications of manifest fact, went forth. Collectivisation would not so much be organised as appear magically when the incubus of Capitalism and all those irritatingly well-to-do people, were lifted off the great Proletarian soul.<br /><br />Marx was a man incapable in money matters and much bothered by tradesmen’s bills. Moreover he cherished absurd pretensions to aristocracy. The consequence was that he romanced about the lovely life of the Middle Ages as if he were another Belloc and concentrated his animus about the "bourgeoisie", whom he made responsible for all those great disruptive forces in human society that we have considered. Lord Bacon, the Marquis of Worcester, Charles the Second and the Royal Society, people like Cavendish and Joule and Watt for example, all became "bourgeoisie" in his inflamed imagination. "During its reign of scarce a century", he wrote in the Communist Manifesto, "the bourgeoisie has created more powerful, more stupendous forces of production than all preceding generations rolled into one . . . . What earlier generations had the remotest inkling that such productive forces slumbered within the wombs of associated labour?"<br /><br />"The wombs of associated labour!" (Golly, what a phrase!) The industrial revolution which was a consequence of the mechanical revolution is treated as the cause of it. Could facts be muddled more completely?<br /><br />And again: " . . . the bourgeois system is no longer able to cope with the abundance of wealth it creates. How does the bourgeoisie overcome these crises? On the one hand, by the compulsory annihilation of a quantity of the productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets and the more thorough exploitation of old ones. With what results? The results are that the way is paved for more widespread and more disastrous crises and that the capacity for averting such crises is lessened.<br /><br />"The weapons" (Weapons! How that sedentary gentleman in his vast beard adored military images!) "with which the bourgeoisie overthrew feudalism are now being turned against the bourgeoisie itself.<br /><br />"But the bourgeoisie has not only forged the weapons that will slay it; it has also engendered the men who will use these weapons - the modern workers, the proletarians."<br /><br />And so here they are, hammer and sickle in hand, chest stuck out, proud, magnificent, commanding, in the Manifesto. But go and look for them yourself in the streets. Go and look at them in Russia.<br /><br />Even for 1848 this is not intelligent social analysis. It is the outpouring of a man with a B in his bonnet, the hated Bourgeoisie, a man with a certain vision, uncritical of his own sub-conscious prejudices, but shrewd enough to realise how great a driving force is hate and the inferiority complex. Shrewd enough to use hate and bitter enough to hate. Let anyone read over that Communist Manifesto and consider who might have shared the hate or even have got it all, if Marx had not been the son of a rabbi. Read Jews for Bourgeoisie and the Manifesto is pure Nazi teaching of the 1933-8 vintage.<br /><br />Stripped down to its core in this fashion, the primary falsity of the Marxist assumption is evident. But it is one of the queer common weakness of the human mind to be uncritical of primary assumptions and to smother up any enquiry into their soundness in secondary elaboration, in technicalities and conventional formulæ. Most of our systems of belief rest upon rotten foundations, and generally these foundations are made sacred to preserve them from attack. They become dogmas in a sort of holy of holies. It is shockingly uncivil to say "But that is nonsense". The defenders of all the dogmatic religions fly into rage and indignation when one touches on the absurdity of their foundations. Especially if one laughs. That is blasphemy.<br /><br />This avoidance of fundamental criticism is one of the greatest dangers to any general human understanding. Marxism is no exception to the universal tendency. The Capitalist System has to be a real system, the Bourgeoisie an organised conspiracy against the Workers, and every human conflict everywhere has to be an aspect of the Class War, or they cannot talk to you. They will not listen to you. Never once has there been an attempt to answer the plain things I have been saying about them for a third of a century. Anything not in their language flows off their minds like water off a duck’s back. Even Lenin - by far the subtlest mind in the Communist story - has not escaped this pitfall, and when I talked to him in Moscow in 1920 he seemed quite unable to realise that the violent conflict going on in Ireland between the Catholic nationalists and the Protestant garrison was not his sacred insurrection of the Proletariat in full blast.<br /><br />To-day there is quite a number of writers, and among them there are men of science who ought to think better, solemnly elaborating a pseudo-philosophy of science and society upon the deeply buried but entirely nonsensical foundations laid by Marx. Month by month the industrious Left book Club pours a new volume over the minds of its devotees to sustain their mental habits and pickle them against the septic influence of unorthodox literature. A party Index of Forbidden Books will no doubt follow. Distinguished professors with solemn delight in their own remarkable ingenuity, lecture and discourse and even produce serious-looking volumes, upon the superiority of Marxist physics and Marxist research, to the unbranded activities of the human mind. One tries not to be rude to them, but it is hard to believe they are not deliberately playing the fool with their brains. Or have they a feeling that revolutionary communism is ahead, and are they doing their best to rationalise it with an eye to those red days to come? (See Hogben’s Dangerous Thoughts.)<br /><br />Here I cannot pursue in any detail the story of the Rise and Corruption of Marxism in Russia. It confirms in every particular my contention that the class-war idea is an entanglement and perversion of the world drive towards a world collectivism, a wasting disease of cosmopolitan socialism. It has followed in its general outline the common history of every revolt of the Have-nots since history began. Russia in the shadows displayed an immense inefficiency and sank slowly to Russia in the dark. Its galaxy of incompetent foremen, managers, organisers and so forth, developed the most complicated system of self-protection against criticism, they sabotaged one another, they intrigued against one another. You can read the quintessence of the thing in Littlepage’s In Search of Soviet Gold. And like every other Have-not revolt since the dawn of history, hero worship took possession of the insurgent masses. The inevitable Champion appeared. They escape from the Czar and in twenty years they are worshipping Stalin, originally a fairly honest, unoriginal, ambitious revolutionary, driven to self-defensive cruelty and inflated by flattery to his present quasi-divine autocracy. The cycle completes itself and we see that like every other merely insurrectionary revolution, nothing has changed; a lot of people have been liquidated and a lot of other people have replaced them and Russia seems returning back to the point at which it started, to a patriotic absolutism of doubtful efficiency and vague, incalculable aims. Stalin, I believe, is honest and benevolent in intention, he believes in collectivism simply and plainly, he is still under the impression that he is making a good thing of Russia and of the countries within her sphere of influence, and he is self-righteously impatient of criticism or opposition. His successor may not have the same disinterestedness.<br /><br />But I have written enough to make it clear why we have to dissociate collectivisation altogether from the class war in our minds. Let us waste no more time on the spectacle of the Marxist putting the cart in front of the horse and tying himself up with the harness. We have to put all this proletarian distortion of the case out of our minds and start afresh upon the problem of how to realise the new and unprecedented possibilities of world collectivisation that have opened out upon the world in the past hundred years. That is a new story. An entirely different story.<br /><br />We human+beings are facing gigantic forces that will either destroy our species altogether or lift it to an altogether unprecedented level of power and well-being. These forces have to be controlled or we shall be annihilated. But completely controlled they can abolish slavery - by the one sure means of making these things unnecessary. Class-war communism has its opportunity to realise all this, and it has failed to make good. So far it has only replaced one autocratic Russia by another. Russia, like all the rest of the world, is still facing the problem of the competent government of a collective system. She has not solved it.<br /><br />The dictatorship of the proletariat has failed us. We have to look for possibilities of control in other directions. Are they to be found?<br /><br /> <br /><br />NOTE<br /><br />A friendly adviser reading the passage on p.47 protests against "the wombs of associated labour" as a mistranslation of the original German of the Manifesto. I took it from the translation of Professor Hirendranath Mukherjee in an Indian students’ journal, Sriharsha, which happened to be at my desk. But my adviser produces Lily G. Aitken and Frank C. Budgen in a Glasgow Socialist Labour Press publication, who gave it as "the lap of social labour", which is more refined but pure nonsense. The German word is "schoss", and in its widest sense it means the whole productive maternal outfit from bosom to knees and here quite definitely the womb. The French translation gives "sein", which at the first glance seems to carry gentility to an even higher level. But as you can say in French that an expectant mother carries her child in her "sein", I think Professor Mukherjee has it. Thousands of reverent young Communists must have read that "lap" without observing its absurdity. Marx is trying to make out that the increase of productive efficiency was due to "association" in factories. A better phrase to express his (wrong-headed) intention would have been "the co-ordinated operations of workers massed in factories".<br /><br /> <br /><br />The New World Order by H. G. Wells Pt2<br /><br /> H. G. WELLS<br /><br />THE NEW WORLD ORDER<br /><br />Pt2<br /><br /> <br /><br />5<br /><br />UNSALTED YOUTH<br /><br /> <br /><br />WE HAVE NOW TO examine these disruptive forces a little more closely, these disruptive forces which are manifestly overstraining and destroying the social and political system in which most of us have been reared. At what particular points in our political and social life are these disruptive forces discovering breaking-points?<br /><br />Chief among these breaking-points, people are beginning to realise more and more clearly, is the common, half-educated young man.<br /><br />One particular consequence of the onrush of power and invention in our time, is the release of a great flood of human energy in the form of unemployed young people. This is a primary factor of the general political instability.<br /><br />We have to recognise that humanity is not suffering, as most animal species when they suffer to do, from hunger or want in any material form. It is threatened not by deficiency but by excess. It is plethoric. It is not lying down to die through physical exhaustion; it is knocking itself to pieces.<br /><br />Measured by any standards except human contentment and ultimate security, mankind appears to be much wealthier now than in 1918. The qualities of power and material immediately available are much greater. What is called productivity in general is greater. But there is sound reason for supposing that a large part of this increased productivity is really a swifter and more thorough exploitation of irreplaceable capital. It is a process that cannot go on indefinitely. It rises to a maximum and then the feast is over. Natural resources are being exhausted at a great rate, and the increased output goes into war munitions whose purpose is destruction, and into sterile indulgences no better than waste. Man, "heir of the ages", is a demoralised spendthrift, in a state of galloping consumption, living on stimulants.<br /><br />When we look into the statistics of population, there is irrefutable proof that everywhere we are passing a maximum (see for this Enid Charles’ The Twilight of Parenthood, or R. R. Kuczynski’s Measurement of Population Growth) and that a rapid decline is certain not only in Western Europe bur throughout the world. There is sound reason for doubting the alleged vast increase of the Russian people (see Souvarine’s Stalin). Nevertheless, because of the continually increasing efficiency of productive methods, the relative pressure of this new unemployed class increases. The "mob" of the twentieth century is quite different from the almost animal "mob" of the eighteenth century. It is a restless sea of dissatisfied young people, of young men who can find no outlet for their natural urgencies and ambitions, young people quite ready to "make trouble" as soon as they are shown how.<br /><br />In the technically crude past, the illiterate Have-nots were sweated and overworked. It was easy to find toil to keep them all busy. Such surplus multitudes are wanted no more. Toil is no longer marketable. Machines can toil better and with less resistance.<br /><br />These frustrated multitudes have been made acutely aware of their own frustration. The gap of their always partly artificial disadvantage has been greatly diminished because now they all read. Even for incidental employment it has been necessary to teach them that, and the new reading public thus created has evoked a press and literature of excitement and suggestion. The cinema and the radio dazzle them with spectacles of luxury and unrestricted living. They are not the helpless Hodges and factory fodder of a hundred years ago. They are educated up to what must have been the middle-class level in 1889. They are indeed largely a squeezed-out middle class, restless, impatient and as we shall see extremely dangerous. They have assimilated almost all of the lower strata that were formerly illiterate drudges.<br /><br />And this modernised excess population has no longer any social humility. It has no belief in the infallible wisdom of its rulers. It sees them too clearly; it knows about them, their waste, vices and weaknesses, with an even exaggerated vividness. It sees no reason for its exclusion from the good things of life by such people. It has lost enough of its inferiority to realise that most of that inferiority is arbitrary and artificial.<br /><br />You may say that this is a temporary state of affairs, that the fall in population will presently relieve the situation, by getting rid of this surplus of the "not wanted". But it will do nothing of the sort. As population falls, consumption will fall. Industries will still be producing more and more efficiently for a shrinking market and they will be employing fewer and fewer hands. A state of five million people with half a million of useless hands, will be twice as unstable as forty million with two million standing off. So long as the present state of affairs continues, this stratum of perplexed young people "out of it" will increase relatively to the total community.<br /><br />It is still not realised as clearly as it should be, how much the troubles of the present time are due to this new aspect of the social puzzle. But if you will scrutinise the events of the past half century in the light of this idea, you will see more and more convincingly that it is mainly through this growing mass of unfulfilled desire that the disruptive forces manifest themselves.<br /><br />The eager and adventurous unemployed young are indeed the shock troops in the destruction of the old social order everywhere. They find guidance in some confident Party or some inspired Champion, who organises them for revolutionary or counter-revolutionary ends. It scarcely matters which. They become Communists or they become Fascists, Nazis, the Irish Republican Army, Ku Klux Klansmen and so forth and so on. The essence is the combination of energy, frustration and discontent. What all such movements have in common, is a genuine indignation at the social institutions that have begotten and then cold-shouldered them, a quasi-military organisation and the resolve to seize power for themselves embodied in their leaders. A wise and powerful government would at any cost anticipate and avert these destructive activities by providing various and interesting new employment and the necessary condition for a satisfying successful life for everyone. These young people are life. The rise of the successful leader only puts off the trouble for a time. He seizes power in the name of his movement. And then? When the seizure of power has been effected, he finds himself obliged to keep things going, to create justification for his leadership, exciting enterprises, urgencies.<br /><br />A leader of vision with adequate technical assistance might conceivedly direct much of the human energy he has embodied into creative channels. For example he could rebuild the dirty, inadequate cities of our age, turn the still slovenly country-side into a garden and play-ground, re-clothe, liberate and stimulate imaginations, until the ideas of creative progress became a habit of mind. But in doing this he will find himself confronted by those who are sustained by the pre-emptions and appropriations of the old order. These relatively well-off people will bargain with him up to the last moment for their money and impede his seizure and utilisation of land and material resources, and will be further hampered by the fact that in organising his young people he has had to turn their minds and capacities from creative work to systematic violence and militant activities. It is easy to make an unemployed young man into a Fascist or gangster, but it is hard to turn him back to any decent social task. Moreover the Champion’s own leadership was largely due to his conspiratorial and adventurous quality. He is himself unfit for a creative job. He finds himself a fighter at the head of a fighting pack.<br /><br />And furthermore, unless his country is on the scale of Russia and the United States, whatever he attempts in order to make good his promises of an abundant life, has to be done in face of that mutual pressure of the sovereign states due to the abolition of distance and change of scale which we have already considered. He has no elbow-room in which to operate. The resultant of these convergent difficulties is to turn him and his fighting pack releasing flux of predatory war.<br /><br />Everywhere in the world, under varying local circumstances, we see governments primarily concerned with this supreme problem of what to do with these young adults who are unemployable under present conditions. We have to realise that and bear it constantly in mind. It is there in every country. It is the most dangerous and wrong-headed view of the world situation, to treat the totalitarian countries as differing fundamentally from the rest of the world.<br /><br />The problem of reabsorbing the unemployable adult is the essential problem in all states. It is the common shape to which all current political dramas reduce. How are we to use up or slake this surplus of human energy? The young are the live core of our species. The generation below sixteen or seventeen has not yet begun to give trouble, and after forty, the ebb of vitality disposes men to accept the lot that has fallen to them.<br /><br />Franklin Roosevelt and Stalin find themselves in control of vast countries under-developed or so misdeveloped that their main energies go into internal organisation or reorganisation. They do not press against their frontiers therefore and they do not threaten war. The recent Russian annexations have been precautionary-defensive. But all the same both Russia and America have to cater for that troublesome social stratum quite as much as Europe. The New Deal is plainly an attempt to achieve a working socialism and avert a social collapse in America; it is extraordinarily parallel to the successive "policies" and "Plans" of the Russian experiment. Americans shirk the word "socialism", but what else can one call it?<br /><br />The British oligarchy, demoralised and slack with the accumulated wealth of a century of advantage, bought off social upheaval for a time by the deliberate and socially demoralising appeasement of the dole. It has made no adequate effort to employ or educate these surplus people; it has just pushed the dole at them. It even tries to buy off the leader of the Labour Party with a salary of £2000 a year. Whatever we may think of the quality and deeds of the Nazi or Fascist regimes or the follies of their leaders, we must at any rate concede that they attempt, however clumsily, to reconstruct life in a collectivist direction. They are efforts to adjust and construct and so far they are in advance of the British ruling class. The British Empire has shown itself the least constructive of all governing networks. It produces no New Deals, no Five Year Plans; it keeps on trying to stave off its inevitable dissolution and carry on upon the old lines - and apparently it will do that until it has nothing more to give away.<br /><br />"Peace in our time", that foolishly premature self-congratulation of Mr Chamberlain, is manifestly the guiding principle of the British elder statesman. It is that natural desire we all begin to feel after sixty to sit down comfortably somewhere. Unprogressive tranquillity they want at any price, even at the price of a preventive war. This astonishing bunch of rulers has never revealed any conception whatever of a common future before its sprawling Empire. There was a time when that Empire seemed likely to become the nexus of a world system, but now manifestly it has no future but disintegration. Apparently its rulers expected it to go on just as it was for ever. Bit by bit its component parts have dropped away and become quasi-independent powers, generally after an unedifying struggle; Southern Ireland for example is neutral in the present war, South Africa hesitated.<br /><br />Now, and that is why this book is being written, these people, by a string of almost incredible blunders, have entangled what is left of their Empire in a great war to "end Hitler", and they have absolutely no suggestion to offer their antagonists and the world at large, of what is to come after Hitler. Apparently they hope to paralyse Germany in some as yet unspecified fashion and then to go back to their golf links or the fishing stream and doze by the fire after dinner. That is surely one of the most astounding things in history, the possibility of death and destruction beyond all reckoning and our combatant governments have no idea of what is to follow when the overthrow of Hitler is accomplished. They seem to be as void of any sense of the future, as completely empty-headed about the aftermath of their campaigns, as one of those American Tories who are "just out against F.D.R. Damn him!"<br /><br />So the British Empire remains, paying its way down to ultimate bankruptcy, buying itself a respite from the perplexing problems of the future, with the accumulated wealth and power of its past. It is rapidly becoming the most backward political organisation in the world. But sooner or later it will have no more money for the dole and no more allies to abandon nor dominions to yield up to their local bosses, and then possibly its disintegration will be complete (R.I.P.), leaving intelligent English people to line up at last with America and the rest of the intelligent world and face the universal problem. Which is: how are we to adapt ourselves to these mighty disruptive forces that are shattering human society as it is at present constituted?<br /><br />In the compressed countries which have little internal scope and lack the vast natural resources of the Russian and Atlantic communities, the internal tension makes more directly for aggressive warfare, but the fundamental driving-force behind their aggressiveness is still the universal trouble, that surplus of young men.<br /><br />Seen in this broader vision, the present war falls into its true proportions as a stupid conflict upon secondary issues, which is delaying and preventing an overdue world adjustment. That is may kill hundreds of thousands of people does not alter that. An idiot with a revolver can murder a family. He remains an idiot.<br /><br />From 1914 to 1939 has been a quarter of a century of folly, meanness, evasion and resentment, and only a very tedious and copious historian would attempt to distribute the blame among those who had played a part in the story. And when he had done it, what he had done would not matter in the least. An almost overwhelmingly difficult problem has confronted us all, and in some measure we have all of us lost our heads in the face of it, lost our dignity, been too clever by half, pinned ourselves to cheap solutions, quarrelled stupidly among ourselves. "We have erred and strayed . . . . We have lest undone those things that we ought to have done and we have done those things which we ought not to have done and there is no health in us."<br /><br />I do not see any way to a solution of the problem of World Peace unless we begin with a confession of universal wrong-thinking and wrong-doing. Then we can sit down to the question of a solution with some reasonable prospect of finding an answer.<br /><br />Now let us assume that "we" are a number of intelligent men, German, French, English, American, Italian, Chinese and so forth, who have decided in consequence of the war and in spite of the war, while the war is still going on, to wipe out all these squabbling bygones from our minds, and discuss plainly and simply the present situation of mankind. What is to be done with the world? Let us recapitulate the considerations that so far have been brought in, and what prospects they open, if any, of some hopeful concerted action, action that would so revolutionise the human outlook as to end war and that hectic recurrent waste of human life and happiness, for ever.<br /><br />Firstly then it has been made apparent that humanity is at the end of an age, an age of fragmentation in the management of its affairs, fragmentation politically among separate sovereign states and economically among unrestricted business of organisations competing for profit. The abolition of distance, the enormous increase of available power, root causes of all our troubles, have suddenly made what was once a tolerable working system - a system that was perhaps with all its inequalities and injustices the only practicable working system in its time - enormously dangerous and wasteful, so that it threatens to exhaust and destroy our world altogether. Man is like a feckless heir who has suddenly been able to get at his capital and spend it as though it were income. We are living in a phase of violent and irreparable expenditure. There is an intensified scramble among nations and among individuals to acquire, monopolise and spend. The dispossessed young find themselves hopeless unless they resort to violence. They implement the ever-increasing instability. Only a comprehensive collectivisation of human affairs can arrest this disorderly self-destruction of mankind. All this has been made plain in what has gone before.<br /><br />This essential problem, the problem of collectivisation, can be viewed from two reciprocal points of view and stated in two different ways. We can ask, "What is to be done to end the world chaos?" and also "How can we offer the common young man a reasonable and stimulating prospect of a full life?"<br /><br />These two questions are the obverse and reverse of one question. What answers one answers the other. The answer to both is that we have to collectivise the world as one system with practically everyone playing a reasonably satisfying part in it. For sound practical reasons, over and above any ethical or sentimental considerations, we have to devise a collectivisation that neither degrades nor enslaves.<br /><br />Our imaginary world conference then has to turn itself to the question of how to collectivise the world, so that it will remain collectivised and yet enterprising, interesting and happy enough to content that common young man who will otherwise reappear, baffled and sullen, at the street corners and throw it into confusion again. To that problem the rest of this book will address itself.<br /><br />As a matter of fact it is very obvious that at the present time a sort of collectivisation is being imposed very rapidly upon the world. Everyone is being enrolled, ordered about, put under control somewhere - even if it is only in an evacuation or concentration camp or what not. This process of collectivisation, collectivisation of some sort, seems now to be in the nature of things and there is no reason to suppose it is reversible. Some people imagine world peace as the end of that process. Collectivisation is going to be defeated and a vaguely conceived reign of law will restore and sustain property, Christianity, individualism and everything to which the respectable prosperous are accustomed. This is implicit even on the title of such a book as Edward Mousley’s Man or Leviathan? It is much more reasonable to think that world peace has to be the necessary completion of that process, and that the alternative is a decadent anarchy. If so, the phrase for the aims of liberal thought should be no Man or Leviathan but Man masters Leviathan.<br /><br />On this point, the inevitability of collectivisation as the sole alternative to universal brigandage and social collapse, our world conference must make itself perfectly clear.<br /><br />Then it has to turn itself to the much more difficult and complicated question of how.<br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />6<br /><br />SOCIALISM UNAVOIDABLE<br /><br /> <br /><br />LET US, EVEN AT the cost of a certain repetition, look a little more closely now into the fashion in which the disruptive forces are manifesting themselves in the Western and Eastern hemispheres.<br /><br />In the Old World the hypertrophy of armies is most conspicuous, in America it was the hypertrophy of big business. But in both the necessity for an increasing collective restraint upon uncoordinated over-powerful business or political enterprise is more and more clearly recognised.<br /><br />There is a strong opposition on the part of great interests in America to the President, who has made himself the spear-head of the collectivising drive; they want to put the brake now on his progressive socialisation of the nation, and quite possibly, at the cost of increasing social friction, they may slow down the drift to socialism very considerably. But it is unbelievable that they dare provoke the social convulsion that would ensue upon a deliberate reversal of the engines or upon any attempt to return to the glorious days of big business, wild speculation and mounting unemployment before 1927. They will merely slow down the drive. For in the world now all roads lead to socialism or social dissolution.<br /><br />The tempo of the process is different in the two continents; that is the main difference between them. It is not an opposition. They travel at different rates but they travel towards an identical goal. In the Old World at present the socialisation of the community is going on far more rapidly and thoroughly than it is in America because of the perpetual war threat.<br /><br />In Western Europe now the dissolution and the drive towards socialisation progress by leaps and bounds. The British governing class and British politicians generally, overtaken by a war they had not the intelligence to avert, have tried to atone for their slovenly unimaginativeness during the past twenty years in a passion of witless improvisation. God knows what their actual war preparations amount to, but their domestic policy seems to be based on an imperfect study of Barcelona, Guernica, Madrid and Warsaw. They imagine similar catastrophes on a larger scale - although they are quite impossible, as every steady-headed person who can estimate the available supplies of petrol knows - and they have a terrible dread of being held responsible. They fear a day of reckoning with their long-bamboozled lower classes. In their panic they are rapidly breaking up the existing order altogether.<br /><br />The changes that have occurred in Great Britain in less than a year are astounding. They recall in many particulars the social dislocation of Russia in the closing months of 1917. There has been a shifting and mixing-up of people that would have seemed impossible to anyone in 1937. The evacuation of centres of population under the mere exaggerated threat of air raids has been of frantic recklessness. Hundreds of thousands of families have been broken up, children separated from their parents and quartered in the homes of more or less reluctant hosts. Parasites and skin diseases, vicious habits and insanitary practices have been spread, as if in a passion of equalitarian propaganda, the slums of such centres as Glasgow, London and Liverpool, throughout the length and breadth of the land. Railways, road traffic, all the normal communications have been dislocated by a universal running about. For a couple of months Great Britain has been more like a disturbed ant-hill than an organised civilised country.<br /><br />The contagion of funk has affected everyone. Public institutions and great business concerns have bolted to remote and inconvenient sites; the BBC organisation, for example, scuffled off headlong from London, needlessly and ridiculously, no man pursuing it. There has been a wild epidemic of dismissals, of servants employed in London, for example, and a still wilder shifting of unsuitable men to novel, unnecessary jobs. Everyone has been exhorted to serve the country, children of twelve, to the great delight of conservative-minded farmers, have been withdrawn from school and put to work on the land, and yet the number of those who have lost their jobs and cannot find anything else to do, has gone up by over 100,000.<br /><br />There have been amateurish attempts to ration food, producing waste here and artificial scarcity there. A sort of massacre of small independent businesses is in progress mainly to the advantage of the big provision-dealing concerns, who changed in a night from open profiteers to become the "expert" advisers of food supply. All the expertise they have ever displayed has been the extraction of profits from food supply. But while profits mount, taxation with an air of great resolution sets itself to prune them.<br /><br />The British public has always been phlegmatic in the face of danger, it is too stout-hearted and too stupid to give way to excesses of fear, but the authorities have thought it necessary to plaster the walls with cast, manifestly expensive, posters, headed with a Royal Crown, "Your courage, your resolution, your cheerfulness will bring us victory."<br /><br />"Oh yus," said the London Cockney. "You’ll get the victory all right. Trust you. On my courage, my resolution, my cheerfulness; you’ll use up ‘Tommy Atkins’ all right. Larf at ‘im in a kindly sort of way and use him. And then you think you’ll out him back again on the dust-heap. Again? Twice?"<br /><br />That is all too credible. But this time our rulers will emerge discredited and frustrated from the conflict to face a disorganised population in a state of mutinous enquiry. They have made preposterous promises to restore Poland and they will certainly have to eat their words about that. Or what is more probable the government will have to give place to another administration which will be able to eat those words for them with a slightly better grace. There is little prospect of Thanksgiving Services or any Armistice night orgy this time. People at home are tasting the hardships of war even more tediously and irritating than the men on active service. Cinemas, theatres, have been shut prematurely, black-outs have diminished the safety of the streets and doubled the tale of road casualties. The British crowd is already a sullen crowd. The world has not seen it in such a bad temper for a century and half, and, let there be no mistake about it, it is far less in a temper with the Germans than it is with its own rulers.<br /><br />Through all this swirling intimidating propaganda of civil disorder and a systematic suppression of news and criticism of the most exasperating sort, war preparation has proceeded. The perplexed and baffled citizen can only hope that on the military side there has been a little more foresight and less hysteria.<br /><br />The loss of confidence and particularly confidence in the government and social order is already enormous. No one feels secure, in his job, in his services, in his savings, any longer. People lose confidence even in the money in their pockets. And human society is built on confidence. It cannot carry on without it.<br /><br />Things are like this already and it is only the opening stage of this strange war. The position of the ruling class and the financial people who have hitherto dominated British affairs is a peculiar one. The cast of the war is already enormous, and there is no sign that it will diminish. Income tax, super tax, death duties, taxes on war profits have been raised to a level that should practically extinguish the once prosperous middle strata of society altogether. The very wealthy will survive in a shorn and diminished state, they will hang on to the last, but the graded classes that have hitherto intervened between them and the impoverished masses of the population, who will be irritated by war sacrifices, extensively unemployed and asking more and more penetrating questions, will have diminished greatly. Only by the most ingenious monetary manipulation, by dangerous tax-dodging and expedients verging on sheer scoundrelism, will a clever young man have the ghost of a chance of climbing by the old traditional money-making ladder, above his fellows. On the other hand, the career of a public employee will become continually more attractive. There is more interest in it and more self-respect. The longer the war continues, the completer and more plainly irreparable will be the dissolution of the old order.<br /><br />Now to many readers who have been incredulous of the statement of the first section of this book, that we are living in the End of an Age, to those who have been impervious to the account of the disruptive forces that are breaking up the social order and to the argument I have drawn from them, who may have got away from all that, so to speak, by saying they are "scientific" or "materialistic" or "sociological" or "highbrow", or that Providence that has hitherto displayed such a marked bias in favour of well-off, comfortable, sluggish-minded people is sure to do something nice for them at the eleventh hour, the real inconveniences, alarms, losses and growing disorder of the life about them may at last bring a realisation that the situation in Western Europe is approaching revolutionary conditions. It will be a hard saying for many people in the advantage-holding classes, and particularly if they are middle-aged, that the older has already gone to pieces can never be put back. But how can they doubt it?<br /><br />A revolution, that is to say a more or less convulsive effort at social and political readjustment, is bound to come in all these overstrained countries, in Germany, in Britain and universally. It is more likely than not to arise directly out of the exasperating diminuendos and crescendos of the present war, as a culminating phase of it. Revolution of some sort we must have. We cannot prevent its onset. But we can affect the course of its development. It may end in utter disaster or it may release a new world, far better than the old. Within these broad limits it is possible for us to make up our minds how it will come to us.<br /><br />And since the only practical question before us is the question of how we will take this world revolution we cannot possibly evade, let me recall to your attention the reasons I have advanced in the second section of this book for the utmost public discussion of our situation at the present time. And also let me bring back to mind the examination of Marxism in the fourth section. There it is shown how easily a collectivist movement, especially when it is faced by the forcible-feeble resistances and suppressions of those who have hitherto enjoyed wealth and power, may degenerate into an old-fashioned class-war, become conspiratorial, dogmatic and inadaptable, and sink towards leader worship and autocracy. That apparently is what has happened in Russia in its present phase. We do not know how much of the original revolutionary spirit survives there, and a real fundamental issue in the world situation is whether we are to follow in the footsteps of Russia or whether we are going to pull ourselves together, face the stern logic of necessity and produce a Western Revolution, which will benefit by the Russian experience, react upon Russia and lead ultimately to a world understanding.<br /><br />What is it that the Atlantic world finds most objectionable in the Soviet world of to-day? Is it any disapproval of collectivism as such? Only in the case of a dwindling minority of rich and successful men - and very rarely of the sons of such people. Very few capable men under fifty nowadays remain individualists in political and social matters. They are not even fundamentally anti-Communist. Only it happens that for various reasons the political life of the community is still in the hands of unteachable old-fashioned people. What are called "democracies" suffer greatly from the rule of old men who have not kept pace with the times. The real and effective disapproval, distrust and disbelief in the soundness of the Soviet system lies not in the out-of-date individualism of these elderly types, but in the conviction that it can never achieve efficiency or even maintain its honest ideal of each for all and all for each, unless it has free speech and an insistence upon legally-defined freedoms for the individual within the collectivist framework. We do not deplore the Russian Revolution as a Revolution. We complain that it is not a good enough Revolution and we want a better one.<br /><br />The more highly things are collectivised the more necessary is a legal system embodying the Rights of Man. This has been forgotten under the Soviets, and so men go in fear there of arbitrary police action. But the more functions your government controls the more need there is for protective law. The objection to Soviet collectivism is that, lacking the antiseptic of legally assured personal freedom, it will not keep. It professes to be fundamentally a common economic system based on class-war ideas; the industrial director is under the heel of the Party commissar; the political police have got altogether out of hand; and the affairs gravitate inevitably towards an oligarchy or an autocracy protecting its incapacity by the repression of adverse comment.<br /><br />But these valid criticisms merely indicate the sort of collectivisation that has to be avoided. It does not dispose of collectivism as such. If we in our turn do not wish to be submerged by the wave of Bolshevisation that is evidently advancing from the East, we must implement all these valid objections and create a collectivisation that will be more efficient, more prosperous, tolerant, free and rapidly progressive than the system we condemn. We, who do not like the Stalinised-Marxist state, have, as they used to say in British politics, to "dish" it by going one better. We have to confront Eastern-spirited collectivism with Western-spirited collectivism.<br /><br />Perhaps this may be better put. We may be giving way to a sub-conscious conceit here and assuming that the West is always going to be thinking more freely and clearly and working more efficiently than the East. It is like that now, but it may not always be like that. Every country has had its phases of illumination and its phases of blindness. Stalin and Stalinism are neither the beginning nor the end of the collectivisation of Russia.<br /><br />We are dealing with something still almost impossible to estimate, the extent to which the new Russian patriotism and the new Stalin-worship, have effaced and how far they have merely masked, the genuinely creative international communism of the revolutionary years. The Russian mind is not a docile mind, and most of the literature available for a young man to read in Russia, we must remember, is still revolutionary. There has been no burning of the books there. The Moscow radio talks for internal consumption since the Hitler-Stalin understanding betray a great solicitude on the part of the government to make it clear that there has been no sacrifice of revolutionary principle. That witnesses to the vitality of public opinion in Russia. The clash between the teachings of 1920 and 1940 may have a liberating effect on many people’s minds. Russians love to talk about ideas. Under the Czar they talked. It is incredible that they do not talk under Stalin.<br /><br />That question whether collectivisation is to be "Westernised" or "Easternised", using these words under the caveat of the previous paragraph, is really the first issue before the world to-day. We need a fully ventilated Revolution. Our Revolution has to go on in the light and air. We may have to accept sovietisation à la Russe quite soon unless we can produce a better collectivisation. But if we produce a better collectivisation it is more probable than not that the Russian system will incorporate our improvements, forget its reviving nationalism again, debunk Marx and Stalin, so far as they can be debunked, and merge into the one world state.<br /><br />Between these primary antagonists, between Revolution with its eyes open and Revolution with a mask and a gag, there will certainly be complications of the issue due to patriotism and bigotry and the unteachable wilful blindness of those who do not want to see. Most people lie a lot to themselves before they lie to other people, and it is hopeless to expect that all the warring cults and traditions that confuse the mind of the race to-day are going to fuse under a realisation of the imperative nature of the human situation as I have stated it here. Multitudes will never realise it. Few human+beings are able to change their primary ideas after the middle thirties. They get fixed in them and drive before them no more intelligently than animals drive before their innate impulses. They will die rather than change their second selves.<br /><br />One of the most entangling of these disconcerting secondary issues is that created by the stupid and persistent intrigues of the Roman Catholic Church.<br /><br />Let me be clear here. I am speaking of the Vatican and of its sustained attempts to exercise a directive rôle in secular life. I number among my friends many Roman Catholics who have built the most charming personalities and behaviour systems on the framework provided them by their faith. One of the loveliest characters I have ever known was G. K. Chesterton. But I think he was just as fine before he became a Catholic as afterwards. Still he found something he needed in Catholicism. There are saints of all creeds and of none, so good are better possibilities of human nature. Religious observances provide a frame that many find indispensable for the seemly ordering of their lives. And outside the ranks of "strict" observers many good people with hardly more theology than a Unitarian, love to speak of goodness and kindness as Christianity. So-and-so is a "good Christian". Voltaire, says Alfred Noyes, the Catholic writer, was a "good Christian". I do not use the word "Christianity" in that sense because I do not believe that Christians have any monopoly of goodness. When I write of Christianity, I mean Christianity with a definite creed and militant organisation and not these good kind people, good and kind but not very fastidious about the exact use of the words.<br /><br />Such "good Christians" can be almost as bitterly critical as I am of the continual pressure upon the faithful by that inner group of Italians in Rome, subsidised by the Fascist government, who pull the strings of Church policy throughout the world, so as to do this or that tortuous or uncivilised thing, to cripple education, to persecute unorthodox ways of living.<br /><br />It is to the influence of the Church that we must ascribe the foolish support by the British Foreign Office of Franco, that murderous little "Christian gentleman", in his overthrow of the staggering liberal renascence of Spain. It is the Roman Catholic influence the British and French have to thank, for the fantastic blundering that involved them in the defence of the impossible Polish state and its unrighteous acquisitions; it affected British policy in respect to Austria and Czechoslovakia profoundly, and now it is doing its utmost to maintain and develop a political estrangement between Russia and the Western world by its prejudiced exacerbation of the idea that Russia is "anti-God" while we Westerners are little children of the light, gallantly fighting on the side of the Cross, Omnipotence, Greater Poland, national sovereignty, the small uneconomic prolific farmer and shopkeeper and anything else you like to imagine constitutes "Christendom".<br /><br />The Vatican strives perpetually to develop the present war into a religious war. It is trying to steal the war. By all the circumstances of its training it is unteachable. It knows no better. It will go on - until some economic revolution robs it of its funds. Then as a political influence it may evaporate very rapidly. The Anglican Church and many other Protestant sects, the wealthy Baptists, for example, follow suit.<br /><br />It is not only in British affairs that this propaganda goes on. With the onset of war France becomes militant and Catholic. It has suppressed the Communist Party, as a gesture of resentment against Russia and a precaution against post-war collectivisation. The Belgian caricaturist Raemaekers is now presenting Hitler day after day as a pitiful weakling already disposed of and worthy of our sympathy, while Stalin is represented as a frightful giant with horns and a tail. Yet both France and Britain are at peace with Russia and have every reason to come to a working understanding with that country. The attitude of Russia to the war has on the whole been cold, contemptuous and reasonable.<br /><br />It is not as if these devious schemes can take us somewhere; it is not that this restoration of the Holy Roman Empire is a possibility. You confront these Catholic politicians, just as you confront the politicians of Westminster, with these two cardinal facts, the abolition of distance and the change of scale. In vain. You cannot get any realisation of the significance of these things into those idea-proofed skulls. They are deaf to it, blind to it. They cannot see that it makes any difference at all to their long-established mental habits. If their minds waver for a moment they utter little magic prayers to exorcise the gleam.<br /><br />What, they ask, has "mere size" to do with the soul of man, "mere speed, mere power"? What can the young do better than subdue their natural urgency to live and do? What has mere life to do with the religious outlook? The war, these Vatican propagandists insist, is a "crusade" against modernism, against socialism and free thought, the restoration of priestly authority is its end; our sons are fighting to enable the priest to thrust his pious uncleanliness once again between reader and book, child and knowledge, husband and wife, sons and lovers. While honest men are fighting now to put an end to military aggression, to resume indeed that "war to end war" that was aborted to give us the League of Nations, these bigots are sedulously perverting the issue, trying to represent it as a religious war against Russia in particular and the modern spirit in general.<br /><br />The well-trained Moslem, the American fundamentalists, the orthodox Jew, all the fixed cultures, produce similar irrelevant and wasteful resistances, but the Catholic organisation reaches further and is more persistent. It is frankly opposed to human effort and the idea of progress. It makes no pretence about it.<br /><br />Such cross-activities as these complicate, delay and may even sabotage effectively every effort to solve the problem of a lucid collectivisation of the world’s affairs, but they do not alter the essential fact that it is only through a rationalisation and coalescence of constructive revolutionary movements everywhere and a liberal triumph over the dogmatism of the class war, that we can hope to emerge from the present wreckage of our world.<br /><br />7<br /><br />FEDERATION<br /><br />LET US NOW TAKE up certain vaguely constructive proposals which seem at present to be very much in people’s minds. They find their cardinal expression in a book called Union Now by Mr Clarence K. Streit, which has launched the magic word "Federation" upon the world. The "democracies" of the world are to get together upon a sort of enlargement of the Federal constitution of the United States (which produced one of the bloodiest civil wars in all history) and then all will be well with us.<br /><br />Let us consider whether this word "Federation" is of any value in organising the Western Revolution. I would suggest it is. I think it may be a means of mental release for many people who would otherwise have remained dully resistant to any sort of change.<br /><br />This Federation project has an air of reasonableness. It is attractive to a number of influential people who wish with the minimum of adaptation to remain influential in a changing world, and particularly is it attractive to what I may call the liberal-conservative elements of the prosperous classes in America and Great Britain and the Oslo countries, because it puts the most difficult aspect of the problem, the need for collective socialisation, so completely in the background that it can be ignored. This enables them to take quite a bright and hopeful view of the future without any serious hindrance to their present preoccupations.<br /><br />They think that Federation, reasonably defined, may suspend the possibility of war for a considerable period and so lighten the burden of taxation that the present crushing demands on them will relax and they will be able to resume, on a slightly more economical scale perhaps, their former way of living. Everything that gives them hope and self-respect and preserves their homes from the worst indignities of panic, appeasement, treason-hunting and the rest of it, is to be encouraged, and meanwhile their sons will have time to think and it may be possible so to search, ransack and rationalise the Streit project as to make a genuine and workable scheme for the socialisation of the world.<br /><br />In The Fate of Homo sapiens I examined the word "democracy" with some care, since it already seemed likely that great quantities of our young men were to be asked to cripple and risk their lives for its sake. I showed that it was still a very incompletely realised aspiration, that its complete development involved socialism and a level of education and information attained as yet by no community in the world. Mr Streit gives a looser, more rhetorical statement - a more idealistic statement, shall we say? - of his conception of democracy, the sort of statement that would be considered wildly exaggerated even if it was war propaganda, and though unhappily it is remote from any achieved reality, he proceeds without further enquiry as if it were a description of existing realities in what he calls the "democracies" of the world. In them he imagines he finds "governments of the people, by the people, for the people".<br /><br />In the book I have already cited I discuss What is Democracy? And Where is Democracy? I do my best there to bring Mr Streit down to the harsh and difficult facts of the case. I will go now a little more into particulars in my examination of his project.<br /><br />His "founder democracies" are to be: "The American Union, the British Commonwealth (specifically the United Kingdom, the Federal Dominion of Canada, the Commonwealth of Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, Ireland), the French Republic, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Swiss Confederation, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland."<br /><br />Scarcely one of these, as I have shown in that former book, is really a fully working democracy. And the Union of South Africa is a particularly bad and dangerous case of race tyranny. Ireland is an incipient religious war and not one country but two. Poland, I note, does not come into Mr Streit’s list of democracies at all. His book was written in 1938 when Poland was a totalitarian country holding, in defiance of the League of Nations, Vilna, which it had taken from Lithuania, large areas of non-Polish country it had conquered from Russia, and fragments gained by the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. It only became a democracy, even technically and for a brief period, before its collapse in September 1939, when Mr Chamberlain was so foolish as to drag the British Empire into a costly and perilous war, on its behalf. But that is by the way. None of these fifteen (or ten) "founder democracies" are really democracies at all. So we start badly. But they might be made socialist democracies and their federation might be made something very real indeed - at a price. The U.S.S.R. is a federated socialist system, which has shown a fairly successful political solidarity during the past two decades, whatever else it has done or failed to do.<br /><br />Now let us help Mr Streit to convert his "federation" from a noble but extremely rhetorical aspiration into a living reality. He is aware that this must be done at a price, but I want to suggest that that price is, from what I judge to be his point of view, far greater, and the change much simpler, more general and possibly even closer at hand, than he supposes. He is disposed to appeal to existing administrative organisations, and it is questionable whether they are the right people to execute his designs. One of the difficulties he glosses over is the possible reluctance of the India Office to hand over the control of India (Ceylon and Burma he does not mention) to the new Federation Government, which would also, I presume, take charge of the fairly well governed and happy fifty-odd million people of the Dutch East Indies, the French colonial empire, the West Indies and so on. This, unless he proposes merely to re-christen the India Office, etc., is asking for an immense outbreak of honesty and competence on the part of the new Federal officialdom. It is also treating the possible contribution of these five or six hundred million of dusky peoples to the new order with a levity inconsistent with democratic ideals.<br /><br />Quite a lot of these people have brains which are as good or better than normal European brains. You could educate the whole world to the not very exalted level of a Cambridge graduate in a single lifetime, if you had schools, colleges, apparatus and teachers enough. The radio, the cinema, the gramophone, the improvements in both production and distribution, have made it possible to increase the range and effectiveness of a gifted teacher a thousandfold. We have seen intensive war preparations galore, but no one has dreamt yet of an intensive educational effort. None of us really like to see other people being educated. They may be getting an advantage over our privileged selves. Suppose we overcome that primitive jealousy. Suppose we speed up - as we are now physically able to do - the education and enfranchisement of these huge undeveloped reservoirs of human capacity. Suppose we tack that on the Union Now idea. Suppose we stipulate that Federation, wherever it extends, means a New and Powerful Education. In Bengal, in Java, in the Congo Free State, quite as much as in Tennessee or Georgia or Scotland or Ireland. Suppose we think a little less about "gradual enfranchisement" by votes and experiments in local autonomy and all these old ideas, and a little more about the enfranchisement of the mind. Suppose we drop that old cant about politically immature peoples.<br /><br />There is one direction in which Mr Streit’s proposals are open to improvement. Let us turn to another in which he does not seem to have realised all the implications of his proposal. This great Union is to have a union money and a union customs-free economy. What follows upon that? More I think than he realises.<br /><br />There is one aspect of money to which the majority of those that discuss it seem to be incurably blind. You cannot have a theory of money or any plan about money by itself in the air. Money is not a thing in itself; it is a working part of an economic system. Money varies in its nature with the laws and ideas of property in a community. As a community moves towards collectivism and communism, for example, money simplifies out. Money is a necessary in a communism as it is in any other system, but its function therein is at its simplest. Payment in kind to the worker gives him no freedom of choice among the goods the community produces. Money does. Money becomes the incentive that "works the worker" and nothing more.<br /><br />But directly you allow individuals not only to obtain goods for consumption, but also to obtain credit to produce material for types of production outside the staple productions of the state, the question of credit and debt arises and money becomes more complicated. With every liberation of this or that product or service from collective control to business or experimental exploitation, the play of the money system enlarges and the laws regulating what you may take for it, the company laws, bankruptcy laws and so forth increase. In any highly developed collective system the administration will certainly have to give credits for hopeful experimental enterprises. When the system is not collectivism, monetary operations for gain are bound to creep in and become more and more complicated. Where most of the substantial side of life is entrusted to uncoordinated private enterprise, the intricacy of the money apparatus increases enormously. Monetary manipulation becomes a greater and greater factor in the competitive struggle, not only between individuals and firms, but between states. As Mr Streit himself shows, in an excellent discussion of the abandonment of the gold standard, inflation and deflation become devices in international competition. Money becomes strategic, just as pipe lines and railways can become strategic.<br /><br />This being so it is plain that for the Federal Union a common money means an identical economic life throughout the Union. And this too is implied also in Mr Streit’s "customs-free" economy. It is impossible to have a common money when a dollar or a pound, or whatever it is, can buy this, that or the other advantage in one state and is debarred from anything but bare purchases for consumption in another. So that this Federal Union is bound to be a uniform economic system. There can be only very slight variations in the control of economic life.<br /><br />In the preceding sections the implacable forces that make for the collectivisation of the world or disaster, have been exposed. It follows that "Federation" means practically uniform socialism within the Federal limits, leading, as state after state is incorporated, to world socialism. There manifestly we carry Mr Streit farther than he realises he goes - as yet. For it is fairly evident that he is under the impression that a large measure of independent private business is to go on throughout the Union. I doubt if he imagines it is necessary to go beyond the partial socialisation already achieved by the New Deal. But we have assembled evidence to show that the profit scramble, the wild days of uncorrelated "business" are over for ever.<br /><br />And again though he realises and states very clearly that governments are made for man and not man for governments, though he applauds the great declarations of the Convention that created the American Constitution, wherein "we the people of the United States" overrode the haggling of the separate states and established the American Federal Constitution, nevertheless he is curiously chary of superseding any existing legal governments in the present world. He is chary of talking of "We the people of the world". But many of us are coming to realise that all existing governments have to go into the melting pot, we believe that it is a world revolution which is upon us, and that in the great struggle to evoke a Westernised World Socialism, contemporary governments may vanish like straw hats in the rapids of Niagara. Mr Streit, however, becomes extraordinarily legal-minded at this stage. I do not think that he realises the forces of destruction that are gathering and so I think he hesitates to plan a reconstruction upon anything like the scale that may become possible.<br /><br />He evades even the obvious necessity that under a Federal Government the monarchies of Great Britain, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Holland, if they survive at all, must becomes like the mediatised sovereigns of the component states of the former German Empire, mere ceremonial vestiges. Perhaps he thinks that, but he does not say it outright. I do not know if he has pondered the New York World Fair of 1939 nor the significance of the Royal Visit to America in that year, and thought how much there is in the British system that would have to be abandoned if his Federation is to become a reality. In most of the implications of the word, it must cease to be "British". His Illustrative Constitution is achieved with an altogether forensic disregard of the fundamental changes in human conditions to which we have to adapt ourselves or perish. He thinks of war by itself and not as an eruption due to deeper maladaptations. But if we push his earlier stipulations to their necessary completion, we need not trouble very much about that sample constitution of his, which is to adjust the balance so fairly among the constituent states. The abolition of distance must inevitably substitute functional associations and loyalties for local attributions, if human society does not break up altogether. The local divisions will melt into a world collectivity and the main conflicts in a progressively unifying Federation are much more likely to be these between different world-wide types and associations of workers.<br /><br />So far with Union Now. One of Mr Streit’s outstanding merits is that he has had the courage to make definite proposals on which we can bite. I doubt if a European could have produced any such book. Its naïve political legalism, its idea of salvation by constitution, and its manifest faith in the magic beneficence of private enterprise, are distinctly in the vein of an American, almost a pre-New Deal American, who has become, if anything, more American, through his experiences of the deepening disorder of Europe. So many Americans still look on at world affairs like spectators at a ball game who are capable of vociferous participation but still have no real sense of participation; they do not realise that the ground is moving under their seats also, and that the social revolution is breaking surface to engulf them in their turn. To most of us - to most of us over forty at any rate - the idea of a fundamental change in our way of life is so unpalatable that we resist it to the last moment.<br /><br />Mr Streit betrays at times as vivid a sense of advancing social collapse as I have, but it has still to occur to him that that collapse may be conclusive. There may be dark ages, a relapse into barbarism, but somewhen and somehow he thinks man must recover. George Bernard Shaw has recently been saying the same thing.<br /><br />It may be worse that that.<br /><br />I have given Mr Streit scarcely a word of praise, because that would be beside the mark here. He wrote his book sincerely as a genuine contribution to the unsystematic world conference that is now going on, admitting the possibility of error, demanding criticism, and I have dealt with it in that spirit.<br /><br />Unfortunately his word has gone much further than his book. His book says definite things and even when one disagrees with it, it is good as a point of departure. But a number of people have caught up this word "Federation", and our minds are distracted by a multitude of appeals to support Federal projects with the most various content or with no content at all.<br /><br />All the scores and hundreds of thousands of nice people who are signing peace pledges and so forth a few years ago, without the slightest attempt in the world to understand what they meant by peace, are now echoing this new magic word with as little conception of any content for it. They did not realise that peace means so complicated and difficult an ordering and balancing of human society that it has never been sustained since man became man, and that we have wars and preparatory interludes between wars because that is a much simpler and easier sequence for our wilful, muddle-headed, suspicious and aggressive species. These people still think we can get this new and wonderful state of affairs just by clamouring for it.<br /><br />And having failed to get peace by saying "Peace" over and over again, they are now with an immense sense of discovery saying "Federation". What must happen to men in conspicuous public positions I do not know, but even an irresponsible literary man like myself finds himself inundated with innumerable lengthy private letters, hysterical post-cards, pamphlets from budding organisations, "declarations" to sign, demands for subscriptions, all in the name of the new panacea, all as vain and unproductive as the bleating of lost sheep. And I cannot open a newspaper without finding some eminent contemporary writing a letter to it, saying gently, firmly and bravely, the same word, sometimes with bits of Union Now tacked on to it, and sometimes with minor improvements, but often with nothing more than the bare idea.<br /><br />All sorts of idealistic movements for world peace which have been talking quietly to themselves for years and years have been stirred up to follow the new banner. Long before the Great War there was a book by Sir Max Waechter, a friend of King Edward the Seventh, advocating the United States of Europe, and that inexact but flattering parallelism to the United States of America has recurred frequently; as a phase thrown out by Monsieur Briand for example, and as a project put forward by an Austrian-Japanese writer, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, who even devised a flag for the Union. The main objection to the idea is that there are hardly any states completely in Europe, except Switzerland, San Marino, Andorra and a few of the Versailles creations. Almost all the other European states extend far beyond the European limits both politically and in their sympathies and cultural relations. They trail with them more than half mankind. About a tenth of the British Empire is in Europe and still less of the Dutch Empire; Russia, Turkey, France, are less European than not; Spain and Portugal have their closest links with South America.<br /><br />Few Europeans think of themselves as "Europeans". I, for example, am English, and a large part of my interests, intellectual and material, are Transatlantic. I dislike calling myself "British" and I like to think of myself as a member of a great English-speaking community, which spreads irrespective of race and colour round and about the world. I am annoyed when an American calls me a "foreigner" - war with America would seem to me just as insane as war with Cornwall - and I find the idea of cutting myself off from the English-speaking peoples of America and Asia to follow the flag of my Austrian-Japanese friend into a federally bunched-up European extremely unattractive.<br /><br />It would, I suggest, be far easier to create the United States of the World, which is Mr Streit’s ultimate objective, than to get together the so-called continent of Europe into any sort of unity.<br /><br />I find most of these United States of Europe movements are now jumping on to the Federation band-wagon.<br /><br />My old friend and antagonist, Lord David Davies, for instance, has recently succumbed to the infection. He was concerned about the problem of a World Pax in the days when the League of Nations Society and other associated bodies were amalgamated in the League of Nations Union. He was struck then by an idea, an analogy, and the experience was unique for him. He asked why individuals went about in modern communities in nearly perfect security from assault and robbery, without any need to bear arms. His answer was the policeman. And from that he went on to the question of what was needed for states and nations to go their ways with the same blissful immunity from violence and plunder, and it seemed to him a complete and reasonable answer to say "an international policeman". And there you were! He did not see, he is probably quite incapable of seeing, that a state is something quite different in its nature and behaviour from an individual human+being. When he was asked to explain how that international policeman was to be created and sustained, he just went on saying "international policeman". He has been saying it for years. Sometimes it seems it is to be the League of Nations, sometimes the British Empire, sometimes an international Air Force, which is to undertake this grave responsibility. The bench before which the policeman is to hale the offender and this position of the lock-up are not indicated. Finding our criticisms uncongenial, his lordship went off with his great idea, like a penguin which has found an egg, to incubate it alone. I hope he will be spared to say "international policeman" for many years to come, but I do not believe he has ever perceived or ever will perceive that, brilliant as his inspiration was, it still left vast areas of the problem in darkness. Being a man of considerable means, he has been able to sustain a "New Commonwealth" movement and publish books and a periodical in which his one great idea is elaborated rather than developed.<br /><br />But I will not deal further with the very incoherent multitude that now echoes this word "Federation". Many among them will cease to cerebrate further and fall by the wayside, but many will go on thinking, and if they go on thinking they will come to perceive more and more clearly the realities of the case. Federation, they will feel, is not enough.<br /><br />So much for the present "Federalist" front. As a fundamental basis of action, as a declared end, it seems hopelessly vague and confused and, if one may coin a phrase, hopelessly optimistic. But since the concept seems to be the way to release a number of minds from belief in the sufficiency of a League of Nations, associated or not associated with British Imperialism, it has been worth while to consider how it can be amplified and turned in the direction of that full and open-eyed world-wide collectivisation which a study of existing conditions obliges us to believe is the only alternative to the complete degeneration of our species.<br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />8<br /><br />THE NEW TYPE OF REVOLUTION<br /><br />LET US RETURN TO our main purpose, which is to examine the way in which we are to face up to this impending World Revolution.<br /><br />To many minds this idea of Revolution is almost inseparable from visions of street barricades made of paving-stones and overturned vehicles, ragged mobs armed with impromptu weapons and inspired by defiant songs, prisons broken and a general jail delivery, palaces stormed, a great hunting of ladies and gentlemen, decapitated but still beautiful heads on pikes, regicides of the most sinister quality, the busy guillotine, a crescendo of disorder ending in a whiff of grapeshot. . . .<br /><br />That was one type of Revolution. It is what one might call the Catholic type of Revolution, that it is to say it is the ultimate phase of a long period of Catholic living and teaching. People do not realise this and some will be indignant at its being stated so barely. Yet the facts stare us in the face, common knowledge, not to be denied. That furious, hungry, desperate, brutal mob was the outcome of generations of Catholic rule, Catholic morality and Catholic education. The King of France was the "Most Christian King, the eldest son of the Church", he was master of the economic and financial life of the community, and the Catholic Church controlled the intellectual life of the community and the education of the people absolutely. That mob was the outcome. It is absurd to parrot that Christianity has never been tried. Christianity in its most highly developed form has been tried and tried again. It was tried for centuries fully and completely, in Spain, France, Italy. It was responsible for the filth and chronic pestilence and famine of medieval England. It inculcated purity but it never inculcated cleanliness. Catholic Christianity had practically unchallenged power in France for generations. It was free to teach as it chose and as much as it chose. It dominated the common life entirely. The Catholic system in France cannot have reaped anything it did not sow, for no other sowers were allowed. That hideous mob of murderous ragamuffins we are so familiar with in pictures of the period, was the final harvest of its regime.<br /><br />The more Catholic reactionaries revile the insurgent common people of the first French Revolution, the more they condemn themselves. It is the most impudent perversion of reality for them to snivel about the guillotine and the tumbrils, as though these were not purely Catholic products, as though they came in suddenly from outside to wreck a genteel Paradise. They were the last stage of the systematic injustice and ignorance of a strictly Catholic regime. One phase succeeded another with relentless logic. The Maseillaise completed the life-cycle of Catholicism.<br /><br />In Spain too and in Mexico we have seen undisputed educational and moral Catholic ascendancy, the Church with a free hand, producing a similar uprush of blind resentment. The crowds there also were cruel and blasphemous; but Catholicism cannot complain; for Catholicism hatched them. Priests and nuns who had been the sole teachers of the people were insulted and outraged and churches defiled. Surely if the Church is anything like what it claims to be, the people would have loved it. They would not have behaved as though sacrilege was a gratifying relief.<br /><br />But these Catholic Revolutions are only specimens of one single type of Revolution. A Revolution need not be a spontaneous storm of indignation against intolerable indignities and deprivations. It can take quite other forms.<br /><br />As a second variety of Revolution, which is in sharp contrast with the indignation-revolt in which so many periods of unchallenged Catholic ascendancy have ended, we may take what we may call the "revolution conspiracy", in which a number of people set about organising the forces of discomfort and resentment and loosening the grip of the government’s forces, in order to bring about a fundamental change of system. The ideal of this type is the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, provided it is a little simplified and misunderstood. This, reduced to a working theory by its advocates, is conceived of as a systematic cultivation of a public state of mind favourable to a Revolution together with an inner circle of preparation for a "seizure of power". Quite a number of Communist and other leftish writers, bright young men, without much political experience, have let their imaginations loose upon the "technique" of such an adventure. They have brought the Nazi and Fascist Revolutions into the material for their studies. Modern social structure with its concentration of directive, information and coercive power about radio stations, telephone exchangers, newspaper offices, police stations, arsenals and the like, lends itself to quasi-gangster exploitation of this type. There is a great rushing about and occupation of key centres, an organised capture, imprisonment or murder of possible opponents, and the country is confronted with fait accompli. The regimentation of the more or less reluctant population follows.<br /><br />But a Revolution need be neither an explosion nor a coup d’état. And the Revolution that lies before us now as the only hopeful alternative to chaos, either directly or after an interlude of world communism, is to be attained, if it is attained at all, by neither of these methods. The first is too rhetorical and chaotic and leads simply to a Champion and tyranny; the second is too conspiratorial and leads through an obscure struggle of masterful personalities to a similar end. Neither is lucid enough and deliberate enough to achieve a permanent change in the form and texture of human affairs.<br /><br />An altogether different type of Revolution may or may not be possible. No one can say that it is possible unless it is tried, but one can say with some assurance that unless it can be achieved the outlook for mankind for many generations at least is hopeless. The new Revolution aims essentially at a change in directive ideas. In its completeness it is an untried method.<br /><br />It depends for its success upon whether a sufficient number of minds can be brought to realise that the choice before us now is not a choice between further revolution or more or less reactionary conservatism, but a choice between so carrying on and so organising the process of change in our affairs as to produce a new world order, or suffering an entire and perhaps irreparable social collapse. Our argument throughout has been that things have gone too far ever to be put back again to any similitude of what they have been. We can no more dream of remaining where we are than think of going back in the middle of a dive. We must go trough with these present changes, adapt ourselves to them, adjust ourselves to the plunge, or be destroyed by them. We must go through these changes just as we must go through this ill-conceived war, because there is as yet no possible end for it.<br /><br />There will be no possible way of ending it until the new Revolution defines itself. If it is patched up now without a clear-headed settlement understood and accepted throughout the world, we shall have only the simulacrum of a peace. A patched-up peace now will not even save us from the horrors of war, it will postpone them only to aggravate them in a few years time. You cannot end this war yet, you can at best adjourn it.<br /><br />The reorganisation of the world has at first to be mainly the work of a "movement" or a Party or a religion or cult, whatever we choose to call it. We may call it New Liberalism or the New Radicalism or what not. It will not be a close-knit organisation, toeing the Party line and so forth. It may be a very loose-knit and many faceted, but if a sufficient number of minds throughout the world, irrespective of race, origin or economic and social habituations, can be brought to the free and candid recognition of the essentials of the human problem, then their effective collaboration in a conscious, explicit and open effort to reconstruct human society will ensue.<br /><br />And to begin with they will do all they can to spread and perfect this conception of a new world order, which they will regard as the only working frame for their activities, while at the same time they will set themselves to discover and associate with themselves, everyone, everywhere, who is intellectually able to grasp the same broad ideas and morally disposed to realise them.<br /><br />The distribution of this essential conception one may call propaganda, but in reality it is education. The opening phase of this new type of Revolution must involve therefore a campaign for re-invigorated and modernised education throughout the world, an education that will have the same ratio to the education of a couple of hundred years ago, as the electric lighting of a contemporary city has to the chandeliers and oil lamps of the same period. On its present mental levels humanity can do no better than what it is doing now.<br /><br />Vitalising education is only possible when it is under the influence of people who are themselves learning. It is inseparable from the modern idea of education that it should be knit up to incessant research. We say research rather than science. It is the better word because it is free from any suggestion of that finality which means dogmatism and death.<br /><br />All education tends to become stylistic and sterile unless it is kept in close touch with experimental verification and practical work, and consequently this new movement of revolutionary initiative, must at the same time be sustaining realistic political and social activities and working steadily for the collectivisation of governments and economic life. The intellectual movement will be only the initiatory and correlating part of the new revolutionary drive. These practical activities must be various. Everyone engaged in them must be thinking for himself and not waiting for orders. The only dictatorship he will recognise is the dictatorship of the plain understanding and the invincible fact.<br /><br />And if this culminating Revolution is to be accomplished, then the participation of every conceivable sort of human+being who has the mental grasp to see these broad realities of the world situation and the moral quality to do something about it, must be welcomed.<br /><br />Previous revolutionary thrusts have been vitiated by bad psychology. They have given great play to the gratification of the inferiority complexes that arise out of class disadvantages. It is no doubt very unjust that anyone should be better educated, healthier and less fearful of the world than anyone else, but that is no reason why the new Revolution should not make the fullest use of the health, education, vigour and courage of the fortunate. The Revolution we are contemplating will aim at abolishing the bitterness of frustration. But certainly it will do nothing to avenge it. Nothing whatever. Let the dead past punish its dead.<br /><br />It is one of the most vicious streaks in the Marxist teaching to suggest that all people of wealth and capacity living in a community in which unco-ordinated private enterprise plays a large part are necessarily demoralised by the advantages they enjoy and that they must be dispossessed by the worker and peasant, who are presented as endowed with a collective virtue capable of running all the complex machinery of a modern community. But the staring truth of the matter is that an unco-ordinated scramble between individuals and nations alike, demoralises all concerned. Everyone is corrupted, the filching tramp by the roadside, the servile hand-kissing peasant of Eastern Europe, the dole-bribed loafer, as much as the woman who marries for money, the company promoter, the industrial organiser, the rent-exacting landlord and the diplomatic agent. When the social atmosphere is tainted everybody is ill.<br /><br />Wealth, personal freedom and education, may and do produce wasters and oppressive people, but they may also release creative and administrative minds to opportunity. The history of science and invention before the nineteenth century confirms this. On the whole if we are to assume there is anything good in humanity at all, it is more reasonable to expect it to appear when there is most opportunity.<br /><br />And in further confutation of the Marxist caricature of human motives, we have the very considerable number of young people drawn from middle-class and upper-class homes, who figure in the extreme left movement everywhere. It is their moral reaction to the "stuffiness" and social ineffectiveness of their parents and their own sort of people. They seek an outlet for their abilities that is not gainful but serviceable. Many have sought an honourable life - and often found it, and death with it - in the struggle against the Catholics and their Moorish and Fascist helpers in Spain.<br /><br />It is a misfortune of their generation, that so many of them have fallen into the mental traps of Marxism. It has been my absurd experience to encounter noisy meetings of expensive young men at Oxford, not one of them stunted physically as I was by twenty years of under-nourishment and devitalised upbringing, all pretending to be rough-hewn collarless proletarians in shocked revolt against my bourgeois tyranny and the modest comfort of my declining years, and reciting the ridiculous class-war phrases by which they protected their minds from any recognition of the realities of the case. But though that attitude demonstrates the unstimulating education of their preparatory and public schools, which had thrown them thus uncritical and emotional into the problems of the undergraduate life, it does not detract from the fact that they had found the idea of abandoning themselves to a revolutionary reconstruction of society, that promised to end its enormous waste of potential happiness and achievement, extremely attractive, notwithstanding that their own advantages seemed to be reasonably secure.<br /><br />Faced with the immediate approach of discomfort, indignity, wasted years, mutilation - death is soon over but one wakes up again to mutilation every morning - because of this ill-conceived war; faced also by the reversion of Russia to autocracy and the fiscal extinction of most of the social advantages of their families; these young people with a leftish twist are likely not only to do some very profitable re-examination of their own possibilities but also to find themselves joined in that re-examination by a very considerable number of others who have hitherto been repelled by the obvious foolishness and insincerity of the hammer and sickle symbols (workers and peasants of Oxford!) and the exasperating dogmatism of the orthodox Marxist. And may not these young people, instead of waiting to be overtaken by an insurrectionary revolution from which they will emerge greasy, unshaven, class-conscious and in incessant danger of liquidation, decide that before the Revolution gets hold of them they will get hold of the Revolution and save it from the inefficiency, mental distortions, disappointments and frustrations that have over-taken it in Russia.<br /><br />This new and complete Revolution we contemplate can be defined in a very few words. It is (a) outright world-socialism, scientifically planned and directed, plus (b) a sustained insistence upon law, law based on a fuller, more jealously conceived resentment of the personal Rights of Man, plus (c) the completest freedom of speech, criticism and publication, and sedulous expansion of the educational organisation to the ever-growing demands of the new order. What we may call the eastern or Bolshevik Collectivism, the Revolution of the Internationale, has failed to achieve even the first of these three items and it has never even attempted the other two.<br /><br />Putting it at its compactest, it is the triangle of Socialism, Law and Knowledge, which frames the Revolution which may yet save the world.<br /><br />Socialism! Become outright collectivists? Very few men of the more fortunate classes in our old collapsing society who are over fifty will be able to readjust their minds to that. It will seem an entirely repulsive suggestion to them. (The average age of the British Cabinet at the present time is well over sixty.) But it need not be repulsive at all to their sons. They will be impoverished anyhow. The stars in their courses are seeing to that. And that will help them greatly to realise that an administrative control to administrative participation and then to direct administration are easy steps. They are being taken now, first in one matter and then in another. On both sides of the Atlantic. Reluctantly and often very disingenuously and against energetic but diminishing resistances. Great Britain, like America, may become a Socialist system with a definitive Revolution, protesting all the time that it is doing nothing of the sort.<br /><br />In Britain we have now no distinctively educated class, but all up and down the social scale there are well-read men and women who have thought intensely upon these great problems we have been discussing. To many of them and maybe to enough of them to start the avalanche of purpose that will certainly develop from a clear and determined beginning, this conception of Revolution to evoke a liberal collectivised world may appeal. And so at last we narrow down our enquiry to an examination of what has to be done now to save the Revolution, what the movement or its Party - so far as it may use the semblance of a Party will do, what its Policy will be. Hitherto we have been demonstrating why a reasonable man, of any race or language anywhere, should become a "Western" Revolutionary. We have now to review the immediate activities to which he can give himself.<br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />9<br /><br />POLITICS FOR THE SANE MAN<br /><br />LET US RESTATE THE general conclusions to which our preceding argument has brought us.<br /><br />The establishment of a progressive world socialism in which the freedoms, health and happiness of every individual are protected by a universal law based on a re-declaration of the rights of man, and wherein there is the utmost liberty of thought, criticism and suggestion, is the plain, rational objective before us now. Only the effective realisation of this objective can establish peace on earth and arrest the present march of human affairs to misery and destruction. We cannot reiterate this objective too clearly and too frequently. The triangle of collectivisation, law and knowledge should embody the common purpose of all mankind.<br /><br />But between us and that goal intervenes the vast and deepening disorders of our time. The new order cannot be brought into existence without a gigantic and more or less co-ordinated effort of the saner and abler elements in the human population. The thing cannot be done rapidly and melodramatically. That effort must supply the frame for all sane social and political activities and a practical criterion for all religious and educational associations. But since our world is multitudinously varied and confused, it is impossible to narrow down this new revolutionary movement to any single class, organisation or Party. It is too great a thing for that. It will in its expansion produce and perhaps discard a number of organisations and Parties, converging upon its ultimate objective. Consequently, in order to review the social and political activities of sane, clear-headed people to-day, we have to deal with them piecemeal from a number of points of view. We have to consider an advance upon a long and various front.<br /><br />Let us begin then with the problem of sanity in face of the political methods of our time. What are we to do as voting citizens? There I think the history of the so-called democracies in the past half-century is fairly conclusive. Our present electoral methods which give no choice but a bilateral choice to the citizen and so force a two-party system upon him, is a mere caricature of representative government. It has produced upon both sides of the Atlantic, big, stupid, and corrupt party machines. That was bound to happen and yet to this day there is a sort of shyness in the minds of young men interested in politics when it comes to discussing Proportional Representation. They think it is a "bit faddy". At best it is a side issue. Party politicians strive to maintain that bashfulness, because they know quite clearly that what is called Proportional Representation with the single transferable vote in large constituencies, returning a dozen members or more, is extinction for the mere party hack and destruction for party organisations.<br /><br />The machine system in the United States is more elaborate, more deeply entrenched legally in the Constitution and illegally in the spoils system, and it may prove more difficult to modernise than the British, which is based on an outworn caste tradition. But both Parliament and Congress are essentially similar in their fundamental quality. They trade in titles, concessions and the public welfare, and they are only amenable in the rough and at long last to the movements of public opinion. It is an open question whether they are much more responsive to popular feeling than the Dictators we denounce so unreservedly as the antithesis of democracy. They betray a great disregard of mass responses. They explain less. They disregard more. The Dictators have to go on talking and talking, not always truthfully but they have to talk. A dumb Dictator is inconceivable.<br /><br />In such times of extensive stress and crisis as the present, the baffling slowness, inefficiency and wastefulness of the party system become so manifest that some of its worst pretences are put aside. The party game is suspended. His Majesty’s Opposition abandons the pose of safeguarding the interests of the common citizens from those scoundrels upon the government benches; Republican and Democrats begin to cross the party line to discuss the new situation. Even the men who live professionally by the Parliamentary (Congressional) imposture, abandon it if they are sufficiently frightened by the posture of affairs. The appearance of an All-Party National Government in Great Britain before very long seems inevitable.<br /><br />Great Britain has in effect gone socialist in a couple of months; she is also suspending party politics. Just as the United States did in the great slump. And in both cases this has happened because the rottenness and inefficiency of party politics stank to heaven in the face of danger. And since in both cases Party Government threw up its hands and bolted, is there any conceivable reason why we should let it come back at any appearance of victory or recovery, why we should not go ahead from where we are to a less impromptu socialist regime under a permanent non-party administration, to the reality if not to the form of a permanent socialist government?<br /><br />Now here I have nothing to suggest about America. I have never, for example, tried to work out the consequences of the absence of executive ministers from the legislature. I am inclined to think that is one of the weak points in the Constitution and that the English usage which exposes the minister to question time in the House and makes him a prime mover in legislation affecting his department, is a less complicated and therefore more democratic arrangement than the American one. And the powers and functions of the President and the Senate are so different from the consolidated powers of Cabinet and Prime Minister, that even when an Englishman has industriously "mugged up" the constitutional points, he is still almost as much at a loss to get the living reality as he would be if he were shown the score of an opera before hearing it played or the blue prints of a machine he had never seen in action. Very few Europeans understand the history of Woodrow Wilson, the Senate and his League of Nations. They think that "America", which they imagine as a large single individual, planted the latter institution upon Europe and then deliberately shuffled out of her responsibility for it, and they will never think otherwise. And they think that "America" kept out of the war to the very limit of decency, overcharged us for munitions that contributed to the common victory, and made a grievance because the consequent debt was not discharged. They talk like that while Americans talk as if no English were killed between 1914 and 1918 (we had 800,000 dead) until the noble American conscripts came forward to die for them (to the tune of about 50,000). Savour for example even the title of Quincy Howe’s England expects every American to do his Duty. It’s the meanest of titles, but many Americans seem to like it.<br /><br />On my desk as I write is a pamphlet by a Mr Robert Randall, nicely cyclostyled and got up. Which urges a common attack on the United States as a solution of the problem of Europe. No countries will ever feel united unless they have a common enemy, and the natural common enemy for Europe, it is declared, is the United States. So to bring about the United States of Europe we are to begin by denouncing the Monroe doctrine. I believe in the honesty and good intentions of Mr Robert Randall; he is, I am sure, no more in the pay of Germany, direct or indirect, than Mr Quincy Howe or Mr Harry Elmer Barnes; but could the most brilliant of Nazi war propagandists devise a more effective estranging suggestion? . . .<br /><br />But I wander from my topic. I do not know how sane men in America are going to set about relaxing the stranglehold of the Constitution, get control of their own country out of the hands of those lumpish, solemnly cunning politicians with their great strong jowls developed by chewing-gum and orotund speaking, whose photographs add a real element of frightfulness to the pages of Time, how they are going to abolish the spoils system, discover, and educate to expand a competent civil service able to redeem the hampered promises of the New Deal and pull America into line with the reconstruction of the rest of the world. But I perceive that in politics and indeed in most things, the underlying humour and sanity of Americans are apt to find a way round and do the impossible, and I have as little doubt they will manage it somehow as I have when I see a street performer on his little chair and carpet, all tied up with chains, waiting until there are sufficient pennies in the hat to justify exertion.<br /><br />These differences in method, pace and tradition are a great misfortune to the whole English-speaking world. We English people do not respect Americans enough; we are too disposed to think they are all Quincy Howes and Harry Elmer Barneses and Borahs and suchlike, conceited and suspicious anti-British monomaniacs, who must be humoured at any cost; which is why we are never so frank and rude with them as they deserve. But the more we must contain ourselves the less we love them. Real brothers can curse each other and keep friends. Someday Britannia will give Columbia a piece of her mind, and that may clear the air. Said an exasperated Englishman to me a day or so ago: "I pray to God they keep out of the end of this war anyhow. We shall never hear the last of it if they don’t. . . ."<br /><br />Yet at a different pace our two people are travelling towards identical ends, and it is lamentable that a difference of accent and idiom should do more mischief than a difference of language.<br /><br />So far as Great Britain goes things are nearer and closer to me, and it seems to me that there is an excellent opportunity now to catch the country in a state of socialisation and suspend party politics, and keep it at that. It is a logical but often disregarded corollary of the virtual creation of All-Party National Governments and suspension of electoral contests, that since there is no Opposition, party criticism should give place to individual criticism of ministers, and instead of throwing out governments we should set ourselves to throw out individual administrative failures. We need no longer confine our choice of public servants to political careerists. We can insist upon men who have done things and can do things, and whenever an election occurs we can organise a block of non-party voters who will vote it possible for an outsider of proved ability, and will at any rate insist on a clear statement from every Parliamentary candidate of the concrete service, if any, he has done the country, of his past and present financial entanglements and his family relationships and of any title he possesses. We can get these necessary particulars published and note what newspapers decline to do so. And if there are still only politicians to vote for, we can at least vote and spoil our voting cards by way of protest.<br /><br />At present we see one public service after another in a mess through the incompetent handling of some party hack and the unseen activities of interested parties. People are asking already why Sir Arthur Salter is not in control of Allied Shipping again, Sir John Orr directing our food supply with perhaps Sir Fredrick Keeble to help him, Sir Robert Vansittart in the Foreign Office. We want to know the individuals responsible for the incapacity of our Intelligence and Propaganda Ministries, so that we may induce them to quit public life. It would be quite easy now to excite a number of anxious people with a cry for "Competence not Party".<br /><br />Most people in the British Isles are heartily sick of Mr Chamberlain and his government, but they cannot face up to a political split in wartime, and Mr Chamberlain sticks to office with all the pertinacity of a Barnacle. But if we do not attack the government as a whole, but individual ministers, and if we replace them one by one, we shall presently have a government so rejuvenated that even Mr Chamberlain will realise and accept his superannuation. Quite a small body of public-spirited people could organise an active Vigilance Society to keep these ideas before the mass of voters and begin the elimination of inferior elements from our public life. This would be a practical job of primary importance in our political regeneration. It would lead directly to a new and more efficient political structure to carry on after the present war has collapsed or otherwise ended.<br /><br />Following upon this campaign for the conclusive interment of the played-out party system, there comes the necessity for a much more strenuous search for administrative and technical ability throughout the country. We do not want to miss a single youngster who can be of use in the great business of making over Great Britain, which has been so rudely, clumsily and wastefully socialised by our war perturbations, so that it may become a permanently efficient system.<br /><br />And from the base of the educational pyramid up to its apex of higher education of teachers, heads of departments and research, there is need for such a quickening of minds and methods as only a more or less organised movement of sanely critical men can bring about. We want ministers now of the highest quality in every department, but in no department of public life is a man of creative understanding, bold initiative and administrative power so necessary as in the Education Ministry.<br /><br />So tranquil and unobtrusive has been the flow of educational affairs in the British Empire that it seems almost scandalous, and it is certainly "vulgar", to suggest that we need an educational Ginger Group to discover and support such a minister. We want a Minister of Education who can shock teachers into self-examination, electrify and rejuvenate old dons or put them away in ivory towers, and stimulate the younger ones. Under the party system the Education Ministry has always been a restful corner for some deserving party politician with an abject respect for his Alma Mater and the permanent officials. During war time, when other departments wake up, the Education Department sinks into deeper lethargy. One cannot recall a single British Education Minister, since there have been such things in our island story as Ministers for Education, who signified anything at all educationally or did anything of his own impulse that was in the least worth while.<br /><br />Suppose we found a live one - soon - and let him rip!<br /><br />There again is something to be done far more revolutionary than throwing bombs at innocent policemen or assassinating harmless potentates or ex-potentates. And yet it is only asking that an existing department be what it pretends to be.<br /><br />A third direction in which any gathering accumulation of sanity should direct its attention is the clumsy unfairness and indirectness of our present methods of expropriating the former well-to-do classes. The only observable principle seems to be widows and children first. Socialisation is being effected in Britain and America alike not by frank expropriation (with or without compensation) but by increasing government control and increasing taxation. Both our great communities are going into socialism backward and without ever looking round. This is good in so far as that technical experience and directive ability is changed over step by step from entirely private employment to public service, and on that side sane and helpful citizens have little to do beyond making the process conscious of itself and the public aware of the real nature of the change, but it is bad in its indiscriminate destruction of savings, which are the most exposed and vulnerable side of the old system. They are expropriated by profit-control and taxation alike, and at the same time they suffer in purchasing power by the acceleration of that process of monetary inflation which is the unavoidable readjustment, the petition in bankruptcy, of a community that has overspent.<br /><br />The shareholding class dwindles and dies; widows and orphans, the old who are past work and the infirm who are incapable of it, are exposed in their declining years to a painful shrinkage of their modes of living; there is no doubt a diminution of social waste, but also there is an indirect impoverishment of free opinion and free scientific and artistic initiative as the endless societies, institutions and services which have enriched life for us and been very largely supported by voluntary subscriptions, shrivel. At present a large proportion of our scientific, artistic, literary and social workers are educated out of the private savings fund. In a class-war revolution these economically very defenceless but socially very convenient people are subjected to vindictive humiliation - it is viewed as a great triumph for their meaner neighbours - but a revolution sanely conducted will probably devise a system of terminable annuities and compensation, and of assistance to once voluntary associations, which will ease off the social dislocations due to the disappearance of one stratum of relatively free and independent people, before its successors, that is to say the growing class of retired officials, public administrators and so forth, find their feet and develop their own methods of assertion and enterprise.<br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />10<br /><br />DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF MAN<br /><br />LET US TURN NOW to another system of problems in the collectivisation of the world, and that is the preservation of liberty in the socialist state and the restoration of that confidence without which good behaviour is generally impossible.<br /><br />This destruction of confidence is one of the less clearly recognised evils of the present phase of world-disintegration. In the past there have been periods when whole communities or at least large classes within communities have gone about their business with a general honesty, directness and sense of personal honour. They have taken a keen pride in the quality of their output. They have lived through life on tolerable and tolerant terms with their neighbours. The laws they observed have varied in different countries and periods, but their general nature was to make an orderly law-abiding life possible and natural. They had been taught and they believed and they had every reason to believe: "This (that or the other thing) is right. Do right and nothing, except by some strange exceptional misfortune, can touch you. The Law guarantees you that. Do right and nothing will rob you or frustrate you."<br /><br />Nowhere in the world now is there very much of that feeling left, and as it disappears, the behaviour of people degenerates towards a panic scramble, towards cheating, over-reaching, gang organisation, precautionary hoarding, concealment and all the meanness and anti-social feeling which is the natural outcome of insecurity.<br /><br />Faced with what now amounts to something like a moral stampede, more and more sane men will realise the urgency for a restoration of confidence. The more socialisation proceeds and the more directive authority is concentrated, the more necessary is an efficient protection of individuals from the impatience of well-meaning or narrow-minded or ruthless officials and indeed from all the possible abuses of advantage that are inevitable under such circumstances to our still childishly wicked breed.<br /><br />In the past the Atlantic world has been particularly successful in expedients for meeting this aspect of human nature. Our characteristic and traditional method may be called the method of the fundamental declaration. Our Western peoples, by a happy instinct, have produced statements of Right, from Magna Carta onwards, to provide a structural defence between the citizen and the necessary growth of central authority.<br /><br />And plainly the successful organisation of the more universal and penetrating collectivism that is now being forced upon us all, will be frustrated in its most vital aspect unless its organisation is accompanied by the preservative of a new Declaration of the Rights of Man, that must, because of the increasing complexity of the social structure, be more generous, detailed and explicit than any of its predecessors. Such a Declaration must become the common fundamental law of all communities and collectivities assembled under the World Pax. It should be interwoven with the declared war aims of the combatant powers now; it should become the primary fact in any settlement; it should be put before the now combatant states for their approval, their embarrassed silence or their rejection.<br /><br />In order to be as clear as possible about this, let me submit a draft for your consideration of this proposed Declaration of the Rights of Man - using "man" of course to cover every individual, male or female, of the species. I have endeavoured to bring in everything that is essential and to omit whatever secondary issues can be easily deduced from its general statements. It is a draft for your consideration. Points may have been overlooked and it may contain repetitions and superfluous statements.<br /><br />"Since a man comes into this world through no fault of his own, since he is manifestly a joint inheritor of the accumulations of the past, and since those accumulations are more than sufficient to justify the claims that are here made for him, it follows:<br /><br />"(1) That every man without distinction of race, of colour or of professed belief or opinions, is entitled to the nourishment, covering, medical care and attention needed to realise his full possibilities of physical and mental development and to keep him in a state of health from his birth to death.<br /><br />"(2) That he is entitled to sufficient education to make him a useful and interested citizen, that special education should be so made available as to give him equality of opportunity for the development of his distinctive gifts in the service of mankind, that he should have easy access to information upon all matters of common knowledge throughout his life and enjoy the utmost freedom of discussion, association and worship.<br /><br />"(3) That he may engage freely in any lawful occupation, earning such pay as the need for his work and the increment it makes to the common welfare may justify. That he is entitled to paid employment and to a free choice whenever there is any variety of employment open to him. He may suggest employment for himself and have his claim publicly considered, accepted or dismissed.<br /><br />"(4) That he shall have the right to buy or sell without any discriminatory restrictions anything which may be lawfully bought or sold, in such quantities and with such reservations as are compatible with the common welfare."<br /><br />(Here I will interpolate a comment. We have to bear in mind that in a collectivist state buying and selling to secure income and profit will be not simply needless but impossible. The Stock Exchange, after its career of four-hundred-odd-years, will necessarily vanish with the disappearance of any rational motive either for large accumulations or for hoarding against deprivation and destitution. Long before the age of complete collectivisation arrives, the savings of individuals for later consumption will probably be protected by some development of the Unit Trust System into a public service. They will probably be entitled to interest at such a rate as to compensate for that secular inflation which should go on in a steadily enriched world community. Inheritance and bequest in a community in which the means of production and of all possible monopolisation are collectivised, can concern little else than relatively small, beautiful and intimate objects, which will afford pleasure but no unfair social advantage to the receiver.)<br /><br />"(5) That he and his personal property lawfully acquired are entitled to police and legal protection from private violence, deprivation, compulsion and intimidation.<br /><br />"(6) That he may move freely about the world at his own expense. That his private house or apartment or reasonably limited garden enclosure is his castle, which may be entered only with consent, but that he shall have the right to come and go over any kind of country, moorland, mountain, farm, great garden or what not, or upon the seas, lakes and rivers of the world, where his presence will not be destructive of some special use, dangerous to himself nor seriously inconvenient to his fellow-citizens.<br /><br />"(7) That a man unless he is declared by a competent authority to be a danger to himself and to others through mental abnormality, a declaration which must be annually confirmed, shall not be imprisoned for a longer period than six days without being charged with a definite offence against the law, nor for more than three months without public trial. At the end if the latter period, if he has not been tried and sentenced by due process of law, he shall be released. Nor shall he be conscripted for military, police or any other service to which he has a conscientious objection.<br /><br />"(8) That although a man is subject to the free criticism of his fellows, he shall have adequate protection from any lying or misrepresentation that may distress or injure him. All administrative registration and records about a man shall be open to his personal and private inspection. There shall be no secret dossiers in any administrative department. All dossiers shall be accessible to the man concerned and subject to verification and correction at his challenge. A dossier is merely a memorandum; it cannot be used as evidence without proper confirmation in open court.<br /><br />"(9) That no man shall be subjected to any sort of mutilation or sterilisation except with his own deliberate consent, freely given, nor to bodily assault, except in restraint of his own violence, nor to torture, beating or any other bodily punishment; he shall not be subjected to imprisonment with such an excess of silence, noise, light or darkness as to cause mental suffering, or to imprisonment in infected, verminous or otherwise insanitary quarters, or be put into the company of verminous or infectious people. He shall not be forcibly fed nor prevented from starving himself if he so desire. He shall not be forced to take drugs nor shall they be administered to him without his knowledge and consent. That the extreme punishments to which he may be subjected are rigorous imprisonment for a term of not longer than fifteen years or death."<br /><br />(Here I would point out that there is nothing in this to prevent any country from abolishing the death penalty any country from abolishing the death penalty. Nor do I assert a general right to commit suicide, because no one can punish a man for doing that. He has escaped. But threats and incompetent attempts to commit suicide belong to an entirely different category. They are indecent and distressing acts that can easily become a serious social nuisance, from which the normal citizen is entitled to protection.)<br /><br />"(10) That the provisions and principles embodied in this Declaration shall be more fully defined in a code of fundamental human rights which shall be made easily accessible to everyone. This Declaration shall not be qualified nor departed from upon any pretext whatever. It incorporates all previous Declarations of Human Right. Henceforth for a new ear it is the fundamental law for mankind throughout the whole world.<br /><br />"No treaty and no law affecting these primary rights shall be binding upon any man or province or administrative division of the community, that has not been made openly, by and with the active or tacit acquiescence of every adult citizen concerned, either given by a direct majority vote of his publicly elected representatives. In matters of collective behaviour it is by the majority decision men must abide. No administration, under a pretext of urgency, convenience or the like, shall be entrusted with powers to create or further define offences or set up by-laws, which will in any way infringe the rights and liberties here asserted. All legislation must be public and definite. No secret treaties shall be binding on individuals, organisations or communities. No orders in council or the like, which extend the application of a law, shall be permitted. There is no source of law but the people, and since life flows on constantly to new citizens, no generation of the people can in whole or in part surrender or delegate the legislative power inherent in mankind."<br /><br />There, I think, is something that keener minds than mine may polish into a working Declaration which would in the most effective manner begin that restoration of confidence of which the world stands in need. Much of it might be better phrased, but I think it embodies the general good-will in mankind from pole to pole. It is certainly what we all want for ourselves. It could be a very potent instrument indeed in the present phase of human affairs. It is necessary and it is acceptable. Incorporate that in your peace treaties and articles of federation, I would say, and you will have a firm foundation, which will continually grow firmer, for the fearless cosmopolitan life of a new world order. You will never get that order without some such document. It is the missing key to endless contemporary difficulties.<br /><br />And if we, the virtuous democracies, are not fighting for these common human rights, then what in the name of the nobility and gentry, the Crown and the Established Church, the City, The Times and the Army and Navy Club, are we common British peoples fighting for?<br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />11<br /><br />INTERNATIONAL POLITICS<br /><br />AND NOW, HAVING COMPLETED our picture of what the saner elements in human society may reasonably work for and hope for, having cleared away the horrible nightmares of the class war and the totalitarian slave-state from our imaginations, we are able to attack the immediate riddles of international conflict and relationship with some hope of a general solution. If we realise to the depths of our being that a world settlement based in the three ideas of socialism, law and knowledge, is not only possible and desirable, but the only way of escape from deepening disaster, then manifestly our attitude towards the resentments of Germany, the prejudices of America or Russia, the poverty and undernourishment of India or the ambitions of Japan, must be frankly opportunist. None of these are primary issues. We sane men must never lose sight of our ultimate objective, but our methods of getting there will have to vary with the fluctuating variations of national feeling and national policy.<br /><br />There is this idea of federalism upon which I have already submitted a criticism in chapter seven. As I have shown there, the Streit proposals will either take you further or land you nowhere. Let us assume that we can strengthen his proposals to the extent of making a socialistic economic consortium and adhesion to that Declaration of Rights, primary conditions for any federal union; then it becomes a matter of mood and occasion with what communities the federal association may be begun. We can even encourage feeble federal experiments which do not venture even so far as that along the path to sanity, in the certainty that either they will fade out again or else that they will become liberal realities of the type to which the whole world must ultimately conform. Behind any such half-hearted tentatives an educational propaganda can be active and effective.<br /><br />But when it comes to the rate and amount of participation in the construction of a rational world order we can expect from any country or group of countries, we are in a field where there is little more than guessing and haphazard generalisations about "national character" to work upon. We are dealing with masses of people which may be swayed enormously by a brilliant newspaper or an outstandingly persuasive or compelling personality or by almost accidental changes in the drift of events. I, for example, cannot tell how far the generality of educated and capable people in the British Empire now may fall in with our idea of accepting and serving a collectivism, or how strong their conservative resistance may be. It is my own country and I ought to know it best, and I do not know it detachedly enough or deeply enough to decide that. I do not see how anyone can foretell these swirls and eddies of response.<br /><br />The advocacy of such movements of the mind and will as I am speaking of here is in itself among the operating causes in political adjustment, and those who are deepest in the struggle are least able to estimate how it is going. Every factor in political and international affairs is a fluctuating factor. The wise man therefore will not set his heart upon any particular drift or combination. He will favour everything that trends towards the end at which he aims.<br /><br />The present writer cherishes the idea that the realisation of a common purpose and a common cultural inheritance may spread throughout all the English-speaking communities, and there can be no harm in efforts to give this concrete expression. He believes the dissociation of the British Empire may inaugurate this great synthesis. At the same time there are factors making for some closer association of the United States of America with what are called the Oslo powers. There is no reason why one of these associations should stand in the way of the other. Some countries such as Canada rest already under what is practically a double guarantee; she has the security of the Monroe Doctrine and the protection of the British fleet.<br /><br />A Germany of eighty million people which has been brought to acquiesce in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and which is already highly collectivised, may come much earlier to a completely liberal socialist regime than Great Britain or France. If she participates in a consortium for the development of what are called the politically backward regions of the world, she may no longer be disposed for further military adventures and further stress and misery. She may enter upon a phase of social and economic recovery so rapid as to stimulate and react upon every other country in the world. It is not for other countries to dictate her internal politics, and if the German people want to remain united as one people, in federated states or in one centralised state, there is neither righteousness nor wisdom preventing them.<br /><br />The Germans like the rest of the world have to get on with collectivisation, they have to produce their pattern, and they cannot give themselves to that if they are artificially divided up and disorganised by some old-fashioned Quai d’Orsay scheme. They must do the right thing in their own way.<br /><br />That the belligerent tradition may linger on in Germany for a generation or so, is a risk the Atlantic powers have to take. The world has a right to insist that not simply some German government but the people generally, recognise unequivocably and repeatedly, the rights of man asserted in the Declaration, and it is disarmed and that any aggressive plant, any war plane, warship, gun or arsenal that is discovered in the country shall be destroyed forthwith, brutally and completely. But that is a thing that should not be confined to Germany. Germany should not be singled out for that. Armament should be an illegality everywhere, and some sort of international force should patrol a treaty-bound world. Partial armament is one of those absurdities dear to moderate-minded "reasonable" men. Armament itself is making war. Making a gun, pointing a gun and firing it, are all acts of the same order. It should be illegal to construct anywhere upon earth, any mechanism for the specific purpose of killing men. When you see a gun it is reasonable to ask: "Whom is that intended to kill?"<br /><br />Germany’s rearmament after 1918 was largely tolerated because she played off British Russophobia against the Russian fear of "Capitalist" attack, but that excuse can no longer serve any furtive war-mongers among her people after her pact with Moscow.<br /><br />Released from the economic burdens and restrictions that crippled her recovery after 1918, Germany may find a full and satisfying outlet for the energy of her young men in her systematic collectivisation, raising the standard of her common life deliberately and steadily, giving Russia a lead in efficiency and obliging the maundering "politics" and discursive inattention of the Atlantic world to remain concentrated upon the realities of life. The idea of again splitting up Germany into discordant fragments so as to postpone her ultimate recovery indefinitely, is a pseudo-democratic slacker’s dream. It is diametrically opposed to world reconstruction. We have need of the peculiar qualities of her people, and the sooner she recovers the better for the whole world. It is preposterous to resume the policy of holding back Germany simply that the old order may enjoy a few more years of self-indulgence in England, France and America.<br /><br />A lingering fear of German military aggression may not be altogether bad for the minor states of South-Eastern Europe and Asia Minor, by breaking down their excessive nationalism and inducing them to work together. The policy of the sane man should be to welcome every possible experiment in international understandings duplicate and overlap one another, so much the better. He has to watch the activities of his own Foreign Office with incessant jealousy, for signs of that Machiavellian spirit which foments division among foreign governments and peoples and schemes perpetually to frustrate the progressive movement in human affairs by converting it into a swaying indecisive balance of power.<br /><br />This book is a discussion of guiding principles and not of the endless specific problems of adjustment that arise on the way to a world realisation of collective unity. I will merely glance at that old idea of Napoleon the Third’s, the Latin Union, at the possibility of a situation in Spanish and Portuguese South America parallel to that overlap of the Monroe Doctrine and the European motherlands which already exists in practice in the case of Canada, nor will I expatiate upon the manifold possibilities of sincere application of the Declaration of the Rights of Man to India and Africa - and particularly to those parts of the world in which more or less black peoples are awakening to the realities of racial discrimination and oppression.<br /><br />I will utter a passing warning against any Machiavellian treatment of the problem of Northern and Eastern Asia, into which the British may be led by their constitutional Russophobia. The Soviet collectivism, especially if presently it becomes liberalised and more efficient through a recovery from its present obsession by Stalin, may spread very effectively across Central Asia and China. To anyone nourished mentally upon the ideas of an unending competition of Powers for ascendancy for ever and ever, an alliance with Japan, as truculent and militarised a Japan as possible, will seem the most natural response in the world. But to anyone who has grasped the reality of the present situation of mankind and the urgent desirableness of world collectivisation, this immense unification will be something to welcome, criticise and assist.<br /><br />The old bugbear of Russia’s "designs upon India" may also play its part in distorting the Asiatic situation for many people. Yet a hundred years of mingled neglect, exploitation and occasional outbreaks of genuine helpfulness should have taught the British that the ultimate fate of India’s hundreds of millions rests now upon no conquering ruler but wholly and solely upon the ability of the Indian peoples to co-operate in world collectivisation. They may learn much by way of precept and example from Russia and from the English-speaking world, but the days for mere revolt or for relief by a change of masters have passed. India has to work out for itself, with its own manner of participation in the struggle for a world order, starting from the British raj as a datum line. No outside power can work that out for the Indian peoples, nor force them to do it if they have no will for it.<br /><br />But I will not wander further among these ever-changing problems and possibilities. They are, so to speak, wayside eventualities and opportunities. Immense though some of them are they remain secondary. Every year or so now the shifting channels of politics need to be recharted. The activities and responses of the sane man in any particular country and at any particular time will be determined always by the overruling conception of a secular movement towards a single world order. That will be the underlying permanent objective of all his political life.<br /><br />There is, however, another line of world consolidation to which attention must be drawn before we conclude this section, and is what we may call ad hoc internationalism is admirably set forth in Leonard Woolf’s International Government, a classic which was published in 1916 and still makes profitable reading.<br /><br />The typical ad hoc organisation is the Postal Union, which David Lubin, that brilliant neglected thinker, would have had extended until it controlled shipping and equalised freights throughout the world. He based his ideas upon his practical experience of the mail order business from which he derived his very considerable fortune. From that problem of freight adjustment he passed to the idea of a controlled survey of world, so that a shortage here or a glut there could be foreseen and remedied in time. He realised the idea in the form of the International Institute of Agriculture at Rome, which in its heyday made treaties like an independent sovereign power for the supply of returns from nearly every government upon earth. The war of 1914 and Lubin’s death in 1919 checked the development of this admirable and most inspiring experiment in ad hoc internationalism. Its history is surely something that should be made part of the compulsory education of every statesmen and publicist. Yet never in my life have I met a professional politician who knew anything whatever or wanted to know anything about it. It didn’t get votes; it seemed difficult to tax it; what was the good of it?<br /><br />Another ad hoc organisation which might be capable of a considerable extension of its functions is the Elder Brethren of Trinity House, who control the lighthouses and charting of the seas throughout the world. But it would need a very considerable revision and extension of Mr Woolf’s book and, in spite of the war stresses that have delayed and in some cases reversed their development, it would be quite beyond our present scope, to bring up to date the lengthening tale of ad hoc international networks, ranging from international business cartels, scientific and technical organisations, white-slave-trade suppression and international police co-operation, to health services and religious missions. Just as I have suggested that the United States and Great Britain may become complete socialisms unawares, so it is a not altogether impossible dream that the world may discover to its great surprise that it is already practically a cosmopolis, through the extension and interweaving of these ad hoc co-operations. At any rate we have this very powerful collateral process going on side by side with the more definite political schemes we have discussed.<br /><br />Surveying the possibilities of these various attacks upon the complicated and intricate obstacles that stand between us and a new and more hopeful world order, one realises both the reasons for hope in that great possibility and the absurdity over over-confidence. We are all like soldiers upon a vast battlefield; we cannot be sure of the trend of things; we may be elated when disillusionment is rushing headlong upon us; we may be on the verge of despair, not knowing that our antagonists are already in collapse. My own reactions vary between an almost mystical faith in the ultimate triumph of human reason and good-will, and moods of stoical determination to carry on to the end in the face of what looks like inevitable disaster. There are quantitative factors in the outlook for which there are no data; there are elements of time and opportunity beyond any estimating. Every one of these activities we have been canvassing tends to delay the drift to destruction and provides a foothold for a further counter-offensive against the adversary.<br /><br />In the companion predecessor to this book, The Fate of Homo sapiens, I tried to drive home the fact that our species has no more reason to believe it can escape defeat and extinction, than any other organism that plays or has played its part in the drama of life. I tried to make clear how precarious is our present situation, and how urgent it is that we should make a strenuous effort at adjustment now. Only a little while ago it seemed as though that was an appeal to a deaf and blind world, invincibly set in its habitual ways into the question whether this inclination towards pessimism reflected a mood or phase in myself, and I threw out a qualifying suggestion or so; but for my own part I could not find any serious reason to believe that the mental effort that was clearly necessary if man was to escape that fate that marched upon him would ever be made. His conservative resistances, his apathy, seemed incurable.<br /><br />Now suddenly everywhere one meets with alarmed and open and enquiring minds. So far the tremendous dislocations of the present war have been immensely beneficial in stripping off what seemed to be quite invincible illusions of security only a year ago. I never expected to live to see the world with its eyes as widely open as they are to-day. The world has never been so awake. Little may come of it, much may come of it. We do not know. Life would amount to nothing at all if we did.<br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />12<br /><br />WORLD ORDER IN BEING<br /><br />THERE WILL BE NO day of days then when a new world order comes into being. Step by step and here and there it will arrive, and even as it comes into being it will develop fresh perspectives, discover unsuspected problems and go on to new adventures. No man, no group of men, will ever be singled out as its father or founder. For its maker will be not this man nor that man nor any man but Man, that being who is in some measure in every one of us. World order will be, like science, like most inventions, a social product, an innumerable number of personalities will have lived fine lives, pouring their best into the collective achievement.<br /><br />We can find a small-scale parallel to the probable development of a new world order in the history of flying. Less than a third of a century ago, ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have told you that flying was impossible; kites and balloons and possibly even a navigable balloon, they could imagine; they had known of such things for a hundred years; but a heavier then air machine, flying in defiance of wind and gravity! That they knew was nonsense. The would-be aviator was the typical comic inventor. Any fool could laugh at him. Now consider how completely the air is conquered.<br /><br />And who did it? Nobody and everybody. Twenty thousand brains or so, each contributing a notion, a device, an amplification. They stimulated one another; they took off from one another. They were like excited ganglia in a larger brain sending their impulses to and fro. They were people of the most diverse race and colour. You can write down perhaps a hundred people or so who have figured conspicuously in the air, and when you examine the rôle they have played, you will find for the most part that they are mere notorieties of the Lindbergh type who have put themselves modestly but firmly in the limelight and can lay no valid claim to any effective contribution whatever. You will find many disputes about records and priority in making this or that particular step, but the lines of suggestion, the growth and elaboration of the idea, have been an altogether untraceable process. It has been going on for not more than a third of a century, under our very eyes, and no one can say precisely how it came about. One man said "Why not this?" and tried it, and another said "Why not that?" A vast miscellany of people had one idea in common, an idea as old as Dædalus, the idea that "Man can fly". Suddenly, swiftly, it got about - that is the only phrase you can use - that flying was attainable. And man, man as a social being, turned his mind to it seriously, and flew.<br /><br />So it will certainly be with the new world order, if ever it is attained. A growing miscellany of people are saying - it is getting about - that "World Pax is possible", a World Pax in which men will be both united and free and creative. It is of no importance at all that nearly every man of fifty and over receives the idea with a pitying smile. Its chief dangers are the dogmatist and the would-be "leader" who will try to suppress every collateral line of work which does not minister to his supremacy. This movement must be, and it must remain, many-headed. Suppose the world had decided that Santos Dumont or Hiram Maxim was the heaven-sent Master of the Air, had given him the right to appoint a successor and subjected all experiments to his inspired control. We should probably have the Air Master now, with an applauding retinue of yes-men, following the hops of some clumsy, useless and extremely dangerous apparatus across country with the utmost dignity and self-satisfaction . . . .<br /><br />Yet that is precisely how we still set about our political and social problems.<br /><br />Bearing this essential fact in mind that the Peace of Man can only be attained, if it is attained at all, by an advance upon a long and various front, at varying speed and with diverse equipment, keeping direction only by a common faith in the triple need for collectivism, law and research, we realise the impossibility of drawing any picture of the new order as though it was as settled and stable as the old order imagined itself to be. The new order will be incessant; things will never stop happening, and so it defies any Utopian description. But we may nevertheless assemble a number of possibilities that will be increasingly realisable as the tide of disintegration ebbs and the new order is revealed.<br /><br />To begin with we have to realise certain peculiarities of human behaviour that are all too disregarded in general political speculation. We have considered the very important rôle that may be played in our contemporary difficulties by a clear statement of the Rights of Man, and we have sketched such a Declaration. There is not an item in that Declaration, I believe, which a man will not consider to be a reasonable demand - so far as he himself is concerned. He will subscribe to it in that spirit very readily. But when he is asked not only to concede by the same gesture to everybody else in the world, but as something for which he has to make all the sacrifices necessary for its practical realisation, he will discover a reluctance to "go so far as that". He will find a serious resistance welling up from his sub-conscious and trying to justify itself in his thoughts.<br /><br />The things he will tell you will be very variable; but the word "premature" will play a large part in it. He will display a tremendous tenderness and consideration with which you have never credited him before, for servants, for workers, for aliens and particularly for aliens of a different colour from himself. They will hurt themselves with all this dangerous liberty. Are they fit, he will ask you, for all this freedom? "Candidly, are they fit for it?" He will be slightly offended if you will say, "As fit as you are". He will say in a slightly amused tone, "But how can you say that?" and then going off rather at a tangent, "I am afraid you idealise your fellow-creatures."<br /><br />As you press him, you will find this kindliness evaporating from his resistance altogether. He is now concerned about the general beauty and loveliness of the world. He will protest that this new Magna Carta will reduce all the world to "a dead level of uniformity". You will ask him why must a world of free-men be uniform and at a dead level? You will get no adequate reply. It is an assumption of vital importance to him and he must cling to it. He has been accustomed to associate "free" and "equal", and has never been bright-minded enough to take these two words apart and have a good look at them separately. He is likely to fall back at this stage upon that Bible of the impotent genteel, Huxley’s Brave New World, and implore you to read it. You brush that disagreeable fantasy aside and continue to press him. He says that nature has made men unequal, and you reply that that is no reason for exaggerating the fact. The more unequal and various their gifts, the greater is the necessity for a Magna Carta to protect them from one another. Then he will talk of robbing life of the picturesque and the romantic and you will have some difficulty in getting these words defined. Sooner or later it will grow clear that he finds the prospect of a world in which "Jack’s as good as his Master" unpleasant to the last degree.<br /><br />If you still probe him with questions and leading suggestions, you will begin to realise how large a part the need for glory over his fellows plays in his composition (and incidentally you will note, please, you own secret satisfaction in carrying the argument against him). It will become clear to you, if you collate the specimen under examination with the behaviour of children, yourself and the people about you, under what urgent necessity they are for the sense of triumph, of being better and doing better than their fellows, and having it felt and recognised by someone. It is a deeper, steadier impulse than sexual lust; it is a hunger. It is the clue to the unlovingness of so much sexual life, to sadistic impulses, to avarice, hoarding and endless ungainful cheating and treachery which gives men the sense of getting the better of someone even if they do not get the upper hand.<br /><br />In the last resort this is why we must have law, and why Magna Carta and all its kindred documents set out to defeat human nature in defence of the general happiness. Law is essentially an adjustment of that craving to glory over other living things, to the needs of social life, and it is more necessary in a collectivist society than in any other. It is a bargain, it is a social contract, to do as we would be done by and to repress our extravagant egotisms in return for reciprocal concessions. And in the face of these considerations we have advanced about the true nature of the beast we have to deal with, it is plain that the politics of the sane man as we have reasoned them out, must anticipate a strenuous opposition to this primary vital implement for bringing about the new world order.<br /><br />I have suggested that the current discussion of "War Aims" may very effectively be transformed into the propaganda of this new Declaration of the Rights of Man. The opposition to it and the attempts that will be made to postpone, mitigate, stifle and evade it, need to be watched, denounced and combatted persistently throughout the world. I do not know how far this Declaration I have sketched can be accepted by a good Catholic, but the Totalitarian pseudo-philosophy insists upon inequality of treatment for "non-Aryans" as a glorious duty. How Communists would respond to its clauses would, I suppose, depend upon their orders from Moscow. But what are called the "democracies" are supposed to be different, and it would be possible now to make that Declaration a searching test of the honesty and spirit of the leaders and rulers in whom they trust. These rulers can be brought to the point by it, with a precision unattainable in any other fashion.<br /><br />But the types and characters and authorities and officials and arrogant and aggressive individuals who will boggle at this Declaration and dispute and defy it, do not exhaust the resistances of our unregenerate natures to this implement for the establishment of elementary justice in the world. For a far larger proportion of people among the "democracies" will be found, who will pay it lip service and then set about discovering how, in their innate craving for that sense of superiority and advantage which lies so near the core of our individuals wills, they may unobtrusively sabotage it and cheat it. Even if they only cheat it just a little. I am inclined to think this disingenuousness is a universal weakness. I have a real passion for serving the world, but I have a pretty keen disposition to get more pay for my service, more recognition and so on than I deserve. I do not trust myself. I want to be under just laws. We want law because we are all potential law-breakers.<br /><br />This is a considerable digression into psychology, and I will do no more than glance at how large a part this craving for superiority and mastery has played in the sexual practices of mankind. There we have the ready means for a considerable relief of this egotistical tension in mutual boasting and reassurance. But the motive for his digression here is to emphasise the fact that the generalisation of our "War Aims" into a Declaration of Rights, though it will enormously simplify the issue of the war, will eliminate neither open and heartfelt opposition nor endless possibilities of betrayal and sabotage.<br /><br />Nor does it alter the fact that even when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people, from maharajas to millionaires and from pukkha sahibs to pretty ladies, will hate the new world order, be rendered unhappy by frustration of their passions and ambitions through its advent and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to estimate its promise we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people.<br /><br />Ant it will be no light matter to minimise the loss of efficiency in the process of changing the spirit and pride of administration work from that of an investing, high-salaried man with a handsome display of expenditure and a socially ambitious wife, into a relatively less highly-salaried man with a higher standard of self-criticism, aware that he will be esteemed rather by what he puts into his work than by what he gets out of it. There will be a lot of social spill, tragi-comedy and loss of efficiency during the period of the change over, and it is better to be prepared for that.<br /><br />Yet after making allowances for these transitional stresses we may still look forward with some confidence to certain phases in the onset of World Order. War or war fear will have led everywhere to the concentration of vast numbers of workers upon munition work and the construction of offensive and defensive structures of all sorts, upon shipping, internal communications, replacement structures, fortification. There will be both a great accumulation and control of material and constructive machinery and also of hands already growing accustomed to handling it. As the possibility of conclusive victory fades and this war muddle passes out of its distinctively military phase towards revolution, and as some sort of Peace Congress assembles, it will be not only desirable but necessary for governments to turn over these resources and activities to social reconstruction. It will be too obviously dangerous and wasteful to put them out of employment. They must surely have learnt now what unemployment means in terms of social disorganisation. Governments will have to lay out the world, plan and build for peace whether they like it or not.<br /><br />But it will be asked, "Where will you find the credit to do that?" and to answer this question we must reiterate that fact that money is an expedient and not an end. The world will have the material and the hands needed for a reconditioning of its life everywhere. They are all about you now crying out to be used. It is, or at any rate it has been, the function of the contemporary money-credit system to bring worker and material together and stimulate their union. That system always justified its activities on that ground, that is its claim to exist, and if it does not exist for that purpose then for what purpose does it exist and what further need is there for it? If now the financial mechanism will not work, if it confronts us with a non possumus, then clearly it resigns its function.<br /><br />Then it has to get out of the way. It will declare the world has stopped when the truth will be that the City has stopped. It is the counting-house that has gone bankrupt. For a long time now an increasing number of people have been asking questions about the world counting-house, getting down at last to such fundamental questions as "What is money?" and "Why are Banks?" It is disconcerting but stimulating to find that no lucid answer is forthcoming.<br /><br />One might have imagined that long before this one of the many great bankers and financial experts in our world would have come forward with a clear and simple justification for the monetary practices of to-day. He would have shown how completely reasonable and trustworthy this money-credit system was. He would have shown what was temporarily wrong with it and how to set it working again, as the electrician does when the lights go out. He would have released us from our deepening distress about our money in the Bank, our little squirrel hoard of securities, the deflating lifebelt of property that was to assure our independence to the end. No one of that quality comes forward. There is not so much as a latter-day Bagehot. It dawns upon more and more of us that it is not a system at all and never has been a system, that it is an accumulation of conventions, usages, collateral developments and compensatory expedients, which creaks now and sways more and more and gives every sign of a complete and horrifying social collapse.<br /><br />Most of us have believed up to the last moment that somewhere distributed among the banks and city offices in a sort of world counting-house, there were books of accounts, multitudinous perhaps and intricate, but ultimately proper accounts. Only now is it dawning upon comfortable decent people that the counting-house is in a desperate mess, that codes seem to have been lost, entries made wrong, additions gone astray down the column, records kept in vanishing ink. . . .<br /><br />For years there has been a great and growing literature about money. It is very various but it has one general characteristic. First there is a swift exposure of the existing system as wrong. Then there is a glib demonstration of a new system which is right. Let this be done or that be done, "let the nation own its own money", says one radio prophet earnestly, repeatedly, simply, and all will be well. These various systems of doctrine run periodicals, organise movements (with coloured shirt complete), meet, demonstrate. They disregard each other flatly. And without exception all these monetary reformers betray signs of extreme mental strain.<br /><br />The secret trouble in their minds is gnawing doubt that their own proper "plan", the panacea, is in some subtle and treacherous way likely to fail them if it is put to the test. The internal fight against this intolerable shadow betrays itself in their outer behaviour. Their letters and pamphlets, with scarcely an exception, have this much in common with the letters one gets from lunatics, that there is a continual resort to capital letters and abusive terms. They shout out at the slightest provocation or none. They are not so much shouting at the exasperating reader who remains so obstinate when they have been so clear, so clear, as at the sceptical whisper within.<br /><br />Because there is no perfect money system by itself and there never can be. It is a dream like the elixir vitæ or perpetual motion. It is in the same order of thought.<br /><br />Attention has already been drawn, in our examination of Mr Streit’s proposals for Union Now, to the fact that money varies in its nature and operations with the theory of property and distribution on which society is based, that in a complete collectivism for example it becomes little more than the check handed to the worker to enable him to purchase whatever he likes from the resources of the community. Every detachment of production or enterprise from collective control (national or cosmopolitan) increases the possible functions of money and so makes a different thing of it. Thus there can be endless species of money - as many types of money as there are types and varieties of social order. Money in Soviet Russia is a different organ from money French or American money. The difference can be as wide as that between lungs and swimming bladders and gills. It is not simply a quantitative difference, as so many people seem to imagine, which can be adjusted by varying the rate of exchange or any such contrivance, it goes deeper, it is a difference in quality and kind. The bare thought of that makes our business and financial people feel uncomfortable and confused and menaced, and they go on moving their bars of gold about from this vault to that, hoping almost beyond hope that no one will say anything more about it. It worked very well for a time, to go on as though money was the same thing all the world over. They will not admit how that assumption is failing to work now.<br /><br />Clever people reaped a certain advantage from a more or less definite apprehension of the variable nature of money, but since one could not be a financier or business director without an underlying faith in one’s right to profit by one’s superior cleverness, there did not seem to be any reason for them to make a public fuss about it. They got their profits and the flats got left.<br /><br />Directly we grasp this not very obscure truth that there can be, and are, different sorts of money dependent on the economic usages or system in operation, which are not really interchangeable, then it becomes plain that a collectivist world order, whose fundamental law is such a Declaration of Rights as we have sketched, will have to carry on its main, its primary operations at least with a new world money, a specially contrived money, differing in its nature from any sort of money conventions that have hitherto served human needs. It will be issued against the total purchasable output of the community in return for the workers’ services to the community. There will be no more reason for going to the City for a loan than for going to the oracle at Delphi for advice about it.<br /><br />In the phase of social stress and emergency socialisation into which we are certainly passing, such a new money may begin to appear quite soon. Governments finding it impossible to resort to the tangled expedients of the financial counting-house, may take a short cut to recuperation, requisition the national resources within their reach and set their unemployment hands to work by means of these new checks. They may carry out international barter arrangements upon an increasing scale. The fact that the counting-house is in a hopeless mess because of its desperate attempts to ignore the protean nature of money, will become more manifest as it becomes less important.<br /><br />The Stock Exchange and Bank credit and all arts of loaning and usury and forestalling will certainly dwindle away together as the World Order establishes itself. If and when World Order establishes itself. They will be superseded, like egg-shells and fœtal membranes. There is no reason for denouncing those who devised and worked those methods and institutions as scoundrels and villains. They did honestly according to their lights. They were a necessary part of the process of getting Homo sapiens out of his cave and down from his tree. And gold, that lovely heavy stuff, will be released from its vaults and hiding-places for the use of the artist and technician - probably at a price considerably below the present quotations.<br /><br />Our attempt to forecast the coming World Order is framed then in an immense and increasing spectacle of constructive activity. We can anticipate a rapid transfiguration of the face of the earth as its population is distributed and re-distributed in accordance with the shifting requirements of economic production.<br /><br />It is not only that there is what is called a housing shortage in nearly every region of the earth, but most of the existing accommodation, by modern standards, is unfit for human occupation. There is scarcely a city in the world, the new world as well as the old, which does not need to have half its dwelling-places destroyed. Perhaps Stockholm, reconditioned under a Socialist regime, may claim to be an exception; Vienna was doing hopefully until its spirit was broken by Dollfuss and the Catholic reaction. For the rest, behind a few hundred main avenues and prospects, sea and river fronts, capitols, castles and the like, filthy slums and rookeries cripple childhood and degrade and devitalise its dulled elders. You can hardly say people are born into such surroundings; they are only half born.<br /><br />With the co-operation of the press and the cinema it would be easy to engender a world-wide public interest and enthusiasm for the new types of home and fitment that are now attainable by everyone. Here would be an outlet for urban and regional patriotism, for local shame and pride and effort. Here would be stuff to argue about. Wherever men and women have been rich enough, powerful enough and free enough, their thoughts have turned to architecture and gardening. Here would be a new incentive to travel, to see what other towns and country-sides were doing. The common man on his holidays would do what the English milord of the seventeenth century did; he would make his Grand Tour and come back from his journeys with architectural drawings and notions for home application. And this building and rebuilding would be a continuing process, a sustained employment, going on from good to better, as the economic forces shifted and changed with new discoveries and men’s ideas expanded.<br /><br />It is doubtful in a world of rising needs and standards if many people would want to live in manifestly old houses, any more than they would want to live in old clothes. Except in a few country places where ancient buildings have wedded themselves happily to some local loveliness and become quasi-natural things, or where some great city has shown a brave facade to the world, I doubt if there will be much to preserve. In such large open countries as the United States there has been a considerable development of the mobile home in recent years. People haul a trailer-home behind their cars and become seasonal nomads. . . . But there is no need to expatiate further on a limitless wealth of possibilities. Thousands of those who have been assisting in the monstrous clumsy evacuations and shiftings of population that have been going on recently, must have had their imaginations stirred by dim realisation of how much better all this might be done, if it were done in a new spirit and with a different intention. There must be a multitude of young and youngish people quite ripe for infection by this idea of cleaning up and resettling the world. Young men who are now poring over war maps and planning annexations and strategic boundaries, fresh Maginot lines, new Gibraltars and Dardanelles, may presently be scheming the happy and healthy distribution of routes and residential districts in relation to this or that important region of world supply for oil or wheat or water-power. It is essentially the same type of cerebration, better employed.<br /><br />Considerations of this sort are sufficient to supply a background of hopeful activities to our prospective world order. But we are not all architects and gardeners there are many types of minds and many of those who are training or being trained for the skilled co-operations of warfare and the development of a combatant morale, may be more disposed to go on with definitely educational work. In that way they can most easily gratify the craving for power and honourable service. They will face a world in extreme need of more teachers and fresh-minded and inspiring teachers at that. At every level of educational work from the kindergarten to the research laboratory, and in every part of the world from Capricornia to Alaska and from the Gold Coast to Japan, there will be need of active workers to bring minds into harmony with new order and to work out, with all the labour saving and multiplying apparatus available, cinema, radio, cheap books and pictures and all the rest of it, the endless new problems of human liaison that will arise. There we have a second line of work along which millions of young people may escape the stagnation and frustration which closed in upon their predecessors as the old order drew to its end.<br /><br />A sturdy and assertive variety of the new young will be needed for the police work of the world. They will be more disposed for authority and less teaching or creative activities than their fellows. The old proverb will still hold for the new order that it takes all sorts to make a world, and the alternative to driving this type of temperament into conspiracy and fighting it and, if you can, suppressing it, is to employ it, win it over, trust it, and give it law behind it to respect and enforce. They want a loyalty and this loyalty will find its best use and satisfaction in the service of world order. I have remarked in the course of such air travel as I have done, that the airmen of all nations have a common resemblance to each other and that the patriotic virus in their blood is largely corrected by a wider professionalism. At present the outlook before a young airmen is to perish in a spectacular dog-fight before he is five and twenty. I wonder how many of them really rejoice in that prospect.<br /><br />It is not unreasonable to anticipate the development of an ad hoc disarmament police which will have its greatest strength in the air. How easily the spirit of an air police can be de-nationalised is shown by the instance of the air patrols on the United States-Canadian border, to which President Roosevelt drew my attention. There is a lot of smuggling along that border and the planes now play an important part in its suppression. At first the United States and Canada had each their own planes. Then in a wave of common sense, the two services were pooled. Each plane now carries a United States and Canadian customs officer. When contraband is spotted the plane comes down on it and which officer acts is determined by the destination of the smuggled goods. There we have a pattern for a world struggling through federation to collective unity. An ad hoc disarmament police with its main strength in the air would necessarily fall into close co-operation with the various other world police activities. In a world where criminals can fly anywhere, the police must be able to fly anywhere too. Already we have a world-wide network of competent men fighting the white-slave traffic, the drug traffic and so forth. The thing begins already.<br /><br />All this I write to provide imaginative material for those who see the coming order as a mere blank interrogation. People talk much nonsense about the disappearance of incentive under socialism. The exact opposite is the truth. It is the obstructive appropriation of natural resources by private ownership that robs the prosperous of incentive and the poor of hope. Our Declaration of Human rights assures a man the proper satisfaction of all his elementary needs in kind, and nothing more. If he wants more than that he will have to work for it, and the healthier he is and the better he is fed and housed, the more bored he will be by inactivity and the more he will want something to do. I am suggesting what he is likely to do in general terms, and that is as much as one can do now. We can talk about the broad principles upon which these matters will be handled in a consolidating world socialism, but we can scarcely venture to anticipate the detailed forms, the immense richness and variety of expression, an ever-increasing number of intelligent people will impose upon these primary ideas.<br /><br />But there is one more structural suggestion that it may be necessary to bring into our picture. So far as I know it was first broached by that very bold and subtle thinker, Professor William James, in a small book entitled The Moral Equivalent of War. He pointed out the need there might be for a conception of duty, side by side with the idea of rights, that there should be something in the life of every citizen, man or woman alike, that should give him at once a sense of personal obligation to the World State. He brought that into relation with the fact that there will remain in any social order we can conceive, a multitude of necessary services which by no sort of device can be made attractive as normal life-long occupations. He was not thinking so much of the fast-vanishing problem of mechanical toil as the such irksome tasks as the prison warder’s, the asylum attendant’s; the care of the aged and infirm, nursing generally, health and sanitary services, a certain residuum of clerical routine, dangerous exploration and experiment. No doubt human goodness is sufficient to supply volunteers for many of these things, but are the rest of us entitled to profit by their devotion? His solution is universal conscription for a certain period of the adult life. The young will have to do so much service and take so much risk for the general welfare as the world commonwealth requires. They will be able to do these jobs with the freshness and vigour of those who know they will presently be released, and who find their honour through performance; they will not be subjected to that deadening temptation to self-protective slacking and mechanical insensitiveness, which assails all who are thrust by economic necessity into these callings for good and all.<br /><br />It is quite possible that a certain percentage of these conscripts may be caught by the interest of what they are doing; the asylum attendant may decide to specialise in psycho-therapeutic work; the hospital nurse succumb to that curiosity which underlies the great physiologist; the Arctic worker may fall in love with his snowy wilderness. . . .<br /><br />One other leading probability of a collectivist world order has to be noted here, and that is an enormous increase in the pace and amount of research and discovery. I write research, but by that I mean that double-barrelled attack upon ignorance, the biological attack and the physical attack, that is generally known as "Science". "Science" comes to us from those academic Dark Ages when men had to console themselves for their ignorance by pretending that there was a limited amount of knowledge in the world, and little chaps in caps and gowns strutted about, bachelors who knew all that there was to be known. Now it is manifest that none of us know very much, and the more we look into what we think we know, the more hitherto undetected things we shall find lurking in our assumptions.<br /><br />Hitherto this business of research, which we call the "scientific world", has been in the hands of very few workers indeed. I throw out the suggestion that in our present-day world, of all the brains capable of great and masterful contributions to "scientific" thought and achievement, brains of the quality of Lord Rutherford’s, or Darwin’s or Mendel’s or Freud’s or Leonardo’s or Galileo’s, not one in a thousand, not one in a score of thousands, ever gets born into such conditions as to realise its opportunities. The rest never learn a civilised language, never get near a library, never have the faintest chance of self-realisation, never hear the call. They are under-nourished, they die young, they are misused. And of the millions who would make good, useful, eager secondary research workers and explorers, not one in a million is utilised.<br /><br />But now consider how things will be if we had a stirring education ventilating the whole world, and if we had a systematic and continually more competent search for exceptional mental quality and a continually more extensive net of opportunity for it. Suppose a quickening public mind implies an atmosphere of increasing respect for intellectual achievement and livelier criticism of imposture. What we call scientific progress to-day would seem a poor, hesitating, uncertain advance in comparison with what would be happening under these happier conditions.<br /><br />The progress of research and discovery has produced such brilliant and startling results in the past century and a half that few of us are aware of the small number of outstanding men who have been concerned in it, and how the minor figures behind these leaders trail off into a following of timid and ill-provided specialists who dare scarcely stand up to a public official on their own ground. This little army, this "scientific world" of to-day, numbering I suppose from head to tail, down to the last bottle-washer, not a couple of hundred thousand men, will certainly be represented in the new world order by a force of millions, better equipped, amply co-ordinated, free to question, able to demand opportunity. Its best will be no better than our best, who could not be better, but they will be far more numerous, and its rank and file, explorers, prospectors, experimental team workers and an encyclopædic host of classifiers and co-ordinators and interpreters, will have a vigour, a pride and confidence that will make the laboratories of to-day seem half-way back to the alchemist’s den.<br /><br />Can one doubt that the "scientific world" will break out in this way when the revolution is achieved, and that the development of man’s power over nature and over his own nature and over this still unexplored planet, will undergo a continual acceleration as the years pass? No man can guess beforehand what doors will open then nor upon what wonderlands.<br /><br />These are some fragmentary intimations of the quality of that wider life a new world order can open to mankind. I will not speculate further about them because I would not have it said that this book is Utopian or "Imaginative" or anything of that sort. I have set down nothing that is not strictly reasonable and practicable. It is the soberest of books and the least original of books. I think I have written enough to show that it is impossible for world affairs to remain at their present level. Either mankind collapses or our species struggles up by the hard yet fairly obvious routes I have collated in this book, to reach a new level of social organisation. There can be little question of the abundance, excitement and vigour of living that awaits our children upon that upland. If it is attained. There is no doubting their degradation and misery if it is not.<br /><br />There is nothing really novel about this book. But there has been a certain temerity in bringing together facts that many people have avoided bringing together for fear they might form an explosive mixture. Maybe they will. They may blast through some obstinate mental barriers. In spite of that explosive possibility, that explosive necessity, it may be this remains essentially an assemblage, digest and encouragement of now prevalent but still hesitating ideas. It is a plain statement of the revolution to which reason points an increasing number of minds, but which they still lack resolution to undertake. In The Fate of Homo sapiens I have stressed the urgency of the case. Here I have assembled the things they can and need to do. They had better summon up their resolution.devorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-78042885541378822482009-10-03T08:29:00.000-07:002013-07-03T12:55:03.473-07:00Cap. I - H. G. Wells, by John Batchelor<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRClyxv6TRJIETJcS2YbWCcab2-j21u3jn9Jcg5mvBAjuYjDgCfSV5aklM78MoBnvph5gBC8JKGsHfo2duYXHGXWN2GPycWwOn-YjjOnQmU9wnnMW4tu_AIePgqdiKDukBxq4NXNp3ZkrY/s1600-h/H.+G.+Wells+by+John+Batchelor.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5388503374541869138" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRClyxv6TRJIETJcS2YbWCcab2-j21u3jn9Jcg5mvBAjuYjDgCfSV5aklM78MoBnvph5gBC8JKGsHfo2duYXHGXWN2GPycWwOn-YjjOnQmU9wnnMW4tu_AIePgqdiKDukBxq4NXNp3ZkrY/s320/H.+G.+Wells+by+John+Batchelor.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 320px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 207px;" /></a><br />
[page 3]<br />
[1st. parragraph]<br />
socialist theory, fed by his reading of Carlyle and Rushkin and by his visits to Kelmscott House in Hammersmith, where he met William Morris, Bernard Shaw and other radicals of the moment. He was an effective student debater and already saw himself as someone marked out, special, destined to be a prophet. A cartoon he drew of himself in 1886 show him surronded by scraps of paper on which are scribbled drawings and captions indicating the possible courses that his future might take: 'How I could I save the Nation', 'All about God', 'Secret of the Kosmos', Whole Duty of Man' and 'Wells' Design for a New Framework of Society'. The new ideas that he was encountering stirred up in his mind visions which had to be written down; the habits of the creative writer were already becoming established.[/1st. parragraph]<br />
<br />
[traducción primer pàrrafo]<br />
la teoría socialista, alimentada por sus lecturas de Carlyle (wikipedia <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Carlyle">en español</a> y <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Carlyle">en inglés</a>) y Rushkin (wikipedia <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ruskin">en español</a> y <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ruskin">en inglés</a>),y por sus visitas a Kelsmcott House en Hammersmith donde se encontró con <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Morris">William Morris</a>, Bernard Shaw (wikipedia en <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bernard_Shaw">español</a> y en <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bernard_Shaw">inglés</a>) otros radicales del momento. Cuando era estudiante, era un polemista muy efectivo, y ya se veía como una persona marcada, especial, destinada a ser profeta. Una caricatura que hizo de si mismo lo muestra rodeado de trozos de papel en los que hacía dibujos y escribía pequeños textos como: "¿Como podría salvar yo a la nación?", "Todo acerca de Dios", "El secreto del Cosmos", "La obligación del hombre" y "El diseño de Wells para un nuevo marco de la sociedad". Las nuevas ideas que iba encontrando en su visiones mentales y que necesitaban ser puestas por escrito. Los hábitos del escritor creativo ya se estaban estableciendo.[/traducción primer párrafo]<br />
<br />
[2nd parragraph]He had been writting odds and ends since adolescence, and in 1886 became the first editor of the new student magazine, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Science Schools Journal</span>. The papers and short pieces that he wrote for <span style="font-style: italic;">The Journal</span> show already the combination of romance, satire and scientific ideas which was to characterise the romances of the 1890s. A paper called 'The Past and the Present of the Human Race' contained ideas about human evolution which were to reappear in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Time Machine</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">The War of the Worlds</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">The First Men in the Moon</span>; and a story about time travel, 'The Chronic Argonauts', was in effect an early draft of the story which Wells was to work, and re-work, until it was finally revised as <span style="font-style: italic;">The Time Machine</span> in 1895. His writing, together with his involvement in student politics, was partly a preparation for a possible alternative career in case he proved an academic failure. In his autobiography Wells recalls that following three years of 'deliberate abstinence' from reading during his student days, at the age of 21 he plunged back into literature with a new purposiveness, and conciously trained himself as a writer. He 'ground out some sonnets' and 'read everything accesible', which included romantic and radical writers as well as popular writers of Gotic and supernatural romance: Shelley, Keats, Heine, Whitman, Lamb, Stevenson, Hawthorne. In a way Wells student years were typical of the undergraduate careers of wayward writers - from Byron to Auden, one may say - in that he made a marked pesonal impact on student life, was insubordinate and undisciplined, and was already feeling his way towards his real identity as a writer. He was also falling in love, with his cousin Isabel; a relationship which was to prove another false start.[/2nd parragraph]<br />
<br />
[traducción segundo párrafo]Wells había estado escribiendo pequeñas obritas desde la adolescencia, y en 1886 se convirtió en el primer editor de la nueva revista estudiantil <span style="font-style: italic;">El Diario de la Escuela de Ciencias</span>. Los artículos y pequeñas obras que él escribió para el diario ya mostró la combinación de romance, sátira e ideas científicas que caracterizaban las novelas de la década de 1890. Un documento llamado "El pasado y el presente de la raza humana" contiene ideas sobre la evolución humana que vuelven a aparecer en <span style="font-style: italic;">La máquina del tiempo</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">La guerra de los mundos</span> y <span style="font-style: italic;">Los primeros hombres en la luna</span>; y una historia sobre viajes en el tiempo, Los argonautas crónicos, era en efecto un primer borrador de una historia en la que Wells trabajó, y volvió a trabajar hasta que finalmente publicada como <span style="font-style: italic;">La máquina del tiempo</span>. Sus primeros escritos, junto a su participación en la política estudiantil, fue una preparación para una posible carrera alternativa en caso de que sus estudios resultasen un fracaso. En su autobiografía Wells recuerda que, tras tres años de "abstinencia involuntaria" de la lectura durante sus días de estudiante, a la edad de 21 años se metió de nuevo en la lectura con una finalidad nueva y consciente de capacitarse a sí mismo como escritor. Leyó todo lo que estaba a su alcance, incluyendo a escritores románticos y radicales, así como escritores populares de la literatura gótica y romances sobrenaturales: Shelley, Keats, Heine, Whitman, Lamb, Stevenson, Hawthorne. En cierto modo, los años de estudiante de Wells eran típicos de las carreras pre universitarias de escritores díscolos - desde Byron a Auden -, Wells era insoburdinado e indisciplinado, y ya estaba tanteando el camino hacia su verdadera identidad como escritor.<br />
<br />
[3rd parragraph]After completing the course at the Normal School, with [/page 3]<br />
<br />
[page 4]'wilted qualifications', Wells had several teaching posts. The first was at a dismal boy's school in North Wales, which he left after one of the pupils had injured him on the sports field. This injured was to a kidney which was to trouble him for the rest of his life; it may be that he was also suffering from incipient diabetes, although he was not diagnosed as a diabetic until his sixties. The fact was that Wells was never fisically fit, and this added to the pressure to make his living for writing; he was simply not suited to the physical strain of teaching.[/page 4]<br />
<br />
[traducción tercer párrafo]Después de completar el curso en la escuela Normal con flojas calificaciones, Wells tomó sucesivamente varios puestos de enseñanza. El primero fue un poco prometedor puesto de maestro en una escuela en el norte de Gales, de donde salió después de que uno de los alumnos lo hubiera herido en el campo de deportes. Esta herida fue en el riñón, el cual le causó problemas por el resto de su vida. Puede ser que él también sufriera de diabetes, aunque no fue diagnosticado como diabético hasta los 60. El hecho es que Wells nunca estuvo físicamente en forma, y esto sumado a la presión de ganarse la vida escribiendo, no era el ambiente adecuado para la enseñanza.[/traducción tercer párrafo]<br />
<br />
[4th parragraph]After finding a new teaching post at a more satisfactory private school (in London) Wells enrolled as an external student for the London B.Sc., in order to improve his teaching qualifications, and at the same time wrote scraps of journalism - quizzes, two-pages articles on scientific topics - for the new popular papers, such Answers and Tit-bits, which catered for the literature proletarian audience created by the elementary education introduced in the 1870s. A better paid job teaching adult students at Briggs' Tutorial College soon offered itself, and in 1890 Wells passed his B. Sc. with first class honours in zoology and got his first publication in a major periodical: an article on the misteriousness of the physical world called 'The Rediscovery of the Unique', published in 1891 by Frank Harris in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Fortnightly Review</span>. By 1891 he felt sufficiently secure to marry his cousin Isabel, and he now saw himself as a comitted to teaching and to educational writing. His first book-length publication was a textbook for biologists.[/4th parragraph]<br />
<br />
[traducción cuarto párrafo]Después de encontrar un nuevo puesto más satisfactorio como profesor en una escuela de educación de adultos en Londres, Wells se inscribió como alumno externo en la licenciatura en la Universidad de Londres, a fin de mejorar su cualificación docente, al tiempo que escribía concursos de preguntas y respuestas, artículos de dos páginas sobre temas de divulgación científica para que nuevas publicaciones populares, tales como Answers y Tit-bits, que atiende a la literatura de la audiencia proletaria creada por la educación primaria introducida en la década de 1870.[/traducción cuarto párrafo]<br />
<br />
[5th parragraph]devorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-30200687105749530032009-10-03T08:04:00.000-07:002009-10-03T08:06:43.679-07:00When the Sleeper Wakes<a href="http://www.online-literature.com/wellshg/sleeperwakes/">When the Sleeper Wakes - 1899</a>.devorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-4403796157501800502009-10-02T15:19:00.000-07:002009-10-02T15:25:07.469-07:00Socialismo y la ciencia positiva<a href="http://www.archive.org/stream/socialismpositiv00ferruoft/socialismpositiv00ferruoft_djvu.txt">Fuente</a>.<br /><br />THE SOCIALIST LIBRARY. 1.<br /><br /><br /><br />The Socialist Library. L<br /><br />EDITED BY J. RAMSAY MACDONALD, M.P.<br /><br />SOCIALISM AND POSITIVE<br />SCIENCE<br /><br />(DARWIN SPENCER MARX)<br /><br />BT<br /><br />ENRICO FERRI<br /><br />in<br /><br />PROFESSOR OF PENAL LAW IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ROME :<br />DIRECTOR OF THE Scuola Positiva :<br />DEPUTY.<br /><br />TRANSLATED BY EDITH C. HARVEY<br /><br />From the French Edition of 1896<br /><br />FIFTH EDITION<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />LONDON<br /><br />INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY,<br /><br />23, BRIDE LANE, E.G.<br /><br />1909.<br /><br /><br /><br />EDITIONS<br /><br />FIRST ............... April 1905<br /><br />SECOND ............... Sept. 1905<br /><br />THIRD ............... Nov. 1905<br /><br />FOURTH... ............ Nov. 1906<br /><br />FIFTH ............... Feb. 1909<br /><br />NX<br /><br />Al<br /><br /><br /><br />7116S1<br /><br /><br /><br />TABLE OF CONTENTS.<br /><br />PART I.<br /><br />CHAP. PAGE<br /><br />EDITOR'S PREFACE - v<br /><br />PREFACE TO FRENCH EDITION - - ix<br /><br />INTRODUCTION - - - xi<br /><br />I. VIRCHOW AND HAECKEL AT THE CONGRESS<br /><br />OF MUNICH ------ i<br /><br />II. THE EQUALITY OF INDIVIDUALS - 8<br /><br />III. THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE AND ITS VICTIMS 23<br /><br />IV. THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST - 38<br />V. SOCIALISM AND RELIGIOUS BELIEFS 47<br /><br />VI. THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE SPECIES 55<br /><br />VII. "THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE " AND THE " CLASS<br /><br />STRUGGLE" ------ 62<br /><br />PART II.<br />T VIII/ EVOLUTION AND SOCIALISM 77<br /><br />IX. THE ORTHODOX ARGUMENT AND THE SOCIA-<br />LIST ARGUMENT AS OPPOSED TO THE<br />THEORY OF EVOLUTION - 79<br /><br />X. THE LAW OF APPARENT RETROGRESSION AND<br /><br />COLLECTIVE PROPERTY - - 85<br /><br />SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY 93<br /><br /><br /><br />( Xlli EVOLUTION, REVOLUTION, REVOLT, SOCIALISM<br /><br />AND ANARCHY in<br /><br />PART III.<br /><br />XIII. STERILITY OF SOCIOLOGY 137<br /><br />; XIV. MARX, DARWIN, SPENCER, &c. - - - 140<br /><br />APPENDICES.<br /><br />1. LETTER IN REPLY TO HERBERT SPENCER.<br /><br />2. SOCIALIST SUPERSTITION AND INDIVIDUALIST<br /><br />SHORT-SIGHTEDNESS.<br /><br /><br /><br />EDITOR'S PREFACE.<br /><br />Socialismo e Scienza Positiva was published in Rome in 1894, and in the following year was translated into French (from which this translation is made), German and Spanish. In 1901 it was published in English in America.<br /><br />After having been an adverse critic of the unscientific Utopian socialism which preceded Marx, Ferri yielded in 1893 to Marx's influence, identified himself with the socialists in the Italian Chamber of which he had been a radical member since 1886, and began to write Socialismo e Scienza Positiva.<br /><br />In his recently published book on Democracy and Reaction, Mr. Hobhouse points out h6w<br />the conservative and aristocratic interests in Europe have armed themselves for defensive and offensive purposes with the law of the struggle for existence, and its corollary, the survival of the fittest. Ferri's aim in this volume has been to show that Darwinism is not only not in intellectual opposition to socialism, but is its scientific foundation.<br /><br />In developing his argument, he brings his<br />new faith into organic touch with the studies<br />in criminology, especially social criminology,<br />upon which he had written a great work in<br />1880, a portion of which has been published<br />in the Criminology Series, edited by Dr.<br />Douglas Mojrison. No part of this present<br />study is more suggestive than the frequent<br />discussions which it contains upon the social<br /><br /><br /><br />nature of crime, its connection with the char-<br />acteristics of the various stages in social evo-<br />lution, and the limits within which it can be<br />cured by better economic arrangements.<br /><br />In common with most Marxian socialists,<br />Ferri attacks religion and capitalism, marriage<br />(as we know it) and private property in the<br />means of production, in the same breath. The<br />socialist movement in this country has not<br />only not considered these attacks to be essen-<br />tial to the success of socialism, but has largely<br />disagreed with them. It may be true logically,<br />as Ferri asserts, that once the evolutionary<br />process is granted, it is as easy to swallow the<br />gnat of eternal and self-existent force and<br />matter, as it is to swallow the camel of an<br />eternal and self-existent God. Neither belief<br />may explain the origin of force, of creative<br />power, of will to struggle. But the British<br />socialist, as a rule, has said " Those things<br />have nothing to do with socialism."<br /><br />So also with marriage. Mr. Bryce suggested<br />to the Sociological Society a few days ago<br />(23rd March) that it was necessary to collect<br />and classify, with a view of drawing scientific<br />sociological inferences from them, the facts<br />regarding the working of laws making divorce<br />easy. These facts have not been collected<br />and until they are, dogmatising in a priori<br />fashion upon the sociological future of the<br />marriage tie has not seemed to the British<br />socialist a very profitable mental exercise.<br />He has been content to record two well<br />observed conclusions. The first is, that capi-<br />talism hinders the free play of simple affection<br />in marriage to-day, and is thus responsible<br />not only for many ghastly failures in matri-<br />monial ventures, but also for offspring phy-<br />sically and morally unfit. This Ferri describes<br />as " sexual selection the wrong way " (selection<br /><br /><br /><br />sexuelle a rebours.) The second is, that<br />capitalist industrial methods are crushing the<br />family out of existence, and whatever family<br />theory may or may not be most in accordance<br />with socialist conceptions, as a matter of<br />actual fact, capitalism and family life cannot<br />flourish together.<br /><br />Ferri has conclusively shown that the natural<br />basis of the family is menaced by the motives<br />and the conditions of the capitalist regime.<br />When that regime has been supplanted by<br />another such as the socialist contemplates, the<br />family will flourish on congenial soil and in<br />pure air, and its moral and sociological value<br />will decide what laws are to govern its form<br />and determine its stability. Taking these<br />things into consideration, one may, with<br />formidable array of argument, contend that<br />so far from the marriage bond being weakened<br />by socialism, the supreme moral and<br />sociological value of the family organisation<br />will be then so clear, that the secular state<br />will frown upon divorce as much as the<br />Catholic Church does at the present moment.<br />The chief value of this study, however, is<br />the claim that it so successfully makes, that<br />the socialist conception -of human progress<br />and of the social conditions which are to be<br />the characteristics of the next, the socialist,<br />stage in that evolution, is not only in<br />accordance with the processes which Darwin<br />proved to be the method of the development<br />of life from the moneron to man, but is<br />those very processes themselves applied to<br />human society with such modifications as are<br />necessitated by the fact that they now<br />relate to life which can consciously adapt<br />itself to its -circumstances and aid natural<br />evolution by economising in experimental<br />waste. Thus, socialism is naught but Dar-<br /><br /><br /><br />winism economised, made definite, become an<br />intellectual policy, applied to the conditions<br />of human society.<br /><br />The translation, which has been made by<br />Miss Harvey, is as literal as the medium of<br />English will allow.<br /><br />J.R.M.<br />April, 1905.<br /><br /><br /><br />AUTHOR'S PREFACE<br /><br />FOR THE FRENCH EDITION.<br /><br /><br /><br />THIS VOLUME which it is desired to bring<br />before the large public of French readers in<br />entering on the complex and vast question of<br />socialism, has a well-defined and limited aim.<br /><br />I have proposed to indicate, and nearly<br />always by means of rapid and summary<br />observations, the general relations between<br />contemporary socialism and the trend of<br />modern scientific thought.<br /><br />The opponents of contemporary socialism<br />only see in it, or only wish to see in it, a<br />reproduction of the sentimental socialism of<br />the first half of the igth century. They<br />maintain that socialism is contrary to the<br />data and fundamental inductions of physics,<br />biology and sociology, the marvellous de-<br />velopment and fruitful applications of which<br />are the title to glory of the century just closed.<br /><br />These opponents of socialism have made use<br />of the individual interpretations and exaggera-<br />tions of certain partisans of Darwinism, of<br />the opinions of such-and-such a sociologist<br />opinions and interpretations in manifest con-<br />tradiction to the premises of their theories on<br />universal and inevitable evolution.<br /><br />It has also been said, under the pressure of<br />acute or chronic hunger, that " if science is<br />against socialism, so much the worse for<br />science." And this is correct if by science<br />even with a capital S is meant all the<br />observations and conclusions ad usum delphini<br /><br /><br /><br />which orthodox science, academic and official<br />often in good faith, but sometimes also with<br />a view to personal interest has always placed<br />at the disposal of dominant minorities.<br /><br />I have believed it could be shown that<br />positive science is in complete agreement with<br />contemporary socialism which, since Marx<br />and Engels and their successors, differs essen-<br />tially from sentimental socialism both in its<br />scientific discipline and in its political tactics,<br />though it continues the generous efforts to<br />realise an identical aim : social justice for all<br />men.<br /><br />I have loyally and sincerely maintained my<br />thesis on scientific grounds : I have always<br />recognised the partial truth of the theories of<br />our opponents, and I have not overlooked the<br />title to glory that the bourgeois class and<br />science have acquired since the French<br />Revolution. The disappearance of the<br />bourgeois class and science, which at their<br />coming had marked the disappearance of the<br />clerical and aristocratic class and science, will<br />have as a consequence the triumph of social<br />justice for the whole of humanity, without<br />distinction of classes, and the triumph of truth<br />in its final consequences without reservations.<br /><br />The appendix contains my replies to a<br />letter of Herbert Spencer and to the anti-<br />socialistic book of M. Garofalo. It shows<br />what is the actual state of social science, the<br />struggle between ultra-conservative ortho-<br />doxy, which is prevented by its traditional<br />syllogisms from seeing the sad facts of contem-<br />porary life, and between the new heterodoxy<br />which is increasingly asserting itself among<br />the learned as also in the collective intelligence.<br /><br />ENRICO FERRI.<br />Brussels, Nov., 1895.<br /><br /><br /><br />INTRODUCTION.<br /><br />A CONVINCED follower of Darwin and Spencer,<br />I purpose demonstrating that Marxian<br />socialism the only kind that has a positive<br />method and scientific worth, and that has<br />power henceforward to inspire and group the<br />social democrats of the whole civilised world<br />is only the practical and fruitful comple-<br />ment in social life of that modern scientific<br />revolution, which, inaugurated several centur-<br />ies back by the revival of the experimental<br />method in all the branches of human know-<br />ledge, has triumphed in our days, thanks to<br />the labours of Charles Darwin and Herbert<br />Spencer.<br /><br />It is true that Darwin, and especially<br />Spencer, stopped short half -way from the final<br />conclusions of religious, political and social<br />order, which necessarily follow from ; their<br />indisputable premises. But that is only an<br />individual episode which cannot stop the<br />inevitable march of science or delay the<br />fulfilment of its practical consequences which<br />accord admirably with the saddest necessities<br />of contemporary life. This is but one more<br />obligation to us to render justice to the<br />scientific and political life of Karl Marx, who<br />completes the renovation of modern scientific<br />thought.<br /><br />Feeling and thought are the two inseparable<br />motive forces in the individual and the<br />collective life.<br /><br />Socialism, w.hich was only a few years ago<br />at the mercy of the deep-rooted but undiscip-<br />lined fluctuations of humanitarian sentiment-<br /><br /><br /><br />alism, found in the work of Marx and of those<br />who developed and completed it, its scientific<br />and social guide. In that lies the explanation<br />of each of its conquests.<br /><br />Civilisation is the most fruitful and beauti-<br />ful development of human energies, but it also<br />contains an infectious virus of enormous<br />power. By the side of the splendour of<br />artistic, scientific and industrial work, it<br />accumulates cankered products, idleness,<br />misery, folly, r crime, physical and moral<br />suicide that is to say, slavery.<br /><br />Pessimism this mournful symptom of a life<br />without an ideal, and, in part, the effect of<br />the exhaustion, or even of the degeneracy of<br />the nervous system extols final annihilation<br />in order to conquer pain.<br /><br />We, on the contrary, have faith in the<br />eternal " healing power of Nature," and<br />socialism is exactly that breath of a new and<br />better life which will deliver humanity<br />possibly after some access of fever from the<br />noxious products of the present phase of<br />civilisation, and which in a future phase will<br />give a new expansion to the healthy and<br />fruitful energies of all human beings.<br /><br />ENRICO FERRI.<br />Rome, June, 1894.<br /><br /><br /><br />SOCIALISM AND POSITIVE<br />SCIENCE.<br /><br />PART I.<br />CHAPTER I.<br /><br />VIRCHOW AND HAECKEL AT THE CONGRESS<br />OF MUNICH.<br /><br />ON the 1 8th September, 1877, Ernest<br />Haeckel, the celebrated embryologist<br />of Jena, gave an eloquent address at<br />the Congress of Naturalists, held at Munich, in<br />defence and explanation of Darwinism, at that<br />time the subject of most stormy controversies.<br /><br />Some days after, Virchow, the great path-<br />ologist a fighter in the parliamentary " pro-<br />gressive " party, who hates new theories in<br />politics as much as in science violently<br />attacked the Darwinian theory of organic<br />evolution, and with a very just presentiment<br />launched against it the cry of alarm and the<br />political anathema; " Darwinism leads directly<br />to Socialism."<br /><br />The German followers of Darwin, with<br /><br /><br /><br />Oscar Schmidt and Haeckel at their head,<br />protested immediately ; and in order not to<br />add this grave political opposition to that<br />then raised against Darwinism from the<br />religious, philosophical, and biological schools,<br />they maintained that on the contrary the<br />Darwinian theory is in open and absolute<br />opposition to socialism.<br /><br />" If the socialists were prudent (wrote Oscar<br />Schmidt in the Ausland, 2jih November, 1877)<br />they would do all in their power to hush up<br />in silence the theory of descent, for this doc-<br />trine proclaims aloud that socialistic ideas<br />are impracticable."<br /><br />" In fact," said Haeckel, * " there is no<br />scientific doctrine that proclaims more openly<br />than the theory of descent, that the equality<br />of individuals, to which socialism tends, is an<br />impossibility, that this chimerical equality is<br />in absolute contradiction to the necessary<br />inequality of individuals existing as a matter<br />of fact everywhere.<br /><br />" Socialism demands for all citizens equal<br />rights, equal duties, equal wealth, equal<br />enjoyments ; the theory of descent establishes,<br />on the contrary, that the realisation of these<br />wishes is purely and simply impossible, that,<br />in human as in animal societies, the rights,<br />the duties, the wealth, the enjoyments of all<br />the associated members neither will, nor cap,<br />ever be equal.<br /><br />* Les preuves du transformisme. Reply to Virchow.<br />Paris, 1879. Translated Soury, pp. no, &c.<br /><br /><br /><br />"The great law of differentiation teaches<br />that, as well in the general theory of evolution<br />as in its biological part the theory of descent<br />the variety of phenomena arises from an<br />original unity, the diversity of functions from<br />a primitive identity, the complexity of<br />organisation from a primordial simplicity.<br />The conditions of existence are from their<br />entry into life unequal for all individuals.<br />There must be added hereditary qualities and<br />innate tendencies which vary more or less.<br />How could one's work-in life and the results<br />that proceed from it be equal for all ?<br /><br />"The more social life is developed, the<br />more the great principle of the division of<br />labour becomes of importance, the more the<br />stability of the whole state demands that its<br />members should divide among themselves the<br />varied duties of life, and as the work to be<br />accomplished by individuals, and the expen-<br />diture of strength, talent, abilities, which it<br />necessitates, differs in the highest degree, it is<br />natural that the reward of this work should<br />also differ. These are facts so simple and so<br />evident, that every intelligent and enlightened<br />politician ought, it seems to me, to extol the<br />theory of descent and general doctrine of<br />evolution as the best antidote to the absurd<br />levelling Utopias of socialism.<br /><br />" And it is Darwinism, the theory of selec-<br />tion, that Virchow, in his denunciation, has<br />had more in view even than transform ism, the<br />theory of descent, which are always confused.<br />Darwinism is anything rather than socialistic.<br /><br /><br /><br />"If one wishes to attribute a political<br />tendency to this English theory which is<br />allowable this tendency would only be<br />aristocratic, not at all democratic, still less<br />socialistic.<br /><br />"The theory of selection teaches that in the<br />life of humanity, as in that of plants and<br />animals, everywhere and always a small<br />privileged minority alone succeeds in living<br />and developing itself ; the immense majority,<br />on the contrary, suffer and succumb more or<br />less prematurely. The germs of every kind of<br />plant and animal, and the young that are<br />produced from them, are innumerable. But<br />the number of those which have the good<br />fortune to develop to their complete maturity<br />and which attain the aim of their existence,<br />is comparatively insignificant.<br /><br />" The cruel and pitiless ' struggle for exis-<br />tence ' which goes on everywhere in animate<br />nature, and most naturally go on, this eternal<br />and inexorable competition of all that lives,<br />is an undeniable fact. Only the small num-<br />ber chosen from the strongest and fittest can<br />sustain this competition victoriously : the<br />large majority of the unhappy competitors<br />must necessarily perish. This tragic fatality<br />may well be deplored, but it cannot be denied<br />nor changed. All are called, but few are<br />chosen.<br /><br />" The selection, the ' election,' of these<br />' chosen ones,' is necessarily connected with<br />the defeat or the loss of a great number of<br />their living fellow creatures. Thus, another<br /><br /><br /><br />learned Englishman has called the funda-<br />mental principle of Darwinism : ' the survival<br />of the fittest, the victory of the best.'<br /><br />" In every case the principle of the selection<br />is anything rather than democratic : it is, on<br />the contrary, thoroughly aristocratic. If, then,<br />Darwinism, pushed to its final consequences,<br />has, according to Virchow, ' a very dangerous<br />side for the politician,' that is doubtless<br />because it favours aristocratic aspirations."<br /><br />I have reproduced in their entirety, and<br />even in their form, all the arguments of<br />Haeckel because they are those repeated<br />in varying tones and with expressions that<br />only differ from these in precision and<br />eloquence by the opponents of socialism<br />who like to assume a scientific manner, and<br />who, to facilitate their dispute, make use of<br />these ready-made phrases which have more<br />currency, even in science, than one would<br />imagine.<br /><br />It is easy, however, to show in this discus-<br />sion, that Virchow's point of view was more<br />exact and clear, and that the history of the<br />last twenty years has proved him to be right.<br /><br />It has happened, in fact, that Darwinism<br />and socialism have both progressed with a<br />marvellous force of expansion. The first<br />gained from thenceforth the unanimous sup-<br />port of the scientists for its fundamental<br />theory ; the second continued to develop in<br />its general aspirations and political discipline,<br />flooding all Jhe channels of the social con-<br />science like a torrential inundation from<br /><br /><br /><br />internal wounds due to the daily increase of<br />physical and moral disease, or like a slow,<br />capillary, irrevocable infiltration into minds<br />freed from all prejudices and unable to satisfy<br />themselves with the personal advantages<br />procured by the orthodox "raking in" of<br />profits.<br /><br />But as theories, political or scientific, are<br />natural phenomena, and not the capricious<br />and ephemeral blossom of the free will of<br />those who make and propagate them, it is<br />evident that if these two currents of modern<br />thought have both been able to triumph over<br />the first and strongest opposition of scientific<br />and political conservatism, and if the phalanx<br />of their disciples is daily augmented, that of<br />itself is sufficient to prove I would almost<br />say by a law of intellectual symbiosis that<br />they are neither irreconcilable nor contra-<br />dictory.<br /><br />Moreover, the three principal arguments to<br />which the anti -socialistic reasoning of Haeckel<br />is substantially reduced, cannot be maintained<br />against the most elementary criticism nor the<br />most superficial observation of daily life.<br /><br />I. Socialism tends to an imaginary equality<br />of everybody and everything. Darwinism, on<br />the contrary, not only states, but explains the<br />organic reasons for the natural inequality<br />of the aptitudes and even of the needs of<br />individuals.<br /><br />'II. In the life of humanity, as in that of<br />plants and animals, the immense majority of<br />those who are born are destined to perish<br /><br /><br /><br />7<br /><br />because only a small minority triumph in the<br />" struggle for existence." Socialism claims,<br />on the contrary, that all ought to triumph in<br />this struggle, and that no one ought to be<br />conquered.<br /><br />III. The struggle for existence secures the<br />survival of the best, the victory of the<br />" fittest," and there consequently follows an<br />aristocratic gradation of selected individuals,<br />instead of the democratic, collectivist levelling<br />of socialism.<br /><br /><br /><br />CHAPTER II.<br /><br />THE EQUALITY OF INDIVIDUALS.<br /><br />There is absolutely no foundation for the<br />first of the objections made to socialism in<br />the name of Darwinism.<br /><br />If it were true that socialism aspires to the<br />equality of all individuals, it would be correct<br />to assert that Darwinism condemns it irre-<br />vocably.<br /><br />But though people even to-day fluently<br />/ repeat some in good faith, like parrots that<br />recite ready-made phrases, others in bad faith<br />and through polemical dexterity that social-<br />ism is synonymous with equality and level-<br />ling, the truth is, on the contrary, that<br />scientific socialism that which is inspired by<br />the theory of Marx, and which alone deserves<br />at the present day to be defended or attacked<br />has never denied the inequality of indi-<br />viduals as of all living beings an inequality<br />innate and acquired, physical and moral.f<br /><br />* J. de Johannis, II concetto dell' eguaglianza nel<br />socialismo e nella scienza, in Rassegna delle scienze<br />sociali. Florence, i5th March, 1883, and more recently<br />Huxley, On the Natural Inequality of Man in the<br />Nineteenth Century, January, 1890.<br /><br />t Utopian Socialism has left as a mental habit, even<br />with the most convinced followers of Marxian socialism,<br />the affirmation of certain inequalities the equality of the<br />two sexes for example which cannot be sustained in any<br />manner. Rebel ( Woman in the Past, Present and Future,<br />trans. London, 1885), the propagandist and apostle of<br />Marxian theories, this clever and eloquent strategist of<br />democratic socialism, still repeats the affirmation that<br /><br /><br /><br />It is as if one said that socialism claims<br />that a royal decree or a popular vote could<br />establish that " from henceforth all men shall<br />have a stature of five feet seven inches !"<br /><br />But really socialism is something more<br />serious and more difficult to refute.<br /><br />Socialism says : " Men are unequal, but they<br />are all men."<br /><br />And, in fact, although every individual<br />is born and develops in a manner more or<br />less different from all other individuals just<br />as there are not two leaves in a forest the<br />same, so in the whole world there are not two<br />men exactly equal yet every man from the<br />fact alone that he is a human being has a. right<br />to the existence of a man and not of a slave<br />or beast of burden.<br /><br />We also know that all men cannot accom-<br />plish the same work to-day, when social<br />inequalities are added to natural inequalities,<br /><br />from a physio-psychical point of view woman is the equal<br />of man, and he attempts unsuccessfully to refute the<br />scientific objections that have been raised to this thesis.<br /><br />After the scientific researches of MM. Lombroso and<br />Ferrero (Donna delinquente, prostituta e normals, Turin,<br />1893), the physiological and psychological inferiority of<br />woman compared with man cannot be denied. I have<br />given a Darwinian explanation of this fact (Scuola<br />positiva, 1893, nos. 7 and 8) which Lombroso has since<br />completely accepted (Uomo di genio, 6th edition, 1894)<br />in drawing attention to the fact that all the physio-<br />psychical characteristics of women are the result of her<br />great biological function maternity.<br /><br />A being that creates from herself another not in the<br />fleeting moment of a voluptuous contract, but by the<br />organic and psychical sacrifice of pregnancy, childbirth<br />and suckling cannot preserve for herself as much<br />strength as the man who has only an infinitely less<br />heavy function iff the reproduction of the species.<br /><br /><br /><br />io<br /><br />and that they could not do so any more under<br />a socialist regime when the social organisa-<br />tion will tend to diminish congenital inequal-<br />ities. There will always be people whose<br />brain or muscular system will be more fit for<br />scientific or artistic work, whilst others will<br />be more fit for manual work or for work of<br />mechanical precision, etc.<br /><br />What ought not to be, and what will not<br />be, is that there should be men who do no<br />work, and others who work too much or who<br />are too poorly remunerated.<br /><br />But we have attained the height of in-<br />justice and absurdity, and in these days it is<br />he who does not work who has the most<br />important advantages assured to him by the<br />individual monopoly of wealth, accumulated<br />by hereditary transmission. This wealth,<br />moreover, is very rarely due to the economy<br />and privations of the actual possessor or of<br />some industrious ancestor ; it is most fre-<br />quently the time-honoured fruit of spoliation<br /><br />Also, save for certain individual exceptions, the<br />woman has less physical sensibility (the current opinion<br />is the contrary, but it confuses sensibility with irrita-<br />bility), because if her sensibility were greater she could<br />not, according to the Darwinian law, survive the<br />immense and repeated sacrifices of maternity, and the<br />species would die out. The woman has less intelligence,<br />especially in synthetic power, precisely because though<br />there are no women of genius (Sergi in Atti delta societd<br />romana di antropologia, 1894), or very nearly none, they,<br />however, give birth to men of genius.<br /><br />This is so true that one meets with a greater sensrbility<br />and intelligence among women whose function and sense<br />of motherhood do not exist or are less developed (women<br />of genius have generally masculine features), and many<br />of them attain their complete intellectual development<br />just after the critical period when motherhood has passed.<br /><br /><br /><br />tl<br /><br />by military conquest, by unscrupulous specu-<br />lation, or by the favouritism of sovereigns ;<br />but it is in every case always independent of<br />any exertion, of any work useful to society, on<br />the part of the heir, who often dissipates his<br />fortune in idleness, or in the vortex of a life<br />as empty in reality as it is brilliant in<br />appearance.<br /><br />And when we have not to consider a fortune<br />due to inheritance, we are faced with wealth<br />due to fraud. Without speaking for the<br />moment of the economic organisation, whose<br />mechanism Karl Marx has revealed to us,<br />which, even without fraud, normally allows<br />the capitalist or the landlord to live on his<br />revenues without working, it is incontestable<br />that the fortunes which have been made or<br />which have increased the most rapidly under<br />our eyes, cannot be the fruits of honest work.<br />The really honest workman, however inde-<br />fatigable and economical he may be, if he<br /><br />But if it is scientifically certain that woman represents<br />an inferior degree of biological evolution, and that she is<br />placed even by her physio-psychical characteristics<br />between the child and the adult male, it does not<br />follow from this that the socialist conclusions in what<br />concerns the woman question are false.<br /><br />Quite the contrary. Society ought to put woman, as a<br />human being and as a creator of men more worthy<br />consequently of love and respect in a better legal and<br />moral condition than she is in at present too often a<br />beast of burden or object of luxury. Similarly when from<br />the economic point of view special measures are claimed<br />to-day in favour of women, consideration is only paid to<br />their special physio-psychical conditions, whilst the present<br />economic individualism wears them out in manufactories<br />and rice plantations. Socialism, on the contrary, de-<br />mands from them only professional, scientific or muscular<br />work which is in keeping with sacred motherhood.<br /><br /><br /><br />12<br /><br />succeeds in raising himself from a state of<br />wage- earning to that of foreman or employer,<br />can in a long life of privations accumulate at<br />the most a few hundred pounds. Those men,<br />however, who without industrial discoveries<br />due to their own talent accumulate millions<br />in a few years can only be unscrupulous<br />business men, if we except a few strokes of<br />good luck, and it is these parasites bankers<br />and public speculators who live most grandly,<br />who are decorated or placed in official posts<br />as the reward of their honest transactions.<br /><br />The immense majority who work, only<br />receive a sustenance that barely suffices to<br />keep them from dying of hunger ; they live in<br />the back shops, the garrets, in the tumble-<br />down lanes of great towns, in the hovels in<br />the country that are not wanted as cow-sheds<br />or stables for horses.<br /><br />To this we must add the horrors of unem-<br />ployment, the most painful and frequent of<br />the three symptoms of this equality in misery<br />which is spreading in the modern economic<br />world, in Italy and elsewhere, in a more or less<br />intense form.<br /><br />I speak of the always increasing army of<br />those out of work in agriculture and in trade<br />and manufactures, of those thrown out of the<br />class of small householders, and of those who<br />are dispossessed of their little landed property<br />by taxes, debts, or usury.<br /><br />It is therefore not accurate to state that<br />socialism asks for all citizens material and<br />positive equality of work and possessions.<br /><br /><br /><br />13<br /><br />The equality can only consist in an obliga-<br />tion on the part of each individual to work<br />for a livelihood if each is guaranteed condi-<br />tions of existence worthy of a human being<br />in return for service rendered to society.<br /><br />Equality, according to socialism as Benoit<br />Malon said* ought to be understood in a<br />double sense : I. All men as such ought to be<br />assured of the conditions of human existence;<br />2. All men ought to be equal at the starting<br />point in the struggle for life, so that each may<br />freely develop his own personality with<br />equality of social conditions, whilst to-day a<br />healthy and robust, but poor child, in com-<br />petition with a feeble, but rich child, goes to<br />the wall.<br /><br />This is the radical, incommensurable trans-<br />formation that socialism demands, but which<br />it also discovers and announces as an evolu-<br />tion already begun in the world of to-day<br />necessary and inevitable in the world of the<br />future.|<br /><br />This transformation is. summed up in the<br />conversion of private or individual ownership<br />of the means of production, that is to say of<br />the physical basis of human life (land, mines,<br />houses, manufactories, machines, implements<br />of work, means of transport), into collective<br />or social ownership according to methods and<br />processes with which I will deal further on.<br /><br />From this point we will hold it to have<br /><br />* B. Malon, Le Socialisme integral, 2 vol., Paris, 1892.<br /><br />t Letourneau Pass6, present et avenir du travail, in<br />Revue mensuelle de I'tcole d'anthropologie. Paris, icth<br />June, 1894.<br /><br /><br /><br />H<br /><br />been proved that the first objection of anti-<br />socialistic reasoning is not valid because its<br />premise is non-existent ; it supposes, in fact,<br />that contemporary socialism lays claim to a<br />chimerical, physical, and moral equality<br />among all men, when scientific and positive<br />socialism has never thought never even<br />dreamed of it.<br /><br />Socialism maintains, on the contrary, that<br />this inequality very much diminished in a<br />better social organisation which will do'away<br />with all the physical and moral imperfections<br />which misery accumulates from generation to<br />generation will never, however, be able to<br />disappear, for the reasons Darwinism has<br />discovered in the mysterious mechanism of life,<br />in the infinite succession of men and species.<br /><br />In every social organisation, in whatsoever<br />fashion one conceives it, there will always be<br />some men tall and others short, feeble and<br />strong, sanguine and nervous, more and less<br />intelligent, some superior in intelligence,<br />others in muscular force ; and it is well that<br />it should be so anyhow, it is inevitable.<br /><br />It is well, because the variety and inequality<br />of individual aptitudes produce naturally the<br />division of work which Darwinism has rightly<br />declared to be a law of individual physiology<br />and of social econony.<br /><br />All men ought to work to live, but each<br />ought to give himself up to the work which<br />best corresponds to his ability. We should<br />thus avoid a hurtful waste of power, and work<br />would cease from being repugnant and become<br /><br /><br /><br />15<br /><br />agreeable and necessary as a condition of<br />physical and moral health.<br /><br />And when all have given to society the<br />work which best corresponds to their innate<br />and acquired abilities, each has a right to the<br />same reward, because each has contributed<br />equally to the totality of labour which<br />sustains the life of the social aggregate, and<br />jointly with it, that of each individual.<br /><br />The peasant who digs the ground performs<br />a work in appearance more modest, but quite<br />as necessary and meritorious as that of the<br />workman who makes a locomotive, of the<br />engineer who perfects it, or of the scholar<br />who struggles with the unknown in his study<br />or laboratory.<br /><br />It is only necessary that in a society all<br />should work, just as in the individual<br />organism all the cells, for instance, the nerve<br />cells, the muscle cells, or bone cells, fulfil<br />their different functions, more or less modest<br />in appearance, but each equally necessary and<br />useful biologically to the. life of the whole<br />organism.<br /><br />In the biological organism no living cell<br />remains inactive, and it is only nourished by<br />material exchanges in proportion to its work;<br />in the social organism no individual ought to<br />live without working, whatever may be the<br />form of his work.<br /><br />Thus the greatest number of artificial diffi-<br />culties which opponents raise against socialism<br />are swept away.<br /><br />But who will black the boots under the<br /><br /><br /><br />i6<br /><br />socialist regime? asks M. Richter in his<br />book so poor in ideas but which reaches the<br />grotesque when he supposes that in the name<br />of social equality the " great Chancellor " of<br />the socialist society will be forced, before<br />giving his attention to public affairs, to black<br />his boots and mend his clothes ! Really, if<br />the opponents of socialism had only argu-<br />ments of this kind, discussion would be<br />useless.<br /><br />But all would wish to perform the least<br />fatiguing and most pleasant work, says<br />another with more apparent seriousness.<br /><br />I would reply that this is equivalent to<br />demanding to-day a decree thus conceived:<br />" Henceforth all men shall be born painters<br />or surgeons."<br /><br />But it is precisely these anthropological<br />varieties of temperament and character that<br />will secure, without its being necessary to<br />have recourse to a monkish regulation (another<br />baseless objection to socialism), this distribu-<br />tion of different intellectual and manual<br />labours.<br /><br />Propose to a peasant of moderate intelli-<br />gence to devote himself to the study of<br />anatomy or the penal code, or inversely tell<br />the person whose brain is more developed<br />than his muscles to dig the ground instead of<br />observing with the microscope. They' will<br />each prefer the work for which they feel they<br />have the most ability.<br /><br />When society is organised under a collec-<br />tivist regime the change of trade or profession<br /><br /><br /><br />17<br /><br />will not be as considerable as most imagine.<br />When industries for personal luxuries are once<br />suppressed which are most often a defiance<br />to the misery of the masses the quantity<br />and variety of labours will gradually, that is<br />to say, naturally, adapt themselves to the<br />socialistic phase of civilisation as they now<br />correspond to the bourgeois phase.<br /><br />Besides, under the socialistic regime every-<br />one will have greater liberty to assert and<br />show his personal aptitude, and it will not<br />happen, as it does to-day, that from want of<br />pecuniary means many peasants or members<br />of the working class or small shop keepers<br />endowed with natural talents, remain<br />atrophied and are forced to be peasants,<br />workmen, or employees when they could<br />furnish society with a different and more<br />fruitful work better adapted to their peculiar<br />genius.<br /><br />The essential point consists solely in this :<br />In exchange for the work with which they<br />supply society, the latter ought to assure to the<br />peasant and artisan, just' as to the man who<br />devotes himself to a liberal career, conditions<br />of existence worthy of a human being.<br /><br />Then will also disappear the unworthy<br />spectacle which causes a dancer, for example,<br />to gain by her steps in one evening as much<br />as a scientist, a doctor, or a lawyer, in a year<br />of work though they are indeed more likely<br />to impersonate misery in a black coat.<br /><br />Certainly the arts will not be neglected in<br />the socialistic regime, because socialism<br /><br /><br /><br />i8<br /><br />desires life to be agreeable to all, and this<br />to-day is only the privilege of the few ; it<br />will give, on the contrary, a marvellous im-<br />petus to all the arts, and, if it abolishes<br />private luxury, it will be to favour the<br />splendour of public monuments.<br /><br />More attention will be paid to the remuner-<br />ation given to each for work done, and<br />compensation for specially difficult or dan-<br />gerous tasks will be given by increasing the<br />value to the workman of each hour spent on<br />them. If a peasant in the open-air can work<br />seven or eight hours a day, a miner ought not<br />to work more than three or four hours. In<br />fact, when all the world works, and when<br />many unproductive works are suppressed, the<br />sum total of daily work to divide among men<br />will be much less heavy and easier to bear (in<br />consequence of more abundant food, more<br />comfortable lodging and recreations assured<br />to each) than it is to-day for those who work<br />and who are so badly treated. Also, the<br />progress of the application of science to in-<br />dustry will render the work of men less and<br />less laborious.<br /><br />Individuals will voluntarily give themselves<br />up to work, although their salary or remunera-<br />tion cannot be accumulated as private riches,<br />because if a healthy, normal, well-nourished<br />man avoids excessive or badly-paid work, he<br />does not remain in idleness, for there is for<br />him a physiological and psychological neces-<br />sity to give himself up to a daily occupation<br />in keeping with his aptitudes.<br /><br /><br /><br />19<br /><br />The different kinds of sport are for the idle<br />classes a substitute for productive work which<br />a physiological necessity imposes on them to<br />save them from the disagreeable conse-<br />quences of absolute repose and from ennui.<br /><br />The most serious problem will consist in<br />apportioning to each the payment for work.<br />It is known that collectivism adopts the<br />formula, " to each according to his work,"<br />whilst communism adopts the other, " to each<br />according to his need."<br /><br />No one can give, in its practical details, the<br />solution of this problem ; but this impossi-<br />bility of foretelling the future in its smaller<br />details authorises no one to tax socialism with<br />being an unattainable Utopia. No one would<br />have been able to prophesy, a priori, from its<br />beginnings, the successive developments of<br />any civilisation : I shall prove that in speak-<br />ing of the methods of social renovation.<br /><br />This we can confidently affirm, relying<br />upon the most certain inductions of psychology<br />and sociology.<br /><br />One cannot deny, as' Marx himself has<br />declared, that the above second formula<br />which according to some allows one to dis-<br />tinguish anarchy from socialism represents<br />a more remote and more complex ideal. But<br />one cannot deny that the formula of collec-<br />tivism only represents one phase of social<br />evolution, a period of individual discipline<br />which must necessarily precede communism.*<br /><br />* M. Zerboglie has very justly remarked that indivi-<br />dualism, acting without pressure of external sanction, and<br /><br /><br /><br />20<br /><br />We must not believe that socialism will<br />realise every possible ideal of humanity, and<br />that after it there will be nothing to desire<br />and conquer ! Our descendants would be<br />condemned to idleness and vagrancy if we<br />had the capacity to exhaust every possible<br />human ideal.<br /><br />The individual or society which has no<br />longer any ideal to pursue is dead or about<br />to die. The formula of communism could<br />then be a further ideal when collectivism has<br />been completely realised by the historical<br />process with which I shall deal further on.<br /><br />We are now able to conclude that there is<br />no contradiction between socialism and<br />Darwinism on the subject of equality among<br />all men. Socialism has never affirmed it, and<br />it aims, in agreement with Darwinism, to pro-<br />mote a better life for individuals and for<br />society.<br /><br />This permits us also to answer the objection<br />too often repeated, that socialism stifles and<br />suppresses human personality under the leaden<br />mantle of collectivism by reducing individuals<br />to a monastic function, by making of them<br />so many human bees in the social hive.<br /><br />It is exactly the contrary that is true.<br />Is it not evident that it is in the present<br /><br />by a simple internal impulse of right this is the distant<br />ideal of Herbert Spencer would only be realised after a<br />phase of collectivism in which individual activity, and<br />instincts could discipline themselves into social solidarity<br />whilst escaping from the essentially anarchic individualism<br />of our time, in which every man, if he is sufficiently<br />clever to 'skirt the penal code,' may do what he pleases<br />without troubling himself about his fellow-men.<br /><br /><br /><br />bourgeois organisation that thereare found this<br />atrophy and loss of so many individualities<br />which might develop to their own advantage<br />and to the advantage of society at large ?<br />To-day, in fact, apart from a few exceptions,<br />everyone is valued for what he possesses, and<br />not for what he is.<br /><br />He who is born poor, obviously through no<br />fault of his own, may be endowed by nature<br />with artistic or scientific genius, but if he has<br />no patrimony of his own which will give him<br />the means of triumphing over his first<br />struggles, and of completing his personal<br />education, or if he has not, like the shepherd<br />Giotto, the good fortune to meet the rich<br />Cimabue he must disappear without a name<br />in the great prison of wage slavery, and<br />society itself thus loses treasures of intellectual<br />force.<br /><br />He who is born rich, although he owes his<br />fortune to no personal effort, even if he has<br />little brains, will play a leading part in the<br />theatre of life, and all servile persons will be<br />prodigal of praises and flattery, and he will<br />fancy, simply because he has money, that he<br />is a different sort of person from what he<br />really is.<br /><br />When property has become collective, that<br />is under the socialist regime, each man will<br />have his means of existence assured, and daily<br />work will only serve to bring to light the<br />special aptitudes more or less original of each<br />individual, and the best and most fruitful<br />years of life 'will not be used up as they are<br /><br /><br /><br />22<br /><br />now by the painful and despairing conquest<br />of daily bread.<br /><br />Socialism will assure to all a human life<br />real liberty to show and develop the physical<br />and moral personalities born with them,<br />infinitely varied and unequal. Socialism does<br />not deny inequality, it only wishes to direct<br />it towards a free and rich development of<br />human life.<br /><br /><br /><br />CHAPTER III.<br /><br />THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE AND ITS VICTIMS.<br /><br />Socialism and Darwinism are found to be<br />opposed, it is said, on a second point. Dar-<br />winism proves that the immense majority-<br />plants, animals, men are destined to succumb<br />because only a small minority triumph " in<br />the struggle for life " ; socialism claims that<br />all ought to triumph, and that no one ought<br />to succumb.<br /><br />One may first reply that even in the<br />biological domain of the " struggle for<br />existence," the disproportion between the<br />number of individuals who are born and that<br />of those who survive always lessens pro-<br />gressively as one rises from vegetables to<br />animals, and from animals to men.<br /><br />This law of decreasing disproportion<br />between the " called " and the " chosen " is<br />shown even in the different species of the<br />same natural order.<br /><br />In fact, with vegetables the individual<br />yields each year an infinite number of seeds,<br />and an infinitesimal number of these survive.<br />With animals the number of young from each<br />individual diminishes, and the number of<br />those that survive, on the contrary, increases.<br />Finally, with the human species, the number<br />of individuals to which each gives birth is<br />very small, and the greater number survive.<br /><br />But againln the case of vegetables, animals,<br /><br /><br /><br />and man, it is the inferior and most simple<br />species, the races and classes least varied in<br />the scale of beings, which reproduce themselves<br />most freely and whose generations succeed<br />one another most rapidly in consequence of<br />the lesser longevity of the individuals.<br /><br />A fern produces millions of spores, and its<br />life is very short whilst a palm tree gives a<br />few dozen seeds and lives a century.<br /><br />A fish produces several thousand eggs<br />whilst the elephant and the chimpanzee have<br />a few little ones that live a great number of<br />years.<br /><br />In the human species savage races are the<br />most prolific, and have short life --whilst<br />civilised races have a low birth-rate and a<br />greater longevity.<br /><br />From all this it follows that, even keeping<br />to the domain of pure biology, the number of<br />conquerors in the "struggle for existence" is<br />always more considerable relatively to the<br />number of births as one passes from vegetables<br />to animals, from animals to men, and from<br />inferior species or varieties to superior races<br />or varieties,<br /><br />The iron law of "the struggle for existence"<br />rapidly reduces, then, the hecatomb of the<br />conquered as the forms of life become more<br />complex and perfect.<br /><br />It would, therefore, be an error to invoke<br />against socialism the Darwinian law of<br />natural selection as it is manifested in primi-<br />tive forms of life without keeping account of<br />its continued attenuation as we pass from<br /><br /><br /><br />25<br /><br />vegetables to animals, from animals to men,<br />and among men themselves from the primitive<br />to the most advanced races.<br /><br />And as socialism represents a more advanced<br />phase of progress in the life of humanity it is<br />still less allowable to urge against it as<br />an objection such a gross and inexact inter-<br />pretation of the Darwinian law.<br /><br />It is certain that the opponents of socialism<br />have misused the Darwinian law, or rather<br />have misused the " brutal " interpretation of<br />it, to justify the modern individualistic com-<br />petition which is too often a disguised form<br />of cannibalism, and which has made the<br />proverb homo homini lupus (man a wolf to man)<br />a characteristic of our time, whereas Hobbes<br />only laid it down in the " state of nature "<br />era of humanity before the Social Contract.<br /><br />But we cannot consider a principle to be<br />false because it has been misused ; that often<br />serves as a stimulus to specify more exactly<br />its nature and terms, so that we can make a<br />more exact practical application of it ; this<br />will be the result of my demonstration of the<br />perfect harmony that exists between Darwin-<br />ism and socialism.<br /><br />Already in the first edition of my work<br />Socialismo e criminalita (pages 179, etc.), I<br />maintained that the struggle for existence is<br />a law inherent in humanity as in all living<br />beings, although its forms are continually<br />changing, and although it gets weaker.<br /><br />This is still my opinion, and on this point<br />I do not agree with certain socialists who have<br /><br /><br /><br />26<br /><br />thought that they had completely conquered<br />the objection raised against them in the name<br />of Darwinism, by affirming that in human<br />society the " struggle for existence " is a law<br />which ought to lose its meaning and applic-<br />ability when the social transformation which<br />socialism aims at shall have been realised. *<br /><br />It is a law which governs tyrannically all<br />living beings, microbes as well as anthropoid<br />apes, and should it cease to act and fall inert<br />at the feet of man as if he were not an indis-<br />soluble link in the great biological chain ?<br /><br />I maintained, and I maintain still, that the<br />struggle for existence is a law inseparable from<br />life, and consequently from humanity itself ;<br />but that, whilst remaining an immanent and<br />continuous law, it is transformed by degrees<br />in its extent, and is attenuated in its forms.<br /><br />In primitive humanity the struggle for<br />existence is scarcely to be distinguished from<br />that which obtains among other animals ; it<br />is the brutal struggle for daily food or for the<br />female hunger and love are, in fact, the two<br /><br />* Labusquiere in Rivista internazionale del socialismo,<br />Milan, 1880. No. 3. Lanessan, La lutte pour I' existence<br />el I'association pour la lutte, Paris, 1881. Loria, Discorso<br />su Carlo Darwin, Siena, 1882, p. 17, and following, and<br />Darwin e I'economia politica in Riv. di filosofia scientifica,<br />June, 1884. Colajanni, // socialismo, Catania, 1884, etc.<br /><br />M. Colajanni recognised from this moment (note i, p.<br />58), that the basis of my thought was "more socialistic<br />than is that of many other persons who imagine themselves<br />to be socialists, and who are persecuted as such." 'My<br />book, in fact,Socialismo e criminalitd, only made criticisms<br />on the revolutionary method of the Italian socialism of<br />that time, still stamped with nebulous romanticism. The<br />import of my criticisms was exaggerated, not without<br /><br /><br /><br />fundamental needs, and the two poles of<br />life and its means are almost solely muscular<br />force. In a subsequent phase is added the<br />struggle for political supremacy (in the class,<br />in the tribe, in the village, in the town, in the<br />state), and, more and more, muscular force is<br />replaced by intellectual force.<br /><br />In the historic period Grseco-Latin society<br />struggles for civil equality (abolition of<br />slavery) ; it triumphs, but does not stop<br />because life is a struggle ; the society of the<br />middle ages struggles for religious equality,<br />gains it, but does not stop ; and at the end<br />of the 1 8th century it struggles for political<br />equality. Should it now stop and rest<br />in its present state ? To-day society-<br />struggles for economic equality, not for<br />an absolutely material equality, but for<br />this more positive equality of which I have<br />spoken. And everything makes us foresee with<br />mathematical certainty that this victory will<br />be gained to give place to new struggles for<br />new ideals among our descendants.<br /><br />reason, by conservatives more or less progressive ; but<br />already (1883) I was at the bottom a socialist, and I shall<br />prove it in the second edition of Socialismo e criminalitd..<br /><br />My conviction became more complete and deeper, gradu-<br />ally and almost in spite of myself, by reading the popular<br />exposition of scientific socialism, which M. Turati wrote<br />in the Critica sociale, and M. Prampolini in the Giustizia;<br />I was at length definitely admitted to socialism through<br />the study of the works of Karl Marx, whose uncom-<br />promising dogmatism is clothed in a form a little dry and<br />hard, but whose general writings are irresistible, because<br />they are in complete harmony with the whole trend of<br />modern scientific thought.<br /><br />The works of M. Loria, quite full of Marxian theories<br />which a marvellous stream of scientific learning fertilises,<br /><br /><br /><br />28<br /><br />The successive changes in the extent, or the<br />ideals of the struggle for existence, are<br />accompanied by a progressive mitigation of<br />the methods of the struggle ; violent and<br />muscular at first, they become more and more<br />peaceful and intellectual, despite certain<br />atavic reversions or certain psycho -patho-<br />logical manifestations of violence on the part<br />of individuals against society or of society<br />against individuals.<br /><br />My opinion has recently found a striking<br />confirmation in the remarkable work of M.<br />Novikov, who, however, has not taken the<br />sexual struggle into account. I shall further<br />develop my demonstration in the chapter<br />devoted to the Moral Future of Humanity, in<br />the second edition of Socialismo e criminalita.^<br /><br />For the moment it is sufficient for me, in<br />answer to the anti -socialistic objection, to<br />have shown that not only the disproportion<br />between the number of births and the number<br /><br /><br /><br />and full of views of remarkable depth, completed my<br />socialistic education. Since then I have believed it my<br />duty to give to it my strict political adhesion ; besides,<br />even in the political world I was always impregnated<br />with socialistic ideas, and I remember that from the time<br />of my election to the Chamber of Deputies in 1886, my<br />controversies with the Republicans in the Epoca of Genoa<br />and the Lega della democrazia of Rome sprang from my<br />contention that the single fundamental question seemed<br />to me to be the social question.<br /><br />I was still in this sociological phase which is, perhaps,<br />a necessary moment in scientific education, but which is<br />only an arrest of development if it does not attain the<br />practical and fruitful phase of socialism.<br /><br />t Novikov, Les luttes entre socittes, leurs phases<br />successives. Paris, 1893. Lerda, La lotta per la vita in<br />Pensiero italiano, Milan, February and March, 1894.<br /><br /><br /><br />2 9<br /><br />of those who survive is always diminishing,<br />but also that the " struggle for existence "<br />itself changes its extent, and is weakened in<br />its processes with every successive phase of<br />biological and social evolution.<br /><br />Socialism can then affirm that conditions<br />of human existence ought to be assured to all<br />men in exchange for work performed for the<br />community without thereby contradicting<br />the Darwinian law of the survival of the<br />victors in the struggle for existence, since this<br />Darwinian law ought to be comprised in, and<br />applied to (according to its different mani-<br />festation), the law of human progress.<br /><br />Socialism, understood in the scientific<br />sense, does not deny and cannot deny that<br />there are always among men some " losers "<br />in the struggle for existence.<br /><br />This question is more directly concerned<br />with the connection that exists between<br />socialism and crime, because those who claim<br />that the struggle for existence is a law which<br />does not apply to human society, affirm in<br />consequence that crime (an abnormal and<br />anti-social form of the struggle for life as work<br />in its normal and social form) ought to dis-<br />appear. They think likewise that they find a<br />certain contradiction between socialism and<br />the doctrines of criminal anthropology on the<br />born criminal, doctrines which are themselves<br />derived from Darwinism.<br /><br />* I regret to state here that M. Loria, usually so deep<br />and penetrating, has allowed himself to be swayed by<br />appearances. He has pointed out this so-called contra-<br />diction in his Economic Basis oj Society. He has been<br /><br /><br /><br />30<br /><br />I will wait to treat this question more<br />completely elsewhere. Here is a summary,<br />my opinion as a socialist and as an anthro-<br />pologist writer on criminology.<br /><br />First of all, the positive criminal school is<br />occupied with life as it is and its merit is<br />unquestionably to have applied to the study<br />of criminal phenomena the methods of experi-<br />mental science, to have shown the hypocritical<br />absurdity of the modern penal systems, which<br />are based on the conception of free-will and<br />of the moral fault, and which are realised in<br />the system of confinement in cells, one of the<br />aberrations of the igth century as I have<br />once called it: for that, the school wishes to sub-<br />stitute the simple segregation of individuals<br />who are not fit for social life in consequence<br />of pathological conditions, congenital or<br />acquired, permanent or transitory.<br /><br />In the second place, to pretend that socialism<br />will make all forms of crime disappear is an<br />affirmation which proceeds from a generous<br />sentiment, but which is not founded on<br />rigorous scientific observation.<br /><br />The school of scientific criminology demon-<br />strates that crime is a natural and social<br />phenomenon like madness and suicide<br />determined by the abnormal organic and<br />physical constitution of the delinquent, and<br /><br />completely answered in the name of the school of positive<br />criminal anthropology by M. Rinieri de Rocchi, // diritto<br />penale e un'opera recente di Loria in the Scuola positiva<br />nella giurisprudenza penale of the i5th February, 1894,<br />and by M. Lombroso in Archivio di psichiatria e scienze<br />penali, 1894, xiv.<br /><br /><br /><br />by the influences of the physical and social<br />environment. All anthropological factors,<br />physical and social, always co-operate together<br />to determine offences, the lightest as well as<br />the most serious as they do in all other<br />human acts. What varies for every delinquent<br />and every offence is the decisive intensity of<br />each order of factors.*<br /><br />For example, if it is a question of an assas-<br />sination, committed through jealousy or some<br />hallucination, the anthropological factor is<br />the most important, although some attention<br />cannot but be paid to the physical and social<br />environment. But if it is a question of a<br />crime against poverty, or even against persons,<br />committed by a crowd in revolt, or from<br />drunkenness, etc., it is the social environment<br />that becomes the preponderant factor, although<br />one cannot deny the influence of physical<br />environment and of the anthropological factor.<br /><br />The same reasoning can be repeated in<br />order to make a complete examination into<br />the objection raised to socialism in the name<br /><br />* Enrico Ferri, Criminal Sociology (English trans-<br />lation), 1895. A recent work has just confirmed our<br />inductions in a positive manner : Forsanari di Verce,<br />Sulla criminalitd e le vicende economiche d' Italia dal<br />1873 <*l l8 9 (Turin), Library of Juridical Anthropology, 1894. The preface, written by M. Lombroso, ends with these words : " We do not wish by this to misappreciate the truth of the Socialist movement, which is destined to change the current of modern history in Europe, and which claims ad majorem gloriam of its conclusions that all crime depends on economic influence : we share this doctrine without wishing or being able to follow its mis- takes : however enthusiastic we may be, we will never renounce the tenth in its favour. We leave this useless servility to the classic and orthodox authors." 32 of Darwinism on the subject of common illnesses. Besides, crime is a department in human pathology. All diseases, acute or chronic, infectious or non-infectious, severe or slight, are the pro- duct of the anthropological constitution of the individual and of the influence of the physical and social environment. The deter- mining intensity of personal conditions or of environment varies with different illnesses ; phthisis or heart disease, for example, depends principally on the individual organic consti- tution, although attention must be paid to the influence of the environment ; pellagra,* cholera, typhus, etc,, depend, on the contrary, chiefly on the physical and social conditions of the environment. Phthisis also makes ravages among persons in easy circumstances, that is, among persons well fed and well housed, whilst it is the poor, that is, the persons badly fed, who furnish the greatest number of victims to pellagra and cholera. It is consequently evident that a socialist regime of collective property, which will assure to each the condition of human exis- tence, will greatly diminish, or perhaps cause to disappear with the help of scientific dis- coveries and the progress of hygienic measures the illnesses which are chiefly determined by the conditions of the environment, that is to say, by insufficient nourishment or by want * A skin and nerve disease, known in Spain, Italy, and,elsewhere, where maize of inferior quality is largely consumed by the peasantry. ED. 33 of protection against the inclemency of the weather ; but we shall not see those illnesses disappear which are due to wounds, to insanity, to pulmonary affections. We must say as much of crime. If misery and the shocking inequalities of economic conditions are suppressed, sharp and chronic hunger will serve no longer as a stimulus to crime ; better nourishment will bring about a physical and moral amelioration ; the abuses of power and riches will disappear, and we shall see produced a considerable reduction of crimes from want, chiefly caused by the social environment. But what will not disappear are outrages on chastity, through sexual path- ological inversion, murders committed by epileptics, robberies caused by psycho-patho- logical degeneracy, etc. For the same reason popular instruction will be more spread, all the talented men will be able to develop themselves and to freely assert themselves ; but that will not cause idiocy and imbecility, owing to hereditary and pathological conditions, to disappear. Differ- ent causes, however, will be able to exert a preventive and palliative influence on congen- ital degeneracy (common diseases, crime, madness, nervous affections). There will be, for instance, a better economic and social organisation, advice of increasing efficacy given by experimental biology, and procrea- tion becoming less and less frequent in case of hereditary disease by voluntary abstention. In conclusion, we will say that even in the 34 social regime although in infinitely less proportions there will always be some vanquished in the struggle for existence, there will be the victims of feebleness, of disease, of insanity, of nervous disorder, of suicide. We can then assert that socialism does not deny the Darwinian law of the struggle for existence. It will, however, have this unquestionable advantage that the epidemic and endemic forms of human degeneracy will be completely suppressed by the elimination of their principal cause, the physical and, consequently, the moral misery of the greatest number. Then the struggle for existence, whilst still remaining the eternal impulsive force of social life, will assume forms continually less brutal and more humane intellectual forms ; its ideal of physiological and psychical ameliora- tion will be constantly raised, owing to the vitalising effect of daily bread for body and mind being assured to each person. The law of the " struggle for life " must not make us forget another law of natural and social Darwinism. Certainly many socialists have given it an excessive and exclusive importance just as certain individualists have left it completely in oblivion. I mean the law of solidarity which unites all living beings of the same species for example, the animals that live in a community in consequence of the abundance of a common food (herbivora), or even the animals of different species living in a state which naturalists call symbiosic union for life. 35 It is not true to affirm that the struggle for life is the only supreme law in nature and society, just as it is false to claim that this law does not apply to human society. The real truth is that even in human society the struggle for life is an eternal law which weakens progressively in its forms and rises in its ideals ; but beside it we find a law whose action is progressively more efficacious in social evolution, the law of solidarity or of co-operation among living beings. Even in societies of animals mutual help against natural forces or against living species is constantly manifested, and in all the more intense fashion when we come to the human species, even to savage tribes. It is found especially among tribes which, in consequence of favourable conditions of environment or in consequence of assured and abundant food, enter into the industrial and pacific stage. The military or warlike type which ^unhappily rules (in consequence of insecurity and insufficiency of food) among primitive mankind, and in the reactionary phases of civilisation, offers us less frequent examples. The industrial type tends constantly, more- over, as Spencer has shown, *to take the place of the warlike type.* * See in this sense the celebrated writings of Kropot- kin, Mutual Aid among the Savages, in the Nineteenth Century, gih April, 1891, and Among the Barbarians, ibid., January, 1892 [published in Mutual Aid : a factor of evolution, 1902. ED.], and also two recent articles signed "A Professor," appearing in the Revue socialiste of Paris, Ma"y and June, 1894, under the title Lutte ou accord pour la vie. 36 Referring to human society alone, we may put it this way : whilst in the first stages of social evolution the law of the struggle for existence takes precedence of the law of solidarity, the more the division of labour and in consequence the connection between the individuals of the social organism grows, the more does the law of co-operation or solidarity acquire a force progressively more intense and extended, and that for the funda- mental reason which Marx has indicated and which constitutes his grand scientific dis- covery, because the conditions of existence, and primarily food, are or are not assured. In the life of individuals, as in that of societies, when food, that is to say the physical basis of existence, is assured, the law of solidarity takes precedence of the law of the struggle for existence, and the inverse of this also holds good. Among savages, infanticide and parricide are acts not only permitted, but obligatory, and sanctified by religion, if the tribe lives on an island where food is scanty (for example in Polynesia), and they con- stitute immoral and criminal acts on conti- nents where food is more abundant and more sure.* In the same way in our present society, the majority of individuals not being sure of their daily bread, the struggle for life, ,or " free competition," as individualists call it, takes more cruel and more brutal forms. As soon as, with collective property, each * Enrico Ferri, Omicidio nell' antropologia crimincile. Introduction, Turin, 1894. 37 individual has his conditions of existence assured, the law of solidarity will be pre- ponderant. When in a family things go well and daily bread is assured, harmony and reciprocal goodwill reign ; as soon as poverty makes its appearance, discord and struggle follow. Society, as a whole, presents us with this picture magnified. A better social organisa- tion will secure everywhere harmony and reciprocal kindness. Such will be the triumph of socialism, and such is, once more, the most complete and fruitful interpretation that socialism gives of the inexorable natural laws discovered by Darwinism. CHAPTER IV. THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. The third and last division of Haeckel's argu- ment is correct if it is restricted to the purely biological and Darwinian domain, but his starting point is false if it is applied to the social domain and is used as an objection to socialism. It is said: the struggle for existence secures the survival of the best or the best fitted ; it consequently determines an aristocratic pro- cess of individualist selection and not the democratic levelling of socialism. Here again, let us begin by finding out exactly once more, of what consists this famous natural selection, the consequence of the struggle for existence. The expression of which Haeckel makes use, and which is besides commonly employed, "survival of the best or the best adapted," ought to be corrected. We ought to suppress the adjective best. It is the residue of a teleology which saw in nature and history a finality to be attained by means of a continuous amelioration. Darwinism, on the contrary, and still more the theory of universal evolution, has excluded all finality from modern scientific thought a'nd from the interpretation of natural phenomena; evolution consists both of involution and dis- solution. It can happen, and it does happen, that in comparing the two ends of the road 39 travelled over by humanity we state that there has really been progress, amelioration on the whole, not following a straight ascending line, however, but as Goethe has said, a spiral with rhythms of advance and retro- gression, of evolution and dissolution. Every cycle of evolution in the individual as in the collective life carries in itself the germs of the corresponding cycle of dissolution, and the latter inversely by the decay of the already worn out form prepares in the eternal laboratorynewevolutionsandnew forms of life. It is thus that in the social human world every phase of civilisation carries within itself and always develops further the germs of its own dissolution whence is derived a new phase of civilisation whose geographical seat will be more or less changed in the eternal rhythm of living humanity. The ancient ecclesiastical civilisations of the East dissolve and give birth to the Graeco- Roman world to which succeeds the feudal and aristocratic civilisation of Central Europe ; this also being dissolved through its own excesses, like the preceding civilisations, is replaced by the bourgeois civilisation which has attained its culminating point in the Anglo-Saxon world. But this already feels the first shiverings of the fever of dissolution, whilst a socialist civilisation is being born and is developing itself, a civilisation which will flourish over a vaster domain than that of the other civilisations which have preceded it.* * One of the most characteristic phases of social dis- solution is that of parasitism, cf Massart and Vander- velde, Parasitism, Organic and Social, London, 1895. 40 It is not, therefore, correct to claim that natural selection determined by the struggle for existence secures the survival of the best ; really it secures the survival of the best adapted. It is very different whether it is a question of natural or of social Darwinism. The struggle for existence necessarily deter- mines the survival of the individuals best adapted to the society and the time in which they live. In the natural, biological domain the free play of forces and of cosmic conditions secures a progressive elevation of living forms from the microbe up to man. In human society, on the contrary, that is to say in the superorganic evolution of Mr. H. Spencer, the interference of other forces and of other conditions determines occasionally a selection which is retrograde but which always secures the survival of those best adapted to a given society and point of time, in keeping with the corrupted conditions if they are such of this same society and point of time. The problem is one in "social selections." It is in starting from this idea wrongly in- terpreted that certain writers, socialists and non-socialists, arrive at refusing to Darwinian theories an applicability to human society. One knows in fact that in the contemporary, civilised world natural selection is vitiated by military selection, by matrimonial selection, and principally by economic selection.* * Broca, Les selections ( Social selections) in Mdmoires d' anthropologie, Paris, 1877, in. 205 Lapouge, Les Selections sociales, in Revue d' anthrop. 1887, p. 519. Loria, Discorso su Carlo Darwin, Siena, 1882. The temporary celibacy imposed on soldiers exercises a certainly deplorable influence on the human race ; it is the young men with the least good constitutions, who, relieved of military service, marry the earliest, whilst the most healthy individuals are constrained to temporary sterility, and in the large towns run the chances of syphilis, the effects of which are unfortunately permanent. Marriage itself, corrupted as it is in our present civilisation by economic interests, exercises usually a sexual selection in the wrong way. Women degenerate in healih t but, possessing a large fortune, find a husband more easily than the more robust women of the people or the middle class without a marriage portion, and these are condemned to remain sterile in an enforced celibacy, or to give themselves up to a prostitution more or less gilded, j It is incontestable that economic conditio'ns have an influence on all social relations. The monopoly of wealth assures to its possessors victory in the struggle for existence ; rich persons, even when they' are less robust, have a longer life than those who are ill fed ; the labour by day and by night under cruel conditions imposed on adult men, and the still more disastrous work imposed on women Vadala, Darwinistno naturale e darwinisme sociale, Turin, 1883. Bordier, La vie des societes, Paris, 1887. Sergi, Le degenerazioni umane, Milan, 1889, p. 158. Bebel, Woman in the Past, Present, and Future, London 1885. t Max Nordau, Conventional Lies of our Civilisation, London, 1895. ' and children by modern capitalism, make the biological conditions of the proletarian class daily worse. * To that we must add that moral selection in the wrong way which causes capitalism to- day in the struggle waged with the proletariat to favour the survival of men of servile character, whilst it persecutes and tries to keep in the shade men of strong character and all those who do not seem disposed to bear the yoke of the present economic order, f The lirst impression which we get from the statement of all these facts is, that the Darwinian law of natural selection is worth- less, and is not found to apply to human society. I have maintained, and 1 maintain, on the contrary, first, that these social selections of backward tendency are not in contradiction to the Darwinian law, and more, that they serve as material for an argument in favour of socialism. Socialism in fact will alone be able to bring about a more beneficent working of this inexorable law of natural selection. In fact the Darwinian law does not deter- mine the survival of the best, but only of the best adapted. * On this question can be consulted, outside demo- graphic statistic, the abstracts worked out at Turin in 1879 by M. Pagliani, the present director general of the office of Hygiene to the Ministry of the Interior, on the different development of the human body, notably more backward and more feeble among the poor than among the rich. This fact shows itself less at the time of birth than in infancy and later, that is to say as soon as the influence of economic conditions makes its inexorable tyranny felt. t Turati, Selezione servile in Critica Sociale, i, June, 1894. Sergi, Degenerazioni umane, Milan, 1889. 43 It is evident that the degeneracy produced by social conditions, and notably by the present economic organisation, will still only contribute, and always increasingly, to the survival of those best adapted to this econo- mic organisation itself. If the conquerors in the struggle for exist- ence are the worst and the most feeble, that does not mean that the Darwinian law does not apply ; it simply means that the society is vitiated and that those who survive are precisely those who are best adapted for this vitiated society. In my studies in criminal psychology I have too often been obliged to state that in prisons and in the criminal world it is the fiercest or the most cunning criminals who enjoy a triumph ; it is the same in our modern economic individualism ; the victory belongs to him who has fewest scruples, the struggle for existence favours him who is the best adapted to a world where a man is valued for what he has (in whatever way he may have obtained it) and not for what he is. The Darwinian law of natural selection works then even in human society. The error of those who deny this proposition arises because they confuse the present society and time which bears in history the name of bourgeois, as the middle ages were called feudal with the whole history of humanity ; and in consequence they db not see that the disastrous effects of retrogressive modern social selection are only a confirmation of the survival of the best adapted. Popular obser- 44 vation has summed up this fact in a proverb : " The cask gives the wine it contains "; and scientific observation finds its explanation in the necessary biological relations which exist between a given society and the individuals which are born, struggle and survive in it. On the other side this statement constitutes a peremptory argument in favour of socialism. In freeing society of all the corruptions with which an unbridled economic individual- ism pollutes it, socialism will necessarily correct the effects of natural and social selection. In a society physically and morally healthy the best adapted, those who will consequently survive, will be healthy. In the struggle for existence, victory will then belong to him who possesses the greatest and most fruitful physical and moral energies. The collectivist economic organisation, in assuring to each the conditions of existence, must necessarily ameliorate the human race physically and morally. To that one may answer : let us admit that socialism and Darwinian selection can be reconciled, is it not evident that the survival of the best adapted will form an aristocratic individualist process which is contrary to the socialist levelling ? I have already partly answered this objec- tion in observing that socialism will assure to all individuals and not only to some privileged ones or to some heroes, as now the freedom to assert and to develop their own personality. Then indeed the effect of the ggle for existence will be the survival of 45 the best, and that precisely because in a normal society it is to normal individuals that victory belongs. Social Darwinism, therefore, in continuing natural Darwinism will bring about a selection towards the best. To answer completely this affirmation of an unlimited aristocratic selection, I must recall another natural law which completes this rhythm of action and reaction whence results the equilibrium of life. To the Darwinian law of natural inequalities must be joined another law which is insepar- able from it and which Jacoby following the works of Morel, Lucas, Galton, De Candole, Ribot, Spencer, Mme. Royer, Lombroso, etc., has brought into full daylight. This same nature which makes of "choice" and of aristocratic elevation a condition of vital progress, then re-establishes equilibrium by a levelling and democratic law. " Out of the immensity of humanity indi- viduals, families, and races spring up which tend to raise themselves above the common level. Painfully they climb abrupt heights, reach the summit of power, of wealth, of intelligence, of talent, and, once having attained,. are precipitated below and disappear in the abysses of madness and degeneracy. Death is the great leveller ; whilst annihilating all that rise, it democratises humanity.* * Jacoby, Etudes sur la selection dans ses rapports avec I' herddit& chez I' homme, Paris, 1881, p. 606. Lombroso, The Man of Genius, London, 1889, has developed and completed this law. It is this law which all those forget too easily who, 4 6 Everythings that tends to constitute a monopoly of natural forces comes into collision with this supreme law of nature which has given to all living beings the use and disposal of the natural agents air and light, water and land. Everything which is too much above or too much below the human average, an average which is raised with time, but which is of absolute value for each historic period dies out and disappears. The cretin, the man of genius, the pauper and the millionaire, the dwarf and the giant, are so many natural and social monstrosities, and nature strikes them inexorably with degeneracy or sterility, whether they be the product of organic life or the effect of the social organisation. It is also an inevitable destiny for all families that possess any sort of monopoly monopoly of power, wealth, or talent to see their last offspring become mad or sterile or commit suicide, and finally be extinguished. Noble houses, dynasties of sovereigns, families of artists or learned men, descendants of mil- lionaires, all follow the common law which, once again, confirms the inductions, in this sense levelling, of science and socialism. like Nietzsche in our days, attempt to modernise aristo- cratic individualism by views, sometimes deep and original, but often also fantastic and foolish. It is this same law which Mr. Ritchie ignores (Dar- winism and Politics, London, 1891) in his Section 4 "Does the doctrine of Heredity support aristocracy?" and M. Boucher in his treatise Darwinism et Social- isme, Paris, 1890. CHAPTER V. SOCIALISM AND RELIGIOUS BELIEFS. None of the three contradictions between socialism and Darwinism which Haeckel formulated, and which so many authors have repeated after him, withstands a frank and more exact examination of the natural laws attached to the name of Charles Darwin. I add that not only is Darwinism not contrary to socialism, but that it forms one of its fundamental scientific premises. As Virchow justly remarked, socialism is nothing else than the logical and vital outcome partly of Darwinism and partly of Spencerian evolution. Darwin's theory, whether one likes it or not, in showing that man descends from animals, has struck a great blow at the belief in God as the creator of the universe and of man by a special fiat. It is for that reason, moreover, that the most implacable opposition, and the only one which subsists against his scientific induction was, and is, maintained in the name of religion. It is true that Darwin did not declare him- self an Atheist, and Mr. Spencer was not one ; it is also true that, strictly speaking, Darwin's theory and Spencer's can be reconciled with a belief in God, because one can admit that God has created matter and force, and that 4 8 both have then evolved their successive forms following an initial creative impulse. One cannot, however, deny that these theories, whilst rendering more and more inflexible and universal the idea of causality, lead necessarily to the negation of God, because one can always ask oneself : " and who has created God? " And if the answer is : " God has always existed," one can retort by affirming that the universe has always existed. Following the remark of M. Ardigo, human thought cannot conceive that the chain which binds effects to causes, can terminate at a purely conventional given point.* God, as Laplace has said, is an hypothesis of which positive science has no need. He is, according to Herzen, at the most an X which contains in itself not the unknowable as Spencer and Dubois Reymond claim but all that humanity does not yet know. Also it is a variable X which decreases in proportion as the discoveries of science advance. It is for this reason that science and religion are in inverse ratio one to the other ; the one diminishes and becomes feeble in the same measure as the other increases and is strengthened in its struggle with the unknown. And if this is a consequence of Darwinism, its influence on the development of socialism is perfectly evident. The disappearance of the faith in something beyond when the poor will become the elect * Ardigo, La Formazione naturale, vol. n, in his Opere filologiche, and vol. 6, La Ragione, Padua, 1894. 49 of the Lord, and when the miseries of this " valley of tears " will find^an eternal com- pensation in Paradise, gives more vigour to the desire of a little "terrestrial Paradise" down here for the unhappy and the less fortunate who are the most numerous. Hartmann and Guyau* have shown that the evolution of religious beliefs can be thus summarised : all religions have within them- selves the promise of happiness, but primitive religions admit that the happiness wilP be realised during the life itself of the individual, and later religions, by an excess of reaction, transport it outside this'mortal world 'after death; in the last phase this realisation of happiness is again replaced' in human life, no longer in the short moment of individual existence, but in the continued evolution of the whole of humanity. On this side again, socialism is joined to religious evolution and tends f to substitute itself for religion because it desires precisely that humanity should have in itself its own " terrestrial paradise " . without having to wait for it in a "something beyond," which, to say the least, is very problematical. Also it has been very justly remarked that the socialist movement has numerous charac- teristics common, for instance, to primitive * What is predominant, however, in religious beliefs is the hereditary or traditional sentimental factor ; that is what makes them always respectable, if they are pro- fessed in good faith, and often even sympathetic and that precisely on account of the candid and delicate sensibility of the persons among whom religious faith is the most vital and sincere. 50 Christianity, notably its ardent faith in the ideal which has finally deserted the arid field of bourgeoise scepticism, and certain learned men, not socialists, such as Messrs. Wallace,* Laveleye, and Roberty, etc., admit that socialism, by its humanitarian faith, can perfectly replace the faith in the " something beyond " of the old religions. The most direct and efficacious relations are, however, those which exist between socialism and the belief in God. It is true that Marxian socialism since the Congress held at Erfurt (1891) has rightly declared; that religious beliefs are a private affair, and that consequently, the socialist party will fight religious intolerance in all its forms, whether it be directed against Catholics or Jews, as I have indicated in an article against Antisemitism.j" But this superiority of view is, at the bottom, only a consequence of confidence in a final victory. It is because socialism knows and foresees that religious beliefs, whether we consider them with M. SergiJ as pathological pheno- mena of human psychology or as useless phenomena of moral incrustation, must waste away before the extension of even elementary scientific culture ; it is for that reason that socialism does not feel the necessity of fighting specially these same religious beliefs which * Dr. Wallace has now become a Socialist. ED. t Nuova Rassegna, August, 1894. I Sergi, L'origine del fenomeni psichici e loro signifi- cazione biologica, Milan, 1885, p. 334 and the following. are destined to disappear. It has taken this attitude even though it knows that the absence, or lessening, of the belief in God is one of the most powerful factors in its extension, because the priests of all religions have been, in all phases of history, the most powerful allies of the governing classes in keeping the masses bent under the yoke, thanks to religious fascination, as the tamer keeps wild beasts under his whip. And that is so true that the most clear- sighted conservatives, even if they are atheists, regret that the religious sentiment this very precious narcotic should continue to dimin- ish among the masses, because they see in it, if their pharisaism does not allow them to say it openly, an instrument of political domination.* Unhappily, or happily, the religious senti- ment cannot be re-established by a royal decree. If it disappear one cannot blame either Titus or Caius, and there is no need of a special propaganda against it, for that is in the air we breathe saturated as it is with scientific, experimental inductions and the sentiment no longer finds conditions favour- able to its development, as it found in the mystic ignorance of past centuries. I have thus shown the direct influence of modern positive science, which has substituted * As for the pretended influence of religion on personal morality, I have shown what little foundation there is for this opinion in my studies of criminal psychology, and more especially in Omicidio nell' antropologia criminate. 52 the conception of natural causality for the conception of miracle and divinity, on the very rapid development and on the experi- mental foundation of contemporary socialism. Democratic socialism does not view " Catholic socialism " with an evil eye, because it has nothing to fear from it. Catholic socialism, in fact, contributes to the propaganda of socialist ideas, notably in the rural districts, where faith and religious observance have still much life in them, and it is not Catholic socialism that will gather the palm of victory ad majorem Dei gloriam. As I have shown, there is an increasing antagonism between science and religion, and the socialist varnish will not be able to pre- serve Catholicism. " Terrestrial " socialism, besides, possesses a much greater power of attraction. When peasants are familiarised with the views of Catholic socialism, it will be very easy for democratic socialism to collect them under its own flag. They will, moreover, themselves effect their own conversion. Socialism finds itself in an analogous position towards republicanism. Just as atheism is a private matter that concerns the individual conscience, so the republic is a private affair that interests portions of the bourgeoisie. Certainly when socialism is ready to triumph, atheism will have made immense progress, and the republic will have been established in many lands which to-day submit to a monarchical regime. But it is 53 not socialism which develops atheism any more than it is socialism which will establish the republic. Atheism is a product of the theories of Darwin and Spencer in the present bourgeois civilisation, and the republic has been, and will be, in different countries the work of a part of the capitalist bourgeoisie, as was recently written in some conservative newspapers of Milan, when it was said, " the monarchy will no longer serve the interests of the country " that is to say, of the class in power. The evolution from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy and to republicanism, is an evident historical law; in the civilisation of to-day the only difference is in the elective or the hereditary character of the head of the State. In the different European countries the bourgeoisie itself will demand this passage from the monarchy to the republic in order to delay as long as possible the triumph of social- ism. In Italy, as in France, in England as in Spain, one sees only too many republicans or radicals whose attitude towards social questions is more bourgeois and conservative than that of intelligent conservatives. At Montecitorio, for example, M. R. Imbriani, has in religious and social matters more conservative opinions than M. di Rudini, M. Imbriani, whose personality is moreover very sympathetic, has never attacked a priest or a monk he who attacks the whole universe, and very ofteji rightly, though without much success, in consequence of an error in his 54 method and he alone has opposed even with blows the laws proposed by M. L. Ferrari, deputy, who increased the succession tax on inheritances in the indirect line.** Socialism has thus no more interest in preaching republicanism than it has in preaching atheism. To each his role, that is the law of division of labour. The struggle against atheism is the business of science ; the establishment of the republic has been, and will be, the action in the different countries of Europe of the bourgeoisie itself, conservative or radical. All that is history marching towards socialism, whilst individuals are unable to hinder or retard the succession of the phases of the moral, political and social evolution. * English readers will readily supply from their own experience substitutes for the names of the Italian poli- ticians referred to here. ED. CHAPTER VI. THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE SPECIES. We can again show that scientific socialism proceeds directly from Darwinism by examining the different modes of conceiving the individual in relation to the species. The eighteenth century finished with the exclusive glorification of the individual^ of the man as an entity in himself. In the works of Rosseau this was only a beneficent excess of reaction from the political and sacerdotal tyranny of the Middle Ages. This individualism has created, as a direct consequence, a political artificialism with which I shall occupy myself later in studying the relations of the theory of evolution and of socialism, and which is common to the govern- ors in the bourgeois regime and to individual- ist anarchists because they both imagine that the social organisation can be changed in a day by the magical effect of a clause of a law or by a bomb more or less murderous. Modern biology has radically changed this conception of the individual, and it has shown in the domain of biology as in that of sociol- ogy that the individual is himself only an aggregate of more simple living elements, and at the same time that the individual in him- self, the Selbstwesen of the Germans, does not exist in himself but only as far as he is a member of a society (Gliedwesen). 56 Everything living forms an association, a collective whole. The moneron itself, the living cell, the irreducible expression of the biological individuality, is also an aggregate of different parts (nucleus, nucleolus, proto- plasm), and each of these in its turn is an aggregate of molecules, which are aggregates of atoms. The atom does not exist alone as an indi- vidual ; the atom is invisible and impalpable, and does not live. And the complexity of the aggregate, the federation of parts, increases continually as we pass in the zoological series from the protozoa to man. The unifying and equalising Jacobin artifi- cialism corresponds to the metaphysics of individualism just as the conception of national and international federalism corre- sponds to the positive character of scientific socialism. The organism of a mammal is only a federation of tissues, organs, structure ; the organism of a society can only consist of a federation of townships, provinces, regions : the organism of humanity can only consist of a federation of nations. If it is absurd to conceive of a mammal whose head, for instance, should move in the same manner as its extremities, and its extremities should all move together, there is no less absurdity in a political and adminis- trative organism in which the province in the extreme North, or the mountainous province, for instance, should have the same official 57 machinery, the same body of laws, the same movements as the province in the extreme South, or the province composed of plains from the simple love of symmetrical uniformity, this pathological expression of unity. If we leave on one side these considerations of political order in accordance with which we conclude, as I have done elsewhere;* that the only organisation possible for Italy, as for every other country, seems to me to be that of an administrative federalism in a political unity, we can consider as proved, that at the end of the igth century the indi- vidual, as a being in himself is dethroned in' biology as in sociology. The individual exists but only in so far as he makes part of the social aggregate. Robinson Crusoe, this perfect type of indi- vidualism, can only exist as a legend or a pathological case. The species that is to say the social aggregate is the great, the living and eternal reality of life, as Darwinism has shown, and as all the positive sciences from astronomy to sociology have shown. At the end of the i8th century Rousseau thought that the individual alone exists, and that society is an artificial product of the "social contract," and as he attributed (just as Aristotle had done for slavery) a permanent human character to the transitory manifesta- tions of the historical period of the decay of * Criminal Sociology, London, 1895. 58 the regime in which he was living, he added that society is the cause of all evils, and that individuals are born good and equal. At the end of the igih century, on the contrary, all the positive sciences are agreed in recognising that aggregation is a natural and inseparable fact of life, with vegetable as with animal species from the lowest " animal colonies " of zoophytes to the societies of mammals (herbivora) and to human society.* All that the individual possesses of what is best, he owes to the social life, although every phase of the evolution be marked at its close by pathological conditions of social decay, essentially transitory moreover, which inevi- tably precede a new cycle of social renovation. The individual, as such, if such could be, would satisfy only one of the two fundamental needs of existence nourishment that is to say, the egoistic preservation of his own organism, by means of this periodical and fundamental function which Aristotle desig- nates by the name of ctesi the conquest of food. * I cannot concern myself here with the recent eclectic attempt of M. Fouille which others have followed. M. Fouill6e wishes to oppose, or at least to add, to the naturalist conception of society that of consent or con- tract. Evidently, since no theory is absolutely false, there is even in the theory of contract a particle of truth, and the freedom to emigrate may be an example of it as long as it is compatible with the economic interests of the class in power. But evidently this consenting which does not exist at the birth of each individual in such or such a society and this being born forms the most decisive and tyrannical deed in life is likewise very trifling in the development of his aptitudes and tendencies, dominated as these are by the iron law of the economic and political organisation of which he is an atom. 59 But all individuals must live in society, because a second fundamental need of life is imposed on them, that of the reproduction of beings similar to themselves for the preserva- tion of the species. It is this life of relation and of reproduction (sexual and social) which gives birth to the moral or social sense, and which allows the individual not only to be, but to co-exist with his fellows. We can say that these two fundamental instincts of life bread and love accomplish a function of social equilibrium in the life of animals, and notably of men. It is love which causes, for the greatest number of men, the principal physiological and psychical expenditure of forces accumu- lated in a more or less large amount by the daily food which the daily toil has not absorbed or which parasitic laziness has left intact. Much more is love the only pleasure which has really universal and levelling character. The people have called it " the Paradise of the poor " and religions have always invited them to enjoy it without limits crescite et multipli- camini (be fruitful and multiply) because the erotic exhaustion which results from it, especially among males, diminishes or makes them forget the tortures of hunger and servile toil, and enervates in a lasting manner the energy of the individual ; and in this way it fulfils a useful function for the dominant class. But with this effect of the sexual instinct another is inclissolubly linked the increase of 66 the population so that the desire to maintain a given social order clashes against the pressure of the people (described in our time as the proletariat), and social evolution pursues its inexorable and irresistible course. The conclusion of our discussion is that whilst at the end of the i8th century it was thought that society was made for the indi- vidual and it could then be inferred that millions of individuals might and ought to work and suffer for the exclusive advantage of a few other individuals ; at the end of the igth century the positive sciences have proved quite the contrary that it is the individual who lives for the species, and that the latter alone is the eternal reality of life. That is the point of departure of the sociological or social tendency of modern scientific thought as opposed to the exagger- ated individualism left as an heritage by the 1 8th century. Biology shows also that we must not fall into the opposite extreme as certain schools of Utopian socialism and of communism have done and only see society and completely neglect the individual. Another biological law shows us, in fact, that the existence of the aggregate is the resultant of the life of all the individuals, just as the existence of an indi- vidual is the resultant of the life of the cells of which it is composed. We have shown that the socialism which characterises the end of the igth, and which illumines the dawn of this century, is in perfect 6i harmony with the whole current of modern thought. This harmony is even manifested in the fundamental question of the predominence given to the vital exigencies of collective or social solidarity over the dogmatic exaggera- tions of individualism. If this latter marks, at the end of the i8th century, a powerful and fruitful awakening in consequence of pathological manifestations of unbounded competition it inevitably leads to the liber- tarian explosions of anarchism which preaches individual action and which completely forgets human and social solidarity. We thus arrive at the last point of contact and at the intimate union which exists bet ween Darwinism and socialism. CHAPTER VII. ; FOR LIFE " AND THE " CLASS STRUGGLE." Darwinism has proved that all the mechan- ism of animal evolution is reduced to the struggle for existence between individuals of one species, on the one hand, and between different species in the whole world of living beings, on the other. In the same way all the mechanism of social evolution has been reduced by Marxian social- ism to the law of the struggle of the classes. This theory does not give us only the secret motive power and the sole positive explanation of the history of humanity, it give us also the ideal ancj, rigid norm which disciplines politi- cal socialism, and which saves it from the elastic, vaporous, inconclusive uncertainties of sentimental socialism. The history of animal life has only found its positive explanation in the great Darwinian law of the struggle for existence; it alone permits us to determine the natural causes of birth, of evolution and of the disappearance of veget- able and animal species from palseontological times to our days. In the same manner the history of human life only finds its explanation in the great Marxian law of the struggle. of the classes. Thanks to it the annals of primitive humanity, barbarous and civilised, cease from being a capricious and superficial kaleidoscope 63 of individual episodes, and form a grand and fateful drama, determined consciously or unconsciously, in its most intimate details as in its catastrophes by economic conditions, which form the physical and indispensable basis of life, and by the struggle of the classes to conquer and preserve the economic forces on which all the others necessarily depend political, juridical, and moral. I shall have an opportunity when studying the relations of sociology and socialism of speaking more at length of this great concep- tion which is the imperishable glory of Marx and which secures for him in sociology the place that Darwin occupies in biology and Spencer in natural philosophy. For the moment it is sufficient for me to note a new point of contrast between Darwinism and socialism. The expression, " struggle of classes," so antipathetic at the first sound (and I confess that I felt this impression when I had not yet seized the scientific spirit of the Marxian theory) gives us, if we understand it exactly, the first law of human history and, therefore, it alone can give us the certain norm of the coming of the new phase of evolution which socialism foresees and which it endeavours to hasten. Struggle of the classes that is to say, that human society like all other living organisms is not a homogeneous whole, the sum of a number, more or less great, of individuals ; it is, on the contrary, a living organism which is the resultant of different parts and always 6 4 more or less differentiated according as the degree of social evolution is raised. Just as a protozoon is composed almost ex- clusively of albuminous gelatine whilst a mammal is composed of very diverse tissues ; so a chiefless tribe of primitive savages is composed of only a few families whose aggregation results simply from propinquity, whilst a civilised society of an historical or contemporary epoch is composed of social classes which differ one from the other, be it by the physio -psychical constitution of their components, or by the sum of their habits, their tendencies, their personal, family or social life. These different classes can be arranged in a rigorous fashion. In ancient India they go from the Brahman to the Sudra ; in Europe of the middle ages from the Emperor and the Pope to the feudatory, the vassal and the artisan, and an individual cannot pass from one class to the other. Chance of birth alone determines his social condition. It may hap- pen that the legal etiquette will disappear, as it happened in Europe and America after the French Revolution, and exceptionally an in- dividual may find his way from one class to another, as molecules do by exosmosis and endosmosis or, according to the expression of M. Dumont, by a sort of social capillarity. But in all cases these different classes- exist as an assured reality, and they will resist every attempt at levelling by laws as long as the fundament reason for their difference remains. 65 Karl Marx has proved the truth of this theory better than anyone else, by the mass of sociological observations which he has taken from the most diverse economic conditions. The names, the circumstances, the pheno- mena of conflict can vary with each ofjthe phases of social evolution, but the tragic basis of history always appears in the anta- gonism between those who keep the monopoly of the means of production and they are the minority and those who are dispossessed of them and these are the majority. Warriors and shepherds, in primitive societies, as soon as the family, and then the individual appropriation of the land is substituted for primitive collectivism, patricians and plebeians feudatories and vassals nobles and common people bourgeois and proletarians; these are all so many manifestations of the same fact ; the monopoly of wealth on the one side and productive work on the other. Now, the great importance of the Marxian law the class struggle consists chiefly in this, that it indicates with great precision of what the vital point of the social question really consists and by what method we can succeed in solving it. As long as the economic basis of political, legal, and moral life had not been demon- strated by positive evidence, the aspirations of most men towards a social amelioration were directed vaguely to the demand for, and the partial conquest of, some accessory means, such as freedom of worship, political suffrage, public instruction, etc., and certainly I have no wish 66 to deny the great utility of these conquests. But the sancta sanctorum always remained impenetrable to the eyes of the crowd, and as economic power continued to be the privilege of the few, all the conquests, all the concessions, were without real basis, separated as they were from the solid and fructifying foundation which can alone give life and durable force. Now that socialism has shown, even before Marx, but never with so much scientific pre- cision, that individual appropriation, private ownership of land and of the means of pro- duction, is the vital point of the question, the problem is laid down in precise terms in the consciousness of contemporary humanity. What method must be employed to abolish this monopoly of economic power and the mass of pains and evils, of hatred and iniquity, which is the result of it ? The method of the "class struggle" setting out from this positive datum that each class tends to preserve and increase the advantages and privileges acquired, teaches the class deprived of economic power that in order to conquer it, the struggle (we will concern our- selves farther on with the mode of this struggle) must be a struggle of class against class and not of person against person. Hatred, the death of such or such in- dividual belonging to the governing class, does not advance by one step the solution of the problem. It rather retards it because it provokes a reaction in public feeling against personal violence, and it violates the prin- ciple of respect for the human being which 6 7 socialism proclaims aloud for the benefit of all and against all opponents. The solution of the problem does not become easier because the existing abnormal conditions which be- comes more and more acute misery of the masses and enjoyment of the few is not the result of the ill will of such or such an individual. On this side again socialism is, in fact, in complete accord with positive science, which denies the free will of man and sees in human activity, individual and collective, a necessary effect, determined at the same time by conditions of race and environment.* Crime, suicide, madness, misery, are not the fruit of free will, of the individual fault, as metaphysical spiritualism believes ; and it is no more a result of free will, a fault of the individual capitalist, if the workman is badly paid, if he is without work, if he is miserable. All social phenomena are the necessary resultants of historic conditions and of en- vironment. In the modern world the facility and the greater frequency of intercourse between all parts of the earth have drawn still closer the dependence of every action * Separating myself from the two exclusive arguments that civilisation is a consequence of race or a product of the environment, I have always maintained by my theory of the natural factors of criminality that it is the resultant of the combined action of race and environment. Amongst the recent works which maintain the argument of the exclusive or predominant influence of race must be mentioned Le Bon, The Psychology of Peoples, London, 1899. This work is, however, rather superficial. I refer for a more detailed examination of these two arguments to the fourth chapter of my book, Omicidio nell' antro- Pologia criminale, Turin, 1894. 68 economic, political, legal, moral, artistic or scientific on the most distant and most indirect conditions of earthly life. The present organisation of private owner- ship without any limit to family inheritance and personal accumulation ; the continual and always more complete application of scientific discoveries to men's work in the transformation of matter, the telegraph and steam, the always extending migrations of men cause the existence of a family of peasants, of workmen, of small tradesmen, to be united by invisible but tenacious threads to the life of the world, and the crop of coffee, of cotton, or of corn in the most distant countries has its effect on all parts of the civilised world, just as the decrease or increase of solar spots forms a co- efficient of periodical agricultural crises and directly influences the lot of millions of men. This grand scientific conception of "the unity of physical forces " according to the expression of P. Secchi, or of universal solidarity, throws far from it the childish conception which makes free will and the individual the cause of human phenomena. If a socialist proposed, even for a philan- thropic object, to equip a factory for giving work to the unemployed, and if he produced articles abandoned by fashion and general consumption, he would soon be brought to bankruptcy by an inevitable consequence of economic laws in spite of his philanthropic intentions. Or if a socialist wished to give the work- 6 9 people of his establishment wages two or three times higher than the current rate, he would evidently meet with the same fate, because he would meet with the same economic laws and he would be obliged to sell his goods at a loss or keep them unsold in his shops owing to his price for equal qualities being higher than the market rate. He would be declared a bankrupt, and the world would bring him no other consolation than the epithet of worthy man, and, in this phase of " commercial morality,"* we know what this expression signifies. Beyond the personal relations more or less cordial between capitalists and workers, their respective economic condition is inevitably determined by the present organisation, according to the law of surplus value which has allowed Marx to explain in an irrefutable manner how the capitalist can accumulate riches without working because the workman produces in his day's work an equivalent of wealth greater than the wages received, and the surplus of the product forms the gratuitous profit of the capitalist, even if one deducts the salary for his technical and administrative management. The land left to sun and rain does not produce by itself corn or wine. The minerals * I make use of the expression "commercial morality" which M. Letourneau has employed in his book on L'tvolution de la morale, Paris, 1887. In his positive study of facts concerning morality, M. Letourneau has distinguished four phases animal morality, savage morality, barbarian morality, commercial or bourgeois morality ; to these phases will succeed a phase of superior morality which Malon had called social morality. 70 do not come forth by themselves from the bowels of the earth. A bag of crowns shut up in a strong box does not produce crowns as a cow does calves. The production of wealth results only from a transformation of matter wrought by human labour. And it is only because the peasant cultivates the land, that the miner extracts minerals, that the workman sets machines in motion, that the chemist makes experiments in his laboratory, that the engineer invents machines, that the capitalist or the landlord, although the wealth inherited from his father has cost him no work and no effort if he is an absentee, can each year enjoy riches that others have produced for him in exchange for a miserable home, insufficient food, very often poisoned by vapours of rivers or marshes, by the gases of mines, and by the dust of factories in a word for a wage which is always insufficient to secure them an existence worthy of a human being. Even under a regime of fully developed small farming* which has been called a form of practical socialism the question always arises by what miracle the landlord, who does not work, sees corn, oil, and wine arrive in his house in sufficient quantities to enable him to live comfortably, whilst the farmer is forced * [The system here indicated is the metayer which John Stuart Mill defined as that under which "the labourer or peasant makes his engagement directly with the land- owner, and pays, not a fixed rent, either in money or in kind, but a certain proportion of the produce, or rather of what remains of the produce after deducting what is considered necessary to keep up the stock." cf. Mill's Political Economy, bk. ii., chap. viii. ED.] 71 to work daily in order to wrest from the land that which enables him and his family to live miserably. And small farming gives him at least the tranquilising assurance that he will reach the end of the year without experiencing all the terrors of the enforced slack season to which the workers not properly belonging to the country and the workers of the town are condemned. But at the bottom the problem remains in its entirety, and there is always a man who lives in comfort without working, because ten others live miserably whilst working.* Such is the working of private property and such are its effects without any intervention of the will of individuals. Also, every attempt made against such or such individual is condemned to remain sterile : it is the basis of society that must be changed, it is individual property that must be abolished, not by a division which would lead to the most acute and paltry form of private property, because a year afterwards the persistence of the 'individualist aspect would lead us to the status quo ante, to the exclusive benefit of the most crafty and least scrupulous. * Certain persons still imbued with political artificial- ism think that to solve the social question the system of small farming must be generalised. They imagine with- out putting it into words, a royal or presidential decree : Clause i. All men shall become farmers ! And they do not think that if small farming, which was the rule, is become the more and more rare excep- tion, it must be~the necessary effect of natural causes. The cause of the change lies in the fact that small 7 2 We must attain to the abolition ol private property and to the establishment of collec- tive and social property in the land and the means of production. This substitution cannot be the subject of a decree as people suppose us to intend ; but it is being accom- plished under our eyes each day, from hour to hour, directly or indirectly. Directly because civilisation shows us the continuous substitution of social possessions and functions for individual possessions and functions. Roads, the Post Office, railways, museums, the lighting of towns, drinking water, instruction, etc., which were only a few years ago private possessions and functions, have become social possessions and functions, and it would be absurd to imagine that this direct advance of socialism ought to stop short to-day instead of progressively empha- sising itself, since everything in modern life moves with accelerating speed. Indirectly because it is the point to which economic and bourgeois individualism tends. The bourgeoisie, which borrows its name from the inhabitants of the boroughs which the feudal castle and the churches protected farming represents the petty agricultural industry, and that it cannot struggle against the big agricultural indus- try well furnished with machines, just as handwork has not been able to resist the great manufacturing industries. It is true that there are still to-day handicrafts in a few villages, but these are rudimentary organs which only represent a former phase, and which have no decisive function in the economic world. They are like the rudi- mentary organs of the higher animals, according to the theory of Darwin witnesses to epochs for ever passed. The same Darwinian and economic law applies to small farming, itself evidently destined for the same end as handicrafts. 73 symbols of the class then dominant is the result of fruitful labour, conscious of what it was aiming at, and of historic conditions that have changed the economic trend of the world (the discovery of America, for instance). It made its revolution at the end of the i8th century and acquired power. In the history of the civilised world it has written a golden page by its national epics and by its marvel- lous applications of science to industry ; but to-day it is wandering over the descending curve of the parabola, and certain symptoms point out to us its coming dissolution. Without its disappearance, moreover, the establishment of a new social phase will not be possible. Economic individualism, carried to its last consequences, necessarily causes the pro- gressive augmentation of property in the hands of an increasingly restricted number of persons. The millionaire is a new word which characterises the igth century, and it is the clear impression of this phenomenon in which Henry George saw the historic law of individualism which causes the rich to be- come more and more rich and the poor more and more poor.** Now it is evident that the more restricted is the number of those who hold the land and the means of production, the easier is their expropriation with or without indem- nity for the advantage of a single proprietor who is, and who can only be, the community. The land is the physical basis of the social organism. U is then absurd that it should * Henry George, Progress and Poverty, London, 1887. 74 belong to a few and not to the whole social body ; it would not be more absurd if the air we breathe were the monopoly of a few proprietors. That is indeed the supreme aim of socialism, but we can evidently not attain it by aiming at this or that landlord, this or that capitalist. The method of the individualist struggle is destined to remain sterile, or at least it exacts an immense waste of forces to obtain only partial and provisional results. Also, those politicians who carry on their business of daily or anecdotic protest, who only see a struggle of individuals, and whose work is without effect on the public or on assemblies who become accustomed to it, have on me the effect of fantastic hygienists, who would try to render a marsh habitable by killing the mosquitoes one by one with a revolver, instead of adopting the method and aim of rendering healthy the pestilential marsh. No personal struggles, no personal violence, but a class struggle. The immense army of workers of all trades and all professions must be made conscious of these fundamental truths. We must show them that their class interests are in opposition to the interests of the class which holds the economic power, and it is by class conscious organisation that they will conquer this economic power by means of other public powers which contemporary civilisation has secured to free peoples. One can, however, foresee that in every country the dominant class before yielding will diminish 75 or destroy even those public liberties which were without danger when they were in the hands of workmen not formed into a class party, but at the tail of other purely political parties which are as radical in secondary questions as they are profoundly conservative on the fundamental question of the economic organisation of property. The class struggle is, therefore, a struggle of class against class, and a struggle, of course, by the methods of which I shall shortly speak when dealing with the four modes of social transformation : evolution revolution re- volt personal violence. But it is a struggle of class in the Darwinian sense which renews in the history of man the grand drama of the struggle for life among the species instead of debasing ourselves to the savage and insig- nificant fight of one individual with another. We can stop here. The examination of the relations between Darwinism and socialism might lead us much farther, but it would always eliminate the supposed contradiction there is between the two currents of modern, scientific thought, and it would affirm on the contrary the intimate, natural and indissoluble agreement there is between the two. It is thus that the penetrating eye of Virchow found a confirmation in Leopold Jacoby. "The same year when Darwin's book appeared (1859), and setting out from /juite a different direction, an identical impulse was given to~ a very important development of social science by a work which passed 7 6 unperceived for a long time, and which bore for title : Criticism on Political Economy, by Karl Marx it was the precursor of Capital. "What Darwin's book on the Origin of Species is for the genesis and evolution of unconscious nature up to man, the work of Marx is for the genesis and evolution of the community of human beings, of States, and of the social forms of humanity."* And that is why Germany, which has been the most fruitful field for the development of Darwinian theories, has been the same for the conscious, disciplined propaganda of socialist ideas. And that is precisely why at Berlin in the libraries of socialist propaganda the works of Charles Darwin occupy the place of honour beside those of Karl Marx.| * L. Jacoby, L'Idea dell' evoluzione in Bibliotheca dell' economista, series III., vol. ix., part 2, p. 69. t At the death of Darwin the Sozialdemokrat of 27 April, 1882, wrote : "The proletariat which is struggling for its emancipation will always honour the memory of Charles Darwin." I know that in the last few years, perhaps in conse- quence of the relations between Darwinism and social- ism, the objections made to Darwin's theory by Ncegeli have been taken up again, and more recently by Weissmann on the hereditary transmissibility of acquired characteristics. But all that only concerns this or that detail of Darwinism, whilst the fundamental theory of organic transformism remains unshaken. PART II. CHAPTER VIII. EVOLUTION AND SOCIALISM. The theory of universal evolution, which apart from this or that detail more or less debatable really characterises the vital trend of modern scientific thought, has also appeared to be in absolute contradiction to the theories and practical ideals of socialism. Here the equivocation is evident. If we mean by socialism this vague complexus of sentimental aspirations so many times crystallised in artificial Utopian creations of a new human world, which by a magical power was to substitute itself in one day for the world in which we live, then it is perfectly true that the 'scientific theory of evolution condemns the prejudices and illusions of political artificialism, always romantic whether reactionary or revolutionary. But, unfortunately for our adversaries, con- temporary socialism is quite another thing from the socialism that preceded the work of Marx. Beyond the same sentiment of protest against present iniquities and of aspirations towards a better future there is nothing in common between the two socialisms, either in their logical structure or in their inductions, 7 8 unless it be the clear vision, mathematically exact (and that indeed by virtue of the theories of evolution), of the final social organism based on the collective ownership of land and the means of production. That is what will result very clearly from the examination of the three principal contra- dictions which it has been thought could be raised between socialism and scientific evolution. Henceforth it is impossible not to see the direct relation of Marxian socialism to scientific evolution, when it is understood that the former is only the logical and conse- quential application of the theory of evolution in the economic domain. CHAPTER IX. THE ORTHODOX ARGUMENT AND THE SOCIALIST ARGUMENT IN THE LIGHT OF THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION. What does socialism in substance say? That the present economic world cannot be unchangeable and eternal, that it only represents a transitory phase of social evolution, and that a future phase, a world otherwise organised, ought to succeed it. That this new organisation must be collec- tivist or socialist and no longer individualist, that is what is derived as a final and positive conclusion from the examination we have made of Darwinism and socialism. I must now prove that this fundamental affirmation of socialism leaving on one side all the details of future organisation of which I will speak further on is in perfect harmony with the experimental theory of evolution. On what point are orthodox political economy and socialism at complete variance ? Political economy has maintained, and maintains, that the laws of the production and distribution of wealth are natural laws, not in the sense that they are laws naturally determined by the conditions of the social organism (which would be correct), but that they are absolute laws, that is to say, that they are suitable to humanity for all time and all places, and consequently that they are unchangeable in their chief character- istics, though they may be susceptible to modifications in detail. 8o Scientific socialism maintains, on the con- trary, that the laws established by classic, political economy, since Adam Smith, are laws suitable to the present historic period of the civilised world, that consequently they are laws essentially relative to the [time in which they have been analysed ; further, that just as they no longer correspond with the facts if one wishes to extend them to the historic past, and still more to pre-historic and ante-historic times, so they cannot have a claim to petrify the social future. Of these two fundamental arguments, the orthodox argument and the socialist argument, which is the one that best accords with the scientific theory of universal evolution ? The answer cannot be doubtful. The theory of evolution of which Herbert Spencer is the real author, in applying to sociology the relativist tendency which the historic school had followed in the study of law and politics (already heterodox on more than one point), has shown that everything changes, that the present, in the astronomical, geological, biological, sociological order, is only the resultant of many thousand trans- formations, natural, necessary, incessant that the present differs from the past, and that the future will certainly be different from the present. Spencerism has done nothing but bring an enormous number of scientific proofs in all branches of human knowledge to these two abstract thoughts of Leibnitz and Hegel : 8i "the present is the son of the past but it is the father of the future," and "nothing is, every- thing is becoming." Already geology since Lyell had made this demonstration, in sub- stituting for the traditional conception of cataclysms, the scientific conception of the gradual and daily transformation of the earth. It is true that, in spite of his encylopaedic knowledge, Herbert Spencer has not thoroughly studied political economy, or that at least he has not given his proofs as in the natural sciences. That does not, however, hinder socialism from being, in its fundamental con- ception, only the logical application of the scientific theory of natural evolution to economic phenomena. It is Karl Marx who, in 1859, in his Criticism on Political Economy, and previously, in 1847, in the celebrated Manifesto written in col- laboration with Engels, nearly ten years before the First Principles of Spencer was pub- lished, finally completed in Capital in the social domain the scientific revolution com- menced by Darwin and Spencer. Ancient metaphysics ' conceives morality law, economics, as a collection of absolute and eternal laws as Plato understood them. It only takes into consideration the historic world, and has as an instrument of research only the logical imagination of the philo- sopher. The generations which preceded us have been imbued with this idea of absolute natural laws struggling in the dualism of matter andjnind. Positive science, on the contrary, starts from the grand synthesis of 82 monism, that is to say, of the sole phenomenal reality, matter and force being recognised as inseparable and indestructible, developing themselves in a continued movement, assum- ing successively forms relative to time and place. It has radically changed the trend of modern thought and has directed it towards universal evolution. Morality, law, politics are only super- structures, effects of the economic structure, they vary with it from one clime to another, from one century to another century. This is the great discovery which Karl Marx has set forth in his Criticism on Political Economy. I will examine later what is this sole source of economic conditions, but now I am concerned with pointing out their continued variability from the prehistoric epoch to the historic epoch and in the different periods of the latter. Rules of morals, religious beliefs, legal, civil, and penal institutions, political or- ganisation ; everything changes and every- thing is relative to the historic and material environment which one is considering. To kill one's parents is the greatest of crimes in Europe and America ; it is, on the contrary, a duty which religion sanctifies in the island of Sumatra. Similarly, cannibalism is still permitted in Central Africa, and it was equally permitted in Europe and America in prehistoric times. The family is at first (as with animals) only a sexual communism ; polyandry and a matriarchate established themselves where a scanty food supply only allowed a small increase in the population ; we find polygamy and a patriarchate at the time and in the place where this fundamental economic reason does not rule tyrannically. With historic times appears the best and most advanced form, monogamy, although that still needs to be delivered from the absolutist conventionalism of the indissoluble bond and of the prostitution disguised and legalised (for economic reasons) which sullies it in our epoch. Why claim that the constitution of property ought to remain eternally what it is now, un- changeable in the midst of this gigantic current of social institutions, and of moral rules subject to continued and profound evolutions and transformations? Property alone should be subjected to no change, and should remain petrified in its form of private monopoly of the land and of the means of production ! Such is the absurd claim of economic and legal orthodoxy. To the irresistible state- ments of the theory of evolution only this single concession has been made: the accessory rules may vary, the abuses may be diminished. The principle itself is not to be touched, and a few individuals may appropriate for them- selves the land and the means of production necessary for the life of the whole social organism, which thus remains for ever under the domination, more or less direct, of these holders of the physical basis of life.* * The partisans and opponents of free will are in exactly the same position. Ancient metaphysics granted to man (the unique 8 4 It suffices to state precisely the two funda- mental theses the theses of classic law and economics and the thesis of economic and juridical socialism to decide thus without further discussion this first point of the controversy : in all cases the theory of evolution is in perfect, incontestable agree- ment with the inductions of socialism, and it is, on the contrary, in opposition to the affirmations of those who believe in economic and juridical fixity. marvellous exception in the whole universe) absolute free will. Modern physio-psychology refuses to man every kind of free will in the name of the laws of natural causation. There are found in an intermediate position those who, tvhilst recognising that the free will of man is not abso- lute, maintain that we must at least admit a little free will because, otherwise, there is neither merit nor demerit, virtue, nor vice, etc. I dealt with this question in my first work : Teoria dell' imputabilitd e negazione de libero arbitrio (Florence, 1878, out of print), and in chap. iii. of my Criminal Sociology. I only mention it here to show that even in the eco- nomic social question, the struggle presents itself in the same conditions, and that one can, therefore, predict a similar, final solution. The true Conservative inspired with metaphysical tradition keeps to the ancient moral or economic ideas in all their absolutism : he is at least logical. The determinist, in the name of science, holds ideas diametrically opposed in the domain of psychology as in that of the economic or legal sciences. The eclectic, in politics as in psychology, in political economy as in law, is at bottom a Conservative, but he thinks he evades difficulties because he makes some partial concessions and saves appearances. But if eclecticism is an attitude personally convenient, it is like hybridism, sterile, and neither life nor science owes it anything. Thus socialists logically claim that the political parties are after all two in number : individualists (conservatives, progressives, radicals) and socialists. CHAPTER X. THE LAW OF APPARENT RETROGRESSION AND COLLECTIVE PROPERTY. Let us admit, say our opponents, that in demanding a social transformation socialism is in apparent accord with the theory of evolution, yet it does not follow that its positive conclusions notably the substitution of social property for individual property are justified by this same theory. Much more, they add, we maintain that these conclusions are in absolute opposition to this very theory and that they are consequently, at least, Utopian and absurd. Socialism and evolutionism would first be in opposition in that the return to collective property of the land would at the same time be a return to the primitive, savage stage of humanity, and socialism would indeed be a change, but a change the wrong way, that is to say against the current of social evolution which has brought us from the primitive collective ownership of the land to the present individual ownership, which is a characteristic of an advanced civilisation. Socialism would then be a return to barbarism. This objection contains a portion of truth which cannot be denied : it justly notes that collective property would be a return, apparently, to the primitive social organisa- tion. But the conclusion which is drawn is absolutely false and unscientific because it takes no account of a law very generally neglected, but which is neither less true nor less certain than social evolution. 86 There is a sociological law which a French doctor of repute has indicated in studying the relations of transformism and socialism.* I have shown the truth and the importance of this in my Criminal Sociology before becom- ing a militant socialist and I have again recently insisted upon it in my controversy with M. Morselli on divorce.| This law of apparent retrogression shows that the reversion of social institutions to primitive forms and characteristics is a con- stant fact. Before setting forth some evident illustra- tions of this law, I will recall the fact that M. Cognetti de Martiis, already in 1881, had had a vague glimpse of this sociological law. His work Forme primitive nelV evoluzione economica (Turin 1881) so remarkable for the abund- ance, the precision and the exactness of the facts set forth, gave a glimpse in fact of the possibility of the reappearance in the future economic evolutions of the primitive forms which marked its starting point. I remember also often to have heard Carducci, in his lessons at the University of Bologna, affirm that ultimate progress of the forms and subject matter of literature is often only the reproduction of the forms and the subject-matter of primitive Graeco-Oriental literature ; similarly the modern scientific theory of monism, the very soul of universal evolution and the representative of the latest * L. Dramard, Transformisme et socialisme, in the Revue socialiste, January and February, 1885. t Divorzio e sociologia in the Scuola positiva nella giurisprudenza penale, Rome, 1893, No. 16. 87 positive and definite discipline of human thought confronting external reality, suc- ceeding the brilliant wandering of meta- physics, is only a reversion to the ideas of Greek philosophers and of Lucretius, the great naturalistic poet. The examples of this reversion to primitive forms are only too evident and too numerous even in the order of social institutions. I have already spoken of religious evolution. According to Hartmann, in the primitive times of humanity happiness seemed realisable in the existence of the individual. It did not appear to be so later except in the life beyond the tomb, and now the tendency is to carry it back to humanity, but in the series of future generations. It is the same in the political domain, and Spencer remarks* that the will of all the sovereign element in primitive humanity-r- yields little by little to the will of one, then to those of a few (these are the different aris- tocracies, military, hereditary, professional, feudal), and it tends finally to become sovereign with the progress of democracy, universal suffrage, referendum, direct legislation by the people, etc. The right to punish, a simple function of defence in primitive humanity, tendsito become such again. It has freed itself from every teleological pretension of distributive justice which the illusion of free will had superposed on the natural foundation of defence. Scientific researches into crime, as a natural * Sociology III. chapter 5. 8* and social phenomenon, have shown to-day how absurd and illegitimate was the preten- sion of the legislator and the judge to weigh and measure the " fault " of the delinquent in order that the punishment might be an exact counterpoise, instead of contenting themselves with excluding from civil society temporarily or perpetually those individuals who cannot adapt themselves to its necessities, as one does with lunatics or those afflicted with con- tagious diseases. The same with marriage. The free right of dissolution which was recognised in primitive society has been gradually replaced by the absolute formulae of theology and spiritualism which imagine that " free will " can fix the destiny of a person by a monosyllable pro- nounced at a moment of such unstable psychical equilibrium as is the period of betrothal and marriage. Later, the reversion to the spontaneous and primitive form of consent is imposed and the matrimonial union with the custom continually more frequent and easy of divorce returns to its origin and gives to the family, that is to say to the social cell, a healthier constitution. This same phenomenon is established in property. Spencer himself has been forced to recognise that there was a fatal tendency to a reversion to a primitive collectivism when the appropriation of the land, at first for the family then for industrial purposes as he has himself shown, has attained its culminating point, so that in certain countries (Torrens Act in Australia) the land has become a sort of personal property transmissible, like the shares of a joint stock company. Here is what an individualist like Herbert Spencer writes as a conclusive argument: "At first sight it seems fairly inferable that the absolute ownership of land by private persons must be the ultimate state which industrialism brings about. But though industrialism has thus far tended to individualise possession of land, while indivi- dualising all other possession, it maybe doubted tvhether the final stage is at present reached. Ownership established by force does not stand on the same footing as ownership established by contract ; and though multiplied sales and purchases, treating the two ownerships in the same way, have tacitly assimilated them, the assimilation may eventually be denied. The analogy furnished by assumed rights of possession over human beings helps us to recognise this possibility. For while prisoners of war, taken by force and held as property in a vague way (being at first much on a footing with other members of a household), were reduced more definitely to the form of property when the buying and selling of slaves became general ; and while it might, centuries ago, have been thence inferred that the ownership of man by man was an ownership in course of being permanently established ;* yet we see that a later stage of civilisation, reversing this process, has destroyed ownership of man by * It is known that Aristotle, taking for an absolute sociological law a law relative to his time, affirmed that slavery was a natural institution, and that men were distinguished by nature as free men and slaves. 90 man. Similarly, at a stage still more ad- vanced, it may be that private ownership of land will disappear."* Besides, this process of the socialisation of property, although partial and accessory, is so evident and continuous that it would be denying what is an actual fact to maintain that the economic and consequently the juridical tendency of the organisation of property is not in the direction of an ever greater augmentation of the interests and rights of the aggregate of individuals over those of the single individual : this prepon- deratering tendency of to-day will replace completely, by an inevitable process of evolu- tion, the ownership of land and the means of production. The fundamental thesis of socialism is then, to repeat it once more, in perfect accord with * Spencer, Principles of Sociology, vol. 2, part 5, chap. 15. This idea which Spencer had expressed in 1850 in his Social Statics is found again in his recent work, Justice, chapter xi., appendix B. It is true that he has made a step backwards. He thinks that the amount of the indemnity to be given to the present owners of the land would be so great that it would render almost impossible the nationalisation of the land, which, in 1881, Henry George considered as the only remedy, and which Glad- stone had the courage to propose as a solution of the Irish question. Spencer adds, " I adhere to the inference originally drawn, that the aggregate of men forming the community are the supreme owners of the land an infer- ence harmonising with legal doctrine, and daily acted upon in legislation a fuller consideration of the matter has led me to the conclusion that individual ownership, subject to State-suzerainty, should be maintained." The "fuller study" which Spencer has made in Justice (and in parenthesis this work constitutes with his Positive and Negative Benevolence [Parts V. and VI. of The Principles of Ethics, vol. ii. ED.], a mournful document of senile involved reasoning from which even Mr. H. Spencer has not been able to escape ; in addition, his subjective dryness 91 this sociological law of apparent retrogression , the natural causes of which M. Loria has admirably analysed : Primitive humanity borrows from surrounding nature the funda- mental and most simple lines of its thought and life ; then the progress of intelligence and complexity, increasing by a law of evolution, gives us an analytical development of the principal elements contained in the first germs of each institution ; this analytical develop- ment is often, once it is finished, antagonistic to each of the elements ; humanity itself, having reached a certain stage of evolution, recomposes in a final synthesis these different forms a strange contrast to the marvellous wealth of posi- tive ideas in his first works) is founded on two arguments, (i) the present landowners are not the direct descendants of the first conquerors : they have acquired their properties generally by free contract ; (2) Society would have a right to the ownership of the virgin soil, as it was before the clearing, the improvements, the buildings made by private owners : the indemnity which ought to be paid for these improvements would mount to an enormous figure. We must answer that the first argument would hold good if socialism proposed to punish the present landowners, but the question is put otherwise : society recognises the dispossession of holders of land as of "public benefit," the individual right must bow to the social right, as happens, moreover, at present, whilst reserving the ques- tion of indemnity. In order to answer the second question we must not forget that the improvements are not the exclusive work of the personal activity of the landowners. There is first the enormous accumulation of labour and blood which numerous generations of workers, for the benefit of others, have left on the soil to put it in its present state of culture ; there is also this fact that society itself, social life, has been a large co-efficient of these improvements since the good state of the public roads, railways, the use of machines in agriculture, etc., have procured for landowners important increments, free of cost to them, in the value of their lands. Why then, iLwe consider the amount and the form of the indemnity, should this indemnity be total and absolute ? But even to-day if a landowner in consequence of diverse 9 , elements and thus returns to its primitive point of departure.! This return to the primitive form is not, however, a repetition pure and simple. So we call it the law of apparent retrogression and that takes away all value from the objection of the "return to primitive barbarism." It is not a repetition pure and simple, but the end of a cycle, of a great rhythm, as M. Asturaro recently said, which cannot but preserve the effects and conquests of the long prior evolution in what they possess of vitality and fruitfulness, and the final outcome is far superior, in its objective reality and its effect on the human mind, to the primitive embryo which it resembles. The course of social evolution is not repre- sented by a closed circle, which, like the serpent of the ancient symbol, cuts off all hope of a better future ; but according to the image of Goethe, it is represented by a spiral which seems to come back on itself but which always advances and rises. circumstances, of memories associated with his land, for example, values it at a sentimental price, would he not be forced to give it up without being able to exact payment of this sentimental price? It will be the same with the collective dispossession which, moreover, is facilitated by the progressive concentration of land in the hands of a few large landowners. It will suffice to secure to these landowners during their days a comfortable and tranquil life in order that the indemnity should answer to all the exigencies of the most rigorous equity. t Loria, The Economic Basis of Society. This law of apparent retrogression is sufficient to answer the greater number of the rather too superficial criticisms which M. Guyot makes on socialism in The Tyranny of Socialism, London, 1894. CHAPTER XI. SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY. The conclusion of the preceding chapter will be of use to us in examining the second contradiction which it is held exists between socialism and the theory of evolution. It is affirmed and repeated in every way that socialism forms a tyranny of a new kind which will destroy all the benefits of the liberty so painfully won in our century at the price of so many sacrifices and so many martyrs. I have already shown in speaking of anthropological inequalities that socialism will on the contrary secure to all individuals the conditions of human existence, and the possibility of developing their own personality more freely and more completely. It will suffice for me here to recall another law which the scientific theory of evolution has established, to prove (because I cannot in this monograph enter into the details) that it is wrong to suppose that the advent of social- ism will result in the suppression of the living and fructifying part of personal and political liberty. It is a law of natural evolution remarkably illustrated by M. Ardigo,* that no subsequent phase of natural and social evolution destroys the vital and fructifying manifestations of preceding phases, but on the contrary, that it continues their existence in so far as they are vital and eliminate only the pathological manifestations. * Ardig6, La formazione naturale, vol. H. of his opere filosofiche, Padua, 1887. 94 In biological evolution the manifestations of vegetable life do not efface the first dawn of life which is already seen in the crystallisation of minerals, anymore than the manifestations of animal life efface those of vegetable life. The human form of life also leaves in existence the forms and links which precede it in the great series of living beings, but much more do the later developed forms live in proportion to whether they are the product of primitive forms, and co- exist with them. Social evolution follows the same law, and this is precisely the interpretation which scientific evolutionism gives of the transition times. They do not eliminate the conquests of preceding civilisation, but, on the contrary, they preserve the vital part of them and fructify them for the new birth of a fresh civilisation. This law which governs the grand develop- ment of social life, rules equally the destiny and the course of all social institutions. One phase of social evolution in succeeding another eliminates, it is true, the non-vital parts, the pathological products of preceding institutions, but it preserves and develops the healthy and fructifying parts whilst it always raises higher the physical and moral diapason of humanity. By this natural process the great river of humanity has come forth from the virgin forests of savage life, has developed majesti- cally in the periods of barbarism and of the present civilisation, superior in certain aspects to the preceding phases of social life, but in 95 many others stained by the very products of its own degeneracy as I have mentioned con- cerning backward social selections. For example, it is certain that the workmen of the contemporary period of bourgeois civilisation have generally a physical and moral existence superior to that of past centuries ; but it cannot, however, be denied that their condition as free wage earners is inferior in more than one point to the condition of the slaves of antiquity and of the serfs of the Middle Ages. The slave of antiquity was, it is true, the absolute property of his master, of the free man, and he was condemned to an almost bestial life ; but it was to the interest of the master to secure to him at least his daily bread, for the slave was part of his patrimony like his oxen and horses. Similarly, the serf of the soil, in the Middle Ages, enjoyed certain customary rights which attached him to the land and secured to him at least except in case of scarcity daily bread. The free wage earner of the modern world, on the contrary, is always condemned to labour not fit for a human being both by its length and its character. This is the justifica- tion for the claim for an eight hours' day, which can already reckon more than one victory, and which is destined to a certain triumph. As no permanent juridical relation connects him either with the capitalist land- lord, or with the land, his daily bread is not secured to him, because the employer has no longer any interest in feeding and maintaining 9 6 the workers in his factory or his field. The death or the illness of the worker can, in fact, bring no diminution of his patrimony, and he can always have recourse to the inexhaus- tible crowd of proletarians which the slack season offers him in the market. This is why not because the present em- ployers are more wicked than those of the past, but because even the moral sentiments are a product of the economic condition the landowner, or the steward of his estate, will hasten to call a veterinary surgeon if the ox in his stall is taken ill, so that he may avoid the loss of so much capital, while he shows no eagerness in having a doctor called if it is his drover's son who is attacked. Certainly there may be (and there are exceptions more or less frequent) a landowner who is a contradiction to this rule, especially when he lives in daily contact with his workers. It cannot be denied further that the rich classes are sometimes troubled with the spirit of beneficence even without the "charity fad,' 1 and that they thus sooth the inward voice of moral uneasiness which troubles them, but the inexorable rule is still this : with the modern form of industry the worker has con- quered political freedom, the right of a vote, of association, etc. (which he is allowed to exercise as long as he does not unite to form a class party which holds an intelligent con- ception of the essential point of the social question) but he has lost the security of his daily bread and his home. Socialism wishes to give this security to all 97 individuals and it proves the mathematical possibility of this by the substitution of the social ownership for the individual ownership of the means of production ; but that does not mean that socialism will cause the disappear- ance of all the useful and truly fructifying conquests of the present or the preceding phases of civilisation. Here is a characteristic example: the inven- tion of industrial and agricultural machines. This marvellous application of science to the transformation of natural forces which ought to have only beneficial consequences, has entailed, and entails still, the misery and ruin of thousands and thousands of workers. The substitution of machines for human labour has inevitably condemned masses of the work- ing classes to the tortures of forced slack seasons and to the hard law of a minimum wage, scarcely sufficient to keep them from dying of hunger. The first instinctive reaction of these un- fortunates has been, and, unhappily, still is, to destroy the machines, and see in them only a means of undeserved damnation. But the destruction of the machines would really be only a pure and simple reversion to barbarism, and that is not the desire of socialism, which represents a higher plane of human civilisation. And this is how socialism alone can solve this melancholy difficulty. Economic indi- vidualism cannot do this by employing always new machines, because therein is an evident and irresistible advantage for the capitalist. 9 8 It is necessary and there is no other solution that the machines should become collective or social property. Then, evidently, they will have no other effect than to diminish the sum total of work and of muscular effort necessary to produce a given quantity of products. And thus each workman will see his daily portion of work diminish, and his existence will continually and increasingly rise to one worthy of a human creature. This effect is already partially established when, for example, several small landowners found co-operative societies for the purchase of machines for thrashing corn. If workmen or peasants came to join the small landowners in a great brotherly co-operation (and this will only be possible when the land shall have become social property), and if the machines were municipal property, for example, like the fire engines, and if the community let them be used for field work, the machines would not have an unhappy repelling effect, and all men would see in them deliverers. It is thus that socialism, because it repre- sents a higher phase of human evolution would only eliminate from the present phase the evil products of our unbridled economic individualism, which creates on the one side millionaires or those contractors who enrich themselves in a few years by possessing them- selves, according to forms more or less fore- seen by the penal code, of public funds, and which on the other side accumulates enormous masses of miserable men in the lowest parts of the great cities or in the houses of straw 99 and mud, which reproduce in the Basilicate, the quarters of the Roman helots, or in the valley of the Po, the Australian aborigines' huts.* No intelligent socialist has ever dreamt of refusing to recognise all that the bourgeoisie has done for human civilisation, or of tearing out the pages of gold that it has written in the history of the civilised world by its national epics, its marvellous applications of science to industry, and by the commercial and intellectual relations it has developed among the nations. These are definitive" conquests of human progress, and socialism no more denies them than it wishes to destroy them. It accords a just tribute of gratitude to the noble pioneers who have realised them. The attitude of socialism with respect to the bourgeoisie might be compared with that of atheists who do not wish to refuse their admiration for, or to destroy a picture of Raphael or a statue of Michael Angelo, because these works of art represent and give the seal of eternity to religious legends. But socialism sees in the present bourgeois civilisation, which has reached its decline, the painful symptoms of an irremediable dissolu- tion, and it claims that the social organism must be delivered from its infectious venom, and that can be done, not by freeing it from such or such a bankrupt, from such or such a * My master, Pietro Ellero, has given in La Tirranide borghese an eloquent description of this social and political pathology as it concerns Italy. TOO corrupt functionary, from such or such a dis- honest contractor but by going to the root of the evil, to the uncontestable source of virulent infection. By radically transforming the regime by the substitution of social owner- ship for private ownership the healthy and vital forces of human society must be renewed, in order that it may rise to a higher phase of civilisation. Then the privileged will cer- tainly not be able to pass their lives in idleness, luxury, and debauchery, and they will have to resolve to lead a laborious and less pompous life : but the immense majority of men will rise to serene dignity, to security, to a happy fraternity, instead of living in the sufferings, the anguish, and the ill will of the present. We can give an analogous answer to the hackneyed objection that socialism will sup- press all liberty this objection repeated to satiety by all those who conceal under the colours of political liberty more or less con- scious tendencies to economic conservatism. Is not this repugnance which many persons, even with good faith, feel towards socialism in the name of liberty, the manifestation of another law of human evolution which Herbert Spencer has thus formulated : " Every progress realised is an obstacle to further progress"? It is indeed a natural, psychological .ten- dency, which one might call " fetich-ist," to refuse to consider the ideal attained, the pro- gress realised as a simple instrument and point of departure for other progress and other ideals, and to stop in "fetichist" adoration IO1 of a point reached which appears to have exhausted every other ideal, every other aspiration. Just the same as the savage adores the fruit tree, from which he receives benefits, for itself and not for the fruits which it can give, and finishes by making a fetich of it, an idol not to be touched, and therefore sterile ; just as the miser who has learnt in our individualist world the value of money, finishes by worship- ping money in itself and for itself like a fetich or an idol, and keeps it hidden in a strong box where it is sterile, instead of using it as a means of procuring for himself fresh pleasures; in the same way the sincere liberal, the son of the French Revolution, has made of liberty an idol which has its end in itself, a sterile fetich, instead of using it as a means for new conquests and to realise new ideals. We can understand that under a regime of political tyranny the first and most urgent ideal may have been the acquisition of liberty and political sovereignty, and we, the last comers, know how to be grateful for this acquisition to the martyrs and heroes who have insisted upon it at the price of their lives. But liberty is not, and cannot be, an end in itself. Who wants the liberty of public meeting or the liberty of thought if his stomach has not its daily bread, and if millions of individuals have their moral force paralysed in conse- quence of bodily and cerebral anaemia ? What is the worth of a platonic participa- tion in political government, the right to vote, 102 if the people are kept slaves to misery, to slack seasons, to sharp or chronic hunger ? Liberty for liberty's sake that is, progress attained opposing itself to progress to come is a sort of political self pollution : it is impotence in face of the fresh necessities of life. Socialism answers that it does not wish to suppress the liberty gloriously acquired by the bourgeois world in 1879 any more than the subsequent phase effaces the conquests of the preceding phases of social evolution, but it wishes that the workers after having acquired a consciousness of the interests and needs of their class should make use of this liberty to realise a more equitable and more humane social organisation. However, it is only too incontestable that, given individual ownership, and therefore the monopoly of economic power, the liberty of him who is not a holder of this monopoly is only an impotent and platonic toy. And when the workers wish to use this liberty with a clear consciousness of their class interests, then the holders of political power are forced to deny the great liberal principles, " the principles of '89," by suppressing all public liberty, and they imagine themselves able thus to arrest the inevitable march of human evolution. It is necessary to say as much of another accusation directed against socialists. " They deny their country," it is said, "in the name of internationalism." That also is false. io 3 The movements of heroic nationalism which in our century have reconquered for Italy and Germany their unity and independence, have been really a great advance, and we are grateful to those who have given us a free country. But our country cannot become an obstacle to the progress to come, to the fraternity of all the peoples, freed from national hatreds which are in reality either the residue of barbarism or a simple theatrical scenery to conceal the interests of capitalism which has known how to realise for itself the greatest internationalism. It was true moral and social progress for us to go beyond the phase of communal wars in Italy and to feel we were all brothers of the same nation ; it will be the same for us when we shall have passed beyond the phase of "patriotic" rivalries, to feel we are all brothers of the same humanity. It is, however, not difficult for us to pene- trate, thanks to the historical key of class interests, into the secret of the contradictions in which the classes in power move. When they form an international league the banker of London, thanks to the telegraph, is master of the market at Pekin, New York, St. Petersburg it is a great advantage for this dominant class to maintain the artificial divisions between the workmen of the whole world, or even only of old Europe, because the division of workmen alone renders possible the maintenance of the power of capitalists. And to attain this end, it is sufficient to io 4 exploit the primitive and savage basis of hatred for a foreigner. But that does not mean that international socialism may not be, even from this point of view, a definite, moral scheme and an in- evitable phase of human evolution. In the same way and in consequence of the same sociological law, it is not true to claim that in constituting collective ownership, socialism will do away with every kind of individual ownership. We must repeat again that one phase of evolution cannot suppress all that has been realised in preceding phases : it only suppresses the manifestations which have ceased to be vital, because they are in contradiction with the new conditions of existence created by the new phases. In substituting for individual property social ownership of the land and means of production, it is evident that the ownership of food necessary for the individual will not have been suppressed, nor that of clothing and objects of personal use which will con- tinue to be articles of individual or family consumption. This form of individual property will then always exist even in a collective regime, because it is necessary and perfectly com- patible with the social ownership of the land, mines, factories, houses, machines, instruments of work and means of transport. Does the collective'ownership of libraries which we are seeing at work under our eyes take away from individuals the personal 105 use of rare or costly books which they could not procure in any other manner, and do not libraries considerably increase the use made of a book compared with what it could render if shut up in the private library of a useless bibliophile ? In the same way the collective ownership of the land and the means of pro- duction, in furnishing to each the use of machines, tools, and land, will only multiply their utility a hundredfold. And it must not be said that when men no longer have the exclusive and transmissible ownership of wealth they will no longer be impelled to work because they will no longer be moved by personal or family interest. We see for example that even in our present individualist world those residues of collective ownership of the land to which Laveleye has so brilliantly called the atten- tion of sociologists continue to be cultivated and yield a rent which is not inferior to that which the lands yield that are held in private ownership, although these agrarian commun- ists or collectivists have only the right of usage and of enjoyment."* * M. Loria, in Economic Basis oj Society, London, 1894, P art i-t proves besides that in a society based on collective ownership egoism of course still remains the principal motive of human actions, but that it thus brings about a social harmony of which it is the worst enemy in an individualist regime. Here is besides a very small but instructive example. The means of transport in the large towns have followed the ordinary process of progressive socialisation : first, everyone went on foot, as an exception only a few rich persons could have horses and carriages ; later the car- riages were put at the service of the public with a tariff (the fiacres, which have been used in Paris for more than io6 If a few of these remains of collective ownership are disappearing, or if their ad- ministration is bad, that cannot be an argu- ment against socialism, because it is easy to understand that in the present economic organisation, based on absolute individualism, these organisms cannot find a medium which furnishes them with the conditions of a possible existence.! It is like wishing a fish to live out of water a century and which took their name from St. Fiacre because the first carriage was stationed under his image) ; then this tariff being very high brought about a further socialisation through omnibuses and tramways. One step more and the socialisation will be complete. Let the service of carriages, omnibuses, tramways, etc., become municipal and everyone will be able to use them freely as they now use the electric light. It will be the same with a national public service of railways. But then this is the individualist objection everyone will want to go in a carriage or in a tramway, and the service having to satisfy all, will please none. That is not exact. If the transformation were to be made suddenly, this consequence might take place in a transitory fashion. But already a partial or complete free transport exists in a certain measure on railways for members of certain associations, on tramways for post- men and telegraphists. It also seems to us that everyone will want to go in a tramway because now the impossibility of enjoying this mode of locomotion brings with it the desire of forbidden fruit. But when there is freedom to enjoy it (and one could if necessary limit the right to this) another egoisti- cal impulse will come into play, the physiological need of walking, especially for well-nourished persons, and after sedentary work. And that is how individual egoism in this little example of collective ownership would act in harmony with social necessities. t I occupied myself with this problem from the socialist point of view in my address to the Chamber of Deputies on i3th May, 1894. Propriety colletiva e lotta di classe (e polemica con M. R. Imbriani), Milan, 1894. or a mammal in an atmosphere deprived of oxygen. They are the same considerations that condemn to a certain death all those famous experiments of socialist, communist or anarchist communities which people have attempted to establish in different places as " experiments in socialism." People do not seem to have understood that such experiments must inevitably fail, obliged as they are to develop themselves in an individualist economic and moral environment which cannot supply them with the conditions of physiological development to be found, on the contrary, when the whole social organisa- tion has been collectively arranged, that is to say when society is socialised. * At this moment the psychological indi- vidual tendencies and aptitudes will adapt themselves to their environment. It is natural that in an individualist environment of free competition in which each individual sees in the other, if not an enemy, at least a com- petitor, anti -social egoism must be the tendency which inevitably develops most, by necessity of the instinct of personal preser- vation, especially in the last phases of a civilisation which seems driven with full steam if it is compared with the pacific and slow individualism of past centuries. * One can thus understand how unsubstantial is the current reasoning of the opponents of socialism which M. Mas6-Dari has gone over in // socialismo, Turin, 1890, 9 : the failure of communistic or socialistic com- munities is a proof from actual fact of " the instability of a socialist arrangement." io8 In a society where every one, in exchange for intellectual or manual work rendered to the society, will be assured of his daily bread, and thus will be protected from daily anxiety, it is evident that egoism will have far fewer stimulants and opportunities of showing itself than solidarity, sympathy, and altruism. Then this pitiless maxim will cease to be true homo homini lupus which, whether it is avowed or not, poisons so large a portion of our present life. I cannot stay longer over these details, and I finish here the examination of this second alleged contradiction between socialism and evolution by recalling that the sociological law which declares that the subsequent phase does not efface the vital and fructifying mani- festations of preceding phases of evolution, gives us a more positive idea of the social organisation in the course of formation than our opponents imagine who always think they have to refute the romantic and senti- mental socialism of the first half of the last century.* * That is for example what M. Yves Guyot does in Les Principes de '89, Paris, 1894, when he affirmed in the name of an individualistic psychology that "socialism is restrictive, and individualism expansive." This argu- ment is moreover partially true if it is reversed. We shall find a good example in the question of an eight hours' day, on which I point out the remarkable monograph of M. Albertini, La Questions delle otto ore di lavoro, Turin, 1894. The vulgar psychology, which is sufficient for M. Guyot, The Tyranny of Socialism, book iii., chap, i., is contented with superficial observations. It declares, for example, that if the workman works for 12 hours he will evidently produce a third more than if he works 8 hours, and that is a reason why industrial capitalism is opposed log This shows how little substance there is in the objection which an illustrious Italian professor, M. Vanni, raised recently against socialism in the name of a learned but vague sociological eclecticism. " Contemporary socialism does not identify itself with individualism because it puts at the basis of social organisation a principle which is not that of the autonomy of the individual, but its negation. If in spite of that it affirms individualist ideas which are in contradiction to its principles, that does not mean that it has changed its nature or ceased to, and opposes, the minimum programme of the three eights eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and eight for meals and recreation. A more scientific physio-psychological observation proves on the contrary as I said long ago that " man is a machine, but he does not work like a machine " in the sense that man is a living and not an inorganic machine. One understands that a locomotive or a sewing machine does a third more work in twelve hours than in eight, but man is a living machine subject to the laws of physical mechanics, and also to those of biological mechanics. Intellectual work, like muscular work, has not a uniform continuity. In the individual limits of fatigue and exhaustion, it obeys the law which Quetelet expressed by his binomial curve, and which I believe to be one of the fundamental laws of living and non-living nature. At the beginning the force or the speed is very feeble, then a maximum of force or speed is attained, at length the end comes with a very feeble force or speed. With manual as with intellectual work there is a maxi- mum after which the muscular and cerebral forces decline, and then the work is carried on slowly and without vigour until the end of the forced daily work. Add to that the beneficent suggestive influence of the reduction of hours, and it is easy to understand why the recent enquiries of the English manufacturers into the excellent results, even from the capitalist point of view, of the eight hours reform are irrefutable. The workers are less fatigued and the production has not diminished. When these economic reforms and all those that rest on a positive physio-psychology are carried into effect under no to be socialism ; it means simply that social- ism lives on contradictions."! When socialism, in assuring to each the means of living, claims that it will permit the affirmation and development of all individu- alities, it does not fall into a contradiction of principles, but being the next phase of human civilisation, it cannot suppress or efface what there is in the preceding phases that is vital, that is to say, what is compatible with the new social form. And so socialistic inter- nationalism is not in contradiction with the existence of One's country because it recog- nises what is true in it, and only eliminates the pathological part, the chauvinism ; and in the same way socialism does not live on con- tradiction, but, on the contrary, it follows the fundamental laws of natural evolution if it develops and preserves the vital part of individualism, and if it only suppresses the pathological manifestations which bring to pass in the modern world, as Prampolini said, that 90 per cent, of the cells of the social organisation are condemned to anaemia, because 10 per cent, are sick of hyperaemia and hypertrophy. a socialist regime, that is, without the friction and loss of force brought about by capitalist individualism, it is evident that they will have immense material and moral advantages despite the d priori objections of the present individualism which does not know how to observe, or which forgets the profound reflex effects of, a change of social environment on individual psychology. t Icilio Vanni, " La Funzione pratica della filosofia del diritto considerata in se e in rapporto al socialismo contemporaneo." Bologna, 1894. CHAPTER XII. EVOLUTION, REVOLUTION, REVOLT, INDIVIDUAL VIOLENCE, SOCIALISM, AND ANARCHY. The last and gravest of the contradictions which it is claimed are to be found between socialism and the scientific theory of evolution, is involved in the question how practical socialism will be realised. Some think that socialism ought to make known from now in all its details the precise and symmetrical framework of positive social organisation. " Give me a practical description of the new society and I will then decide if I should prefer it to the present society." Others and it is a consequence of this first false conception imagine that socialism wishes to change in a day the face of the world, and that having gone to sleep in a complete bourgeois world, we shall waken next day in a complete socialist world. How is it not seen, we then say, that all this clashes absolutely with the law of evolu- tion, whose two fundamental ideas which characterise the new direction of positive thought, and which oppose to it the old meta- physics are precisely the natural and gradual growth of all phenomena in all the domains of the life of Jhe universe from astronomy to sociology. It is indisputable that these two objections 112 were well founded when they were urged against what Engels called " Utopian socialism." When socialism before Karl Marx was only the sentimental expression of a humani- tarianism, as generous as it was careless of the most elementary principles of scientific positivism, it was quite natural to find its partizans yielding to the impetuosity of their heart, either in their vehement protestations against social iniquities or their dreamy con- templation of a better world to which their imagination sought to give exact outlines from Plato's "Republic" to Bellamy's "Look- ing Backward." It can readily be understood how easily these structures laid themselves open to criticism. This criticism was partly wrong, moreover, because it started from the mental habits proper to a modern environment, and which will change with the change of environ- ment ; but it was partly well founded, because the enormous complexity of social phenomena renders impossible every prophecy on the small details of a social organisation which will differ from ours more profoundly than our present society differs from that of the Middle Ages, because the bourgeois world, like the society which preceded it, has maintained individualism for a basis, whilst the socialist world will have its guiding idea fundamen- tally different. These prophetic constructions of a new social order are for the rest the natural product of the political and social artificialism with "3 which the most orthodox individualists are also imbued because they imagine, as Spencer has remarked, that human society is like dough, to which law can give one form rather than another without taking into account the qualities, tendencies, and aptitudes, organic and psychical, ethnological and historical, of different peoples. vSentimental socialism has furnished some attempts at Utopian construction, but the modern world of politics has presented, and is presenting, still more of them with the absurd and chaotic jumble of its laws and codes which surround each man from his birth to his death (even before he is born and after he is dead) in an inextricable net of systems, rules, decrees, and regulations which stifle him like a silkworm in its cocoon. And every day experience shows us that our legislators, imbued with this political and social artificialism, only copy the laws of the most diverse nations, just as the fashion comes from Paris or Berlin instead of considering scientifically,- from the particular and living conditions of their country, its positive interests in order to adapt laws to them, laws which otherwise remain, as numerous examples testify, a dead letter because the reality of things does not permit them to take root and fructify. * A typical example is furnished us by the new Italian penal code in which is found, as I had written before its application, no disposition which shows that it was made to be adapted to the conditions of Italy. It might just as well be a code made for Greece or Norway ; and we have In the matter of social artificial construc- tions socialists may say to Individualists : let him who is without sin cast the first stone. The true answer is quite another. Scientific socialism represents a much more advanced phase of socialist ideas : it is in complete accord with positive modern science, and it has completely abandoned the fantastic ideas of prophesying from the present time what human society will be in the new collectivist organisation. What scientific socialism can affirm, and what it does affirm, with mathematical cer- tainty, is that the current, the trajectory, of human evolution is in a general sense indi- cated and foreseen by socialism, that is to say, in the sense of a continuous, progressive preponderance of the interests and benefit of the species over those of the individual and consequently in the sense of a continuous socialisation of economic life and through it of juridical, moral, and political life. As to the small details of the new social edifice, we cannot foresee them precisely, be- cause the new social edifice will be, and is, a natural and spontaneous product of human evolution which is already in the process of borrowed from the countries of the North the system of solitary confinement when already these countries have been able to recognise all the costly absurdity of, a plan made to brutalise people. Experience has unfortunately confirmed my previsions, as the Commission of Judicial Statistics was obliged to acknowledge. Ferri, La Bancarotta del nuovo codice penale in Scuola positiva, No. 9, 1894. "5 formation, general lines of which are already drawn and which is not an artificial con- struction imagined by some utopist or metaphysician. The position is the same both for social sciences and natural sciences. In studying a human embryo of a few days, or a few weeks, the biologist cannot say (it is the celebrated law of Haeckel : the develop- ment of the individual embryo reproduces in miniature the ^diverse forms of development of the animal species which have preceded it in the zoological series) the biologist cannot say if it will be male or female, and still less if it will be a strong or feeble individual, of a sanguine or nervous temperament, intelligent or not. He will only be able to give the general lines of the future evolution of this individual, and will leave to time the care of specifying naturally and spontaneously, and according to its organic, hereditary conditions and the conditions of the environment in which it will live, all the peculiarities of its personality. This is what every socialist can and should answer. It is the position taken by Bebel in the German Reichstag,* in his answer to those who wish to know now in detail what the future State will be, and who, cleverly profiting by the ingenuity of socialist romance writers, criticise their artificial phantasies, true in their general lines, but arbitrary in their details. * Bebel, Zukunftstaat und Sozialdemokratie, 1893. u6 It would have been similar if, before the French Revolution which brought about the birth of the bourgeois world prepared and ripened in a prior evolution the nobility and the clergy, the classes then in power, had asked the representatives of the Third Estate bourgeois by birth, aristocrats or priests having embraced the cause of the bourgeoisie against the privileges of their caste, like the Marquis de Mirabeau and the Abbe Sieves : " But what will your new world be ? Present us first with an exact plan of it ; then we will decide." The Third Estate, the bourgeoisie, could not have answered, because it could not have foreseen what human society would become in the nineteenth century : and that did not prevent the bourgeois revolution from taking place, because it represented the subsequent phase, natural and inevitable, of an eternal evolution. That is now the position of socialism in the face of the bourgeois world. And if this bourgeois world, only born a century ago, is to have an historical cycle much smaller than the feudal world (aristo- cratic and clerical), it is simply because the marvellous scientific progress of the nineteenth century has multiplied a hundredfold the rapidity of life in time and space, and because civilised humanity traverses now in ten years the same road that it took a century or two to travel in the Middle Ages. The continually accelerated march of human evolution is, again, one of the laws established and confirmed by positive social science. H7 It is the artificial constructions of senti- mental science which have given birth to this idea correct as far as it concerns them that socialism is synonymous with tyranny. It is evident that if the new social organi- sation is not the spontaneous form of human evolution, but rather the artificial construction proceeding fully developed from the brain of a social architect, the latter would be obliged to discipline the new social mechanism by an infinite number of regulations, and by the superior authority which it will give to a directing spirit, individual or collective. It can then be understood how such an organi- sation gives our opponents, who only see in the individualist world the advantages of liberty, and who forget the evils which freely spring from it, the impressions of a convent, a regimentation, etc.* Another artificial contemporary product State socialism has confirmed this impres- sion. At the bottom, it does not differ from sentimental or Utopian socialism, and as Liebknecht said at the Berlin Socialist Con- gress in 1892, " It would be a State capitalism which would join political slavery to economic exploitation." State socialism is a symptom of the irresistible power of scientific and demo- cratic socialism as is shown by the famous rescripts of the Emperor William convoking an international conference to solve (that is the childish idea of the decree) the problems of * It is this artificial socialism which Herbert Spencer attacks in his essay From Freedom to Bondage, re- published in the third volume of his Essays. u8 labour, and by the famous encyclical letter on " The Condition of Labour " of the very clever Pope Leo, who knew how to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. But these imperial rescripts, and these papal encyclicals because we can neither skip nor suppress the phases of social evolution can but fail in our bourgeois, individualist, liberalist world. Certainly it would not have displeased the bourgeois world to strangle this vigorous con- temporary socialism in the amorous embrace of official artificialism and State socialism ; for it had been perceived in Germany and elsewhere that neither laws nor exceptional repressions would be sufficient for this.* All this arsenal of regulations and inspec- tions has nothing to do with scientific socialism, which foresees clearly that the administration of the new social organisation will not be more confused than the adminis- tration of the State, the provinces, and the parishes, is now, and will, on the contrary, correspond far better with social benefit and individual benefit, because it will be a natural and not a parasitic product of the new social * It is against State Socialism that the majority of the individualist and anarchist objections of Spencer are directed in The Man -versus the State, London, 1885. In connection with this subject the celebrated controversy between Spencer and Laveleye will still be remembered : The State versus the Man, or Social Darwinism and Christianity, in the Contemporary Review, 1885. Larfargue in an article on Herbert Spencer and Social- ism, published in The Times, and reproduced in the Ere Nouvelle, 1894, nas not mentioned this distincti<yn sentimental="" henceforth="" civilised="" received="" organisation="" necessitated="" why="" show="" porary="" agreement="" doctrine="" calls="" 173="" sense="" garofalo="" prefers="" patiently="" ing="" until="" times="" till="" society="" organises="" itself="" spontaneously="" if="" science="" hindu="" contemplation="" academic="" platonism="" done="" too="" long="" asking="" reasons="" existence="" application="" question="" tactics="" distinguishes="" utopian="" former="" imagined="" change="" isation="" world="" top="" bottom="" improvised="" miracle="" popular="" insurrection="" declares="" sovereign="" consequently="" phase="" previous="" consist="" through="" research="" propaganda="" realisation="" marx="" proletarians="" unite="" then="" easy="" enigma="" brings="" laws="" method="" full="" tially="" mystical="" violent="" anarchism="" class="" prejudices="" exigences="" corrupt="" journalism="" claim="" whereas="" during="" several="" whilst="" defending="" positivist="" had="" traverse="" conquering="" freedom="" spiracy="" silence="" attempt="" stifle="" ridicule="" consequence="" resistance="" ideas="" either="" ignorance="" make="" easier="" combat="" them="" partially="" beginning="" final="" knowing="" phases="" natural="" evolution="" now="" instead="" reposing="" first="" scientific="" wished="" burning="" victory="" me="" since="" opponents="" my="" ancient="" companions="" arms="" renew="" again="" same="" artifices="" miseonist="" opposition="" ascertained="" impotence="" restricted="" field="" fight="" was="" lively="" nor="" less="" 174="" soldier="" enlisted="" noble="" i="" am="" already="" assisting="" spectacle="" partial="" inevitable="" torn="" desire="" terrible="" vain="" untenable="" relation="" cry="" pain="" hope="" rises="" depths="" human="" hive="" shudderings="" hearts="" labours="" garden="" city="" tress="" pr="" time="" felt="" there="" deplorable="" lack="" exhaustive="" tematic="" pamphlets="" newspaper="" every="" where="" owing="" firmer="" hold="" amongst="" aims="" better="" understood="" comparing="" output="" literature="" germany="" france="" must="" struck="" ephemeral="" great="" bulk="" matter="" almost="" complete="" absence="" attempts="" deal="" exhaustively="" bearings="" failure="" just="" development="" industrialism="" afforded="" basis="" much="" constructive="" work="" half="" century="" growth="" democratic="" institutions="" characteristics="" british="" methods="" special="" direct="" bearing="" disquieting="" think="" intellectual="" life="" country="" becoming="" attached="" interests="" sympathies="" many="" lift="" up="" voices="" against="" backward="" ei="" ther="" look="" behind="" regretful="" regard="" policies="" exhausted="" longer="" guide="" frankly="" confess="" disconsolate="" without="" promoters="" appears="" ideal="" has="" before="" benumbing="" pessimism="" lies="" minds="" reformers="" also="" guiding="" progressive="" ministration="" day="" likely="" permanent="" those="" experimenting="" groping="" working="" instrument="" understand="" applying="" idea="" grasped="" therefore="" tribution="" political="" principles="" library="" some="" assurance="" definite="" atproviding="" or="" socialistic="" stimulating="" do="" something="" knit="" together="" different="" sections="" opinion="" activity="" contain="" best="" works="" as="" contributions="" our="" own="" follows="" not="" selected="" advocate="" any="" particular="" but="" because="" believed="" worthy="" expositions="" school="" list="" fessor="" 5th="" 6th="" 2nd="" these="" followed="" volumes="" rural="" position="" translations="" leading="" positive="" enrico="" penal="" law="" versity="" edith="" fifth="" no="" more="" type="" militant="" systematic="" could="" been="" series="" inaugurates="" promises="" both="" esting="" doubtless="" find="" tive="" readers="" other="" than="" ball="" sixth="" dundee="" aim="" scholarly="" admirable="" little="" thoughtful="" commend="" study="" social="" studies="" jean="" mildred="" second="" well="" worth="" reading="" english="" socialists="" others="" wish="" keep="" touch="" last="" essay="" able="" poetic="" macdonald="" tion="" contains="" interesting="" personal="" pronouncement="" upon="" future="" party="" this="" coloured="" sydney="" net="" important="" contribution="" sociology="" race="" who="" thinks="" imperialism="" it="" object="" lighten="" white="" concerning="" real="" nature="" case="" treated="" conspicuous="" collectivism="" emile="" author="" entirely="" sane="" like="" his="" broad="" sketch="" concentration="" capital="" practical="" means="" securing="" enfranchisement="" people="" may="" commended="" manchester="" representative="" accounts="" european="" aberdeen="" daily="" seldom="" have="" we="" come="" across="" book="" drink="" states="" issues="" gives="" comprehensive="" intelligible="" view="" relevant="" suggested="" sincere="" effort="" after="" truth="" various="" causes="" alcoholic="" extra="" volume="" provinces="" translated="" sixteen="" remarkable="" realistic="" account="" revolution="" baltic="" oppressive="" measures="" taken="" russian="" government="" stamp="" out="" revolutionary="" printing="" preface="" professor="" editor="" economic="" demy="" serfdom="" can="" man="" christian="" on="" pound="" plea="" workmen="" compensation="" act="" made="" individual="" under="" christ="" ratepayers="" facts="" citizens="" rising="" get="" old="" age="" back="" penny="" each="" 16="" 32="" price="" about="" free="" tariff="" richard="" henry="" single="" will="" destroy="" socialism="" bill="" ramsay="" problem="" right="" russell="" afforestation="" unemployed="" citizenship="" women="" isabella="" w="" t="" oman="" woman="" wolstenholme="" straight="" talk="" philip="" bread="" municipal="" milk="" bradford="" its="" children="" councillor="" m="" nationalisation="" indian="" keir="" how="" millionaires="" infant="" margaret="" mining="" mardy="" only="" harry="" thb="" hanging="" count="" a="" monthly="" review="" discusses="" theories="" policy="" describes="" sociological="" industrial="" changes="" interest="" examines="" modern="" tendencies="" legislation="" generally="" expresses="" that="" sided="" movement="" thought="" experience="" which="" at="" present="" moment="" giving="" such="" an="" impetus="" foreign="" scription="" post="" threepenny="" pilgrim="" s="" most="" telling="" brochures="" to="" found="" whole="" range="" propagandist="" allegory="" is="" so="" new="" crusade="" arthur="" fighters="" for="" tales="" derbyshire="" katherine="" bruce="" ten="" short="" varying="" portray="" very="" vividly="" romance="" charm="" peak="" writer="" knows="" writes="" from="" her="" stories="" are="" readable="" carefully="" they="" round="" with="" sympathy="" happiness="" pathos="" their="" literary="" official="" organ="" should="" be="" read="" regularly="" by="" everyone="" interested="" in="" the="" and="" socialist="" of="" all="" subscription="" rates="" one="" year="" 13="" weeks="" independent="" labour="" publication="" bride="" fleet=""><a href="http://www.archive.org/stream/socialismpositiv00ferruoft/socialismpositiv00ferruoft_djvu.txt">Fuente</a>.<br /><br />PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE<br />CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET<br /><br />UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY<br /><br /><br /><br />Ferri, Enrico<br /><br />Socialism and positive<br />F55 science. 5th ed.<br />1909<br /></yn>devorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-32426924576215979692009-09-30T12:55:00.000-07:002013-07-03T17:44:27.993-07:00Rusia en las sombras - Russia in the ShadowsFuentes: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_in_the_Shadows">Wikipedia</a> en inglés y <a href="http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~tdoyle/hgwells/russia.shtml">cs.clemson.edu</a>. Vista previa restringida en <a href="http://books.google.com.ar/books?id=xqTzG5bAxbAC&dq=H.+G.+Wells+%22Russia+in+the+Shadows%22&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=6-hQr5f3j2&sig=-_DN2ucoJ9Njb6IraKgz3VK_Jzc&hl=es&ei=97XDSqbGDpLmM6Kj4bsE&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false">googlebooks</a>. Para leer el libro en inglés en <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0602371h.html">Project Gutenberg de Australia</a>.<br />
<br />
devorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-16367906749808492322009-09-29T16:02:00.000-07:002009-09-29T16:30:30.549-07:00El pensamiento eugenésico de H. G. Wells en los 30 y 40El pensamiento eugenésico de H. G. Wells en los 30 y 40, artículo escrito por John S. Partington. <a href="http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=KCGQgb3Hc3GGdtqdGnFpDgmDlfwgNRmmcZ2G54HZmPGSDsnz4dpT%211562892977%21-563477853?docId=5001982781">Fuente en inglés</a>.<br /><br />Journal Article Excerpt<br /><br />H.G. Wells's eugenic thinking of the 1930s and 1940s *.<br /><br />by John S. Partington<br /><br />IN A PREVIOUS UTOPIAN STUDIES ARTICLE ("Death of the Static"), I presented Wells's eugenic thinking between 1892 and 1908. That article demonstrated the influence of T.H. Huxley's principle of "ethical evolution" on Wells's developing social policy. Rather than support the "survival of the fittest", Huxley advocated the "the fitting of as many as possible to survive" ("Evolution and Ethics" 82). As I demonstrated, Wells followed Huxley's lead during the late-Victorian and Edwardian period, devising social policy based on the "minimum standard" (Mankind in the Making 108), a rejection of "Race Prejudice" (381), and the advocacy of the "Endowment of Motherhood" (An Englishman Looks at the Worm 229). However, Wells did not reject eugenics outright but considered it of possible use in improving the survival chances of the human species and preventing the occurrence of unwanted births. While Wells consistently rejected positive eugenics, claiming that the creation of an ideal type was antithetical to the principles of Darwinian evolution and arguing that competitive selection was a prerequisite for species advance, he felt that negative eugenics--the prevention of "congenital invalids" and certain anti-social types from breeding and the employment of euthanasia against severely "diseased" new-borns--did have a role in a scientifically-organised society. I argued in that article that Wells's eugenic advocacy, however, could not be viewed in isolation but was intrinsically linked to his more immediate social policy concerns such as improved housing, better education and universal healthcare.<br /><br />That article only investigated Wells's eugenic thought up...<br /><br />Artículo en find articles. <a href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7051/is_1_14/ai_n28150697/">H.G. Wells's eugenic thinking of the 1930s and 1940s</a>.devorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-71922204745011995822009-09-29T12:23:00.000-07:002009-10-18T08:49:38.398-07:00Material suelto y enlaces<ul><li>Sinopsis de <a href="http://bostonreview.net/BR32.1/gornick.php">Experiment in Autobiography</a>.<br /></li><br /><li><a href="http://biografia-h-g-wells.blogspot.com/2009/09/experiment-in-autobiography.html">Experimentt... Auto-enlace</a>.</li><br /><li><a href="http://articulo.mercadolibre.com.ar/MLA-57218089-_JM">Mercado libre</a>.</li><br /><li>Sinopsis de <a href="http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/%7Ematsuoka/GG-Wells.html">Experiment in Autobiography</a>.</li><br /><li><a href="http://books.google.com.ar/books?id=WjoFZfsXNnQC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false">H. G. Wells, escrito por Patrick Parrinder</a>.</li><br /><li><a href="http://books.google.com.ar/books?id=JlpKfycwO30C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false">H. G. Well's perennial time: selected essays</a>.<br /></li><br /><li><a href="http://books.google.com.ar/books?id=HExGaHDhVbUC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false">H. G. Wells: Travesing Time, by W. Warren Wagar</a></li><br /><li><a href="http://books.google.com.ar/books?id=Jw7DQ16cuRUC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false">The strength to dream: literature and imagination, by Colin Wilson</a></li><br /><li><a href="http://www.firstworldwar.com/poetsandprose/wells.htm">Una visión general sobre la vida de H. G. Wells</a></li><br /><li><a href="http://www.answers.com/topic/h-g-wells">Varios enlaces biográficos en 1</a></li><br /><li><a href="http://books.google.com.ar/books?id=NysSmD9t9o4C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false">The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective: The Birth Control Classic, by Margaret Sanger.</a> Vista completa y descarga. Sobre <a href="http://books.google.com.ar/books?id=NysSmD9t9o4C&pg=PA49&lpg=PA49&dq=H.+G.+Wells+%22Experiment+in+Autobiography%22&source=bl&ots=vqP1Jkodku&sig=gO-UG3Y4Db8qi4PSJbdWAzwpoGU&hl=es&ei=52zCSt7BJpeQtge6ydXkBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6#v=onepage&q=H.%20G.%20Wells%20%22Experiment%20in%20Autobiography%22&f=false">Experiment</a></li><br /><li><a href="http://books.google.com.ar/books?id=NysSmD9t9o4C&pg=PA47&lpg=PA47&dq=Anticipations+H.+G.+Wells+%22Birth+Control+Classic%22&source=bl&ots=vqP1Jkq6gu&sig=GAlRO8GmIGzktdU4L5JFcwZKHbw&hl=es&ei=0nHCSrXmIsaHtgfi_8HjBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false">Resumen de Anticipations en The Pivot of Civilization: The Birth Control Classic by Margaret Danger</a></li><br /><li><a href="http://www.readeasily.com/h-g-wells/index.php">Otra visión de conjunto sobre H. G. Wells</a></li><br /><li><a href="http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/search?author=Wells%2C+H.+G.&amode=start">Online legal books</a></li><br /><li><a href="http://www.geocities.com/originalroman/">Otra visión general</a> y <a href="http://www.abacci.com/msreader/author.aspx?authorID=626">otra más</a></li><br /><li><a href="http://www.hgwellsusa.50megs.com/bibliography.html">Wells bibliography</a></li><br /><li><a href="http://books.google.com.ar/books?id=p4w4AAAAIAAJ&dq=H.+G.+Wells,+by+John+Batchelor&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=EFoE2zKgJV&sig=u7h0Bo1MmLkJXsXrGaPncPgIL5k&hl=es&ei=w2vHSvD2CYfg8Abc88ThCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false">H. G. Wells, by John Batchelor</a></li><br /><li><a href="http://books.google.com.ar/books?id=QY6SlaE3u70C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false">The History of the Fabian Society</a></li><br /><li><a href="http://www.google.com.ar/search?hl=es&safe=off&as_qdr=all&q=H.+G.+Wells+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Ffindarticles.com%2F&btnG=Buscar&meta=">Búsqueda de Google en findarticles</a></li><br /><li><a href="http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/w/h-g-wells/">H. G. Wells en fantastic fiction</a></li><br /><li><a href="http://books.google.com.ar/books?id=TIo9zQzV2fkC&dq=H.+G.+Wells+%22Normal+School+of+Science+and+Royal+School+of+Mines+Debating+Society%22&source=gbs_navlinks_s">Building Cosmopolis: the political thoughts of H. G. Wells</a></li><br /><li><a href="http://people.lis.illinois.edu/%7Ewrayward/Wellss_Idea_of_World_Brain.htm">Wells Idea of a Words Brain</a></li><br /><li><a href="http://books.google.com.ar/books?id=HIkjZE_O5ncC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false">H. G. Wells en España: estudio de los expedientes de censura (1939-1978)</a></li><br /><li><a href="http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/wells/hg/">Algunos libros gratis en inglés en ebooks(at)adelaide</a></li><br /><li><a href="http://www.cs.clemson.edu/%7Etdoyle/hgbib.html">Algunos libros en inglés</a></li><br /><li><a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/200010090006">In the footsteps og H. G. Wells</a></li><br /><li><a href="http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Herbert_George_Wells">Libros en Wikisource en inglés</a>.</li><br /><li>An Englishman looks at the world y The labour unrest. <a href="http://books.google.com.ar/books?id=-pxJKohrVx4C&pg=PA43&lpg=PA43&dq=%22The+Labour+Unrest%22+H.+G.+Wells&source=bl&ots=JnbZm-k1Ds&sig=gvKx6mIIij7G-dGnXJQqRUXjaPY&hl=es&ei=NjXbSqGrGYjh8Qbpj823BQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CBIQ6AEwAjgK#v=onepage&q=&f=false">Fuente.</a> </li><br /></ul><br /><br /><a href="http://www.google.com.ar/search?hl=es&safe=off&as_qdr=all&q=H.+G.+Wells+%22Experiment+in+Autobiography%22&start=50&sa=N">Búsqueda en Google</a>, primera entrada de la página 6.<br /><br />-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-<br /><br />http://books.google.com.ar/books?id=HExGaHDhVbUC&pg=PA147&lpg=PA147&dq=Wells+%22War+That+Will+End+War%22&source=bl&ots=AWwRrxUUrg&sig=LdsFSU7OrJAUPjndw41J7LhXctU&hl=es&ei=sH6-SurhL4_g8Qa62PikAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5#v=onepage&q=Wells%20%22War%20That%20Will%20End%20War%22&f=false<br /><a href="http://books.google.com.ar/books?id=HExGaHDhVbUC&pg=PA147&lpg=PA147&dq=Wells+%22War+That+Will+End+War%22&source=bl&ots=AWwRrxUUrg&sig=LdsFSU7OrJAUPjndw41J7LhXctU&hl=es&ei=sH6-SurhL4_g8Qa62PikAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5#v=onepage&q=Wells%20%22War%20That%20Will%20End%20War%22&f=false">Enlace</a>.<br /><br />Traversing Time por W. Warren Wagar.<br /><br />"Speaking to the Residencia des Estudiantes in Madrid in May 1932, Wells began his address with a few personal remarks about the impact of thje World War First: "I am one of those who were violently roused by the Great War. I feel that i have been coming awake and finding out things even ever since tremendous shock of August 1914. I had what I may call a <span style="font-style: italic;">sense of change</span> before,but my sense of change was enormously quickened by that iluminating catastrophe and its desolating consequences. And it turned to me away from imaginative literature into a new direction.""<br /><br />* * * * *<br /><br />http://www.readprint.com/author-88/H-G-Wells-books<br /><br /><br />FINdevorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-38044986142833913562009-09-29T12:13:00.000-07:002009-09-29T12:16:21.571-07:00Experiment in Autobiography<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBEa9L4PwV_z7sH_aiwBW5qXHDUY3qc8byUWQ14lUIvDURe5M6S2aXNNRYvOUz-1zar9Beq3pN_cfUuAwSCfwNmdrjase6CPCsaPdJyKrFlD0kZgq_VRaH7TdOe-oNkXVOh_I9hNhbIVsG/s1600-h/Experiment+in+Autobiography..jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBEa9L4PwV_z7sH_aiwBW5qXHDUY3qc8byUWQ14lUIvDURe5M6S2aXNNRYvOUz-1zar9Beq3pN_cfUuAwSCfwNmdrjase6CPCsaPdJyKrFlD0kZgq_VRaH7TdOe-oNkXVOh_I9hNhbIVsG/s320/Experiment+in+Autobiography..jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5386970327923704146" border="0" /></a><br />Synopsis:<br /><br />H. G. Wells’s An Experiment in Autobiography, subtitled, with typically Wellsian self-effacement, ‘Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866)’, first appeared in 1934, when Wells was sixty-eight years old, and is presented in Faber Finds in two volumes (also in the Faber Finds imprint is H. G. Wells in Love, which Wells drafted as ‘Postscript to an Experiment in Autobiography’ and can be read as an accompaniment to these volumes).<br /><br />In these volumes, Wells relates his early life, student days, struggles to make a living, ascent to literary supremacy, and later career as prophet of socialism. We follow him from the beginnings of his thoughts to his crowning conclusion ‘This particular brain … has arrived at the establishment of the Socialist World-State as its directive purpose and has made that its religion and end'.<br /><br />On reading this remarkable account, President Roosevelt wrote to Wells to say:<br /><br />‘Experiment in Autobiography was for me an experiment in staying awake instead of putting the light out. How do you manage to retain such vivid pictures of events and such extraordinarily clear impressions and judgements?’<br /><br />These are indeed the conclusions of an extraordinary brain and a remarkable individual.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.faber.co.uk/work/experiment-in-autobiography-vol-i/9780571247295/">Vol I</a>. <a href="http://www.faber.co.uk/work/experiment-in-autobiography-vol-ii/9780571247301/">Vol II</a>.devorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-35821107627535374312009-09-19T14:14:00.000-07:002009-09-19T16:50:29.541-07:00Los nuevos Maquiavelos - The New Machiavelli<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOC5E5V4-m1DwC9sMFQvw7Qj8WIuIfzxz8kVYtXnEumBha7NFcn7PeUyXnihWPGMhMXb6VFoj6YplY4RlelCfXJUui-aNuyodEKjTtayDzXJy9smZCTnbQfZpxyoKTDAavwMr8H94CqOlP/s1600-h/new-machiavelli.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 133px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOC5E5V4-m1DwC9sMFQvw7Qj8WIuIfzxz8kVYtXnEumBha7NFcn7PeUyXnihWPGMhMXb6VFoj6YplY4RlelCfXJUui-aNuyodEKjTtayDzXJy9smZCTnbQfZpxyoKTDAavwMr8H94CqOlP/s320/new-machiavelli.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5383317816170199042" border="0" /></a><br />Esta es la historia del ascenso y de la caída en desgracia de un político a comienzos de la Inglaterra eduardiana (alrededor de 1910). Está concebida como un libro semi-autobiográfico, y, por lo tanto, incluye la identidad oculta de muchos de los amigos de Wells. La novela trata sobre los grandes temas de la liberación de la mujer, la colocación de la madre en el corazón de la sociedad, y para colmo de todo, un asunto escandaloso que involucra a un miembro del Parlamento. Este debe haber sido un libro muy atrevido en su tiempo.<br /><br />El narrador, Richard Remington, narra su niñez, su juventud, su educación en las universidades antes de convertirse en político, y luego su carrera en la política. El estilo literario es preciso, pero frustrante, porque los pecados extramaritales se anuncian, pero con demasiadas páginas de antelación. Un buen autor moderno, con este mismo material, reescribiría la obra para mantener el suspense, pero H. G. Wells no tenía una máquina del tiempo en su taller de escritura.<br /><br />Diatribas de los políticos sobre el Imperio, el voto de la mujer y antiguas batallas de esta índole sólo son de interés para los aficionados a la historia. Lo que queda es la pasión de Remington por su joven ayudante de investigación Isabel y el abandono de su floreciente carrera por su pasión amorosa.<br /><br />Wells fue un autor tan genial que sería terrible que alguien leyera este libro y se llevara una mala impresión del autor, por lo que sugiero que deje este libro de lado y eliga cualquiera de sus otras obras.<br /><br />Fuente:Traducción más o menos libre de este <a href="http://classicpenguins.blogspot.com/2009/05/new-machiavelli-h-g-wells-331400.html">enlace</a>.<br /><br />Tono-Bungay, Ann Veronica y The New Machivelli confirmó el lugar de Wells como el más controvertido novelista de su generación; para muchos, quizás la mayoría, él fue el novelista lider. Algunos de las críticas de estas novelas tomó la forma de evaluación independiente de su arte informal y poco ortodoxo desde el punto de vista de las convenciones literarias existentes, aunque tal separación es difícil de mantener. Sus libros tuvieron un poder inmediato e imperativo. Con su mitad imaginativa, mitad argumentativa del comercio, política, familia y relaciones sexuales de la época eduardiana, Tono-Bungay y sus sucesores... <a href="http://books.google.com.ar/books?id=WjoFZfsXNnQC&pg=PA19&lpg=PA19&dq=Wells++%22The+New+Machiavelli%22+-download,+-online&source=bl&ots=RL4gQ2Xy2u&sig=VbSpq721NyIapOF-ZcMxVL3bLjo&hl=es&ei=CWG1St_oJ5Oc8AaQwrSTDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3#v=onepage&q=Wells%20%20%22The%20New%20Machiavelli%22%20-download%2C%20-online&f=false">Enlace</a>.devorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-64053107880887438122009-09-17T15:34:00.000-07:002009-09-27T13:55:39.087-07:00In the Days of the Comet<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPgqlkepz8mjxQ0goN5swrUQuQ586z2lfWZGSX3NCts_gI0YHlNJz_sPAwAvU7g5l4vBKHM47gogyIMlxZAxLZRbNnsj6qbKTrsGhfpIGIOL7ZplQYgaag3xaEUR1zttveE6yrmdj1wYmk/s1600-h/in-the-days-of-the-comet_02a.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 303px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPgqlkepz8mjxQ0goN5swrUQuQ586z2lfWZGSX3NCts_gI0YHlNJz_sPAwAvU7g5l4vBKHM47gogyIMlxZAxLZRbNnsj6qbKTrsGhfpIGIOL7ZplQYgaag3xaEUR1zttveE6yrmdj1wYmk/s320/in-the-days-of-the-comet_02a.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5386253297847606722" /></a><br />William "Willie" Leadford es un impetuoso y rebelde joven socialista enamorado de una joven llamada Nettie, quien ha crecido conociendo desde la infancia. Ambos son parte de las clases inferiores inglesas en los albores del siglo 20. William Leadford vive en la ciudad industrial de Clayton (Gran Gretaña) y es un furibundo socialista que se esfuerza por conseguir un cambio en las pésimas condiciones de vida causadas por el desarrollo industrial de la ciudad y del país. Durante la mayor parte de la primera mitad del libro se describe la aspereza en que viven los pobres de la ciudad y la historia de amor entre William y Nettie, que vive en otro pueblo llamado Checkshill. La acción se desarrolla en un momento en que Inglaterra y Alemania han ido a la guerra. Cuando la historia comienza, se observa un cometa en curso de colisión con la Tierra. Hay algo que preocupa más a Willie: Nettie se ha fugado con otro hombre llamado Verrall que es el hijo del rico terrateniente local de Checkshill y es un poco mayor. En la confusa mente de Willie, la traición no es sólo amorosa, sino además es una traición de clase. Willie, que aún viven en casa con su madre a la que trata mal, se enfurece, pierde el control y promete vengarse de la pareja, adquiere un revólver y los busca. Después de varios días de búsqueda infructuosa, encuentra a la joven pareja disfrutando de unos días de vacaciones en la costera ciudad de Shaphambury, cuando ambos disfrutan de un baño nocturno bajo la luz verde del cometa, y de repente comienza a disparar tiros y a correr detrás de ellos cuando huyen. Al mismo tiempo, un buque alemán desde altamar está disparando cañones de grueso calibre sobre la ciudad, y varios barcos de guerra británicos responden al fuego alemán desde la cercana orilla, a todo lo cual Willie no presta atención. Pero la gente huye de los disparos y la pareja de amantes se pierde entre la multitud y la confusión. Además Willie tropieza y cae inconsciente.<br /><br />El cometa se estrelló contra la Tierra y un vapor verde es liberado y pone a todos a dormir hasta tres horas más tarde, cuando el vapor en la atmósfera se ha disipado.El estado alterado en que el mundo se despierta es muy sutil.La humanidad tiene una visión socialista sobre la vida y ahora se esfuerza para crear un orden utópico y por enderezar los errores del pasado.La guerra entre Alemania y Gran Bretaña ha cesado inmediatamente.¡Los soldados ni siquiera puedo recordar por qué están en el suelo con rifles junto a ellos! Los barrios de tugurios se derribado para dar paso a una vivienda segura y humana para los pobres.Las industrias contaminantes de Clayton han cerrado.<br /><br />Varios días más tarde, Willie, después de haber abandonado el revólver, acude donde Verrall y Nettie viven y admite su enojo y su rabia anteriores. Todo es perdonado y Nettie incluso sugiere compartir su vida con los dos hombres su vida en lugar de tener que prescindir de cualquiera de ellos, ya que afirma estar enamorada de ambos. Finalmente los tres más la nueva amante de Leadford, Ann, viven juntos. Willie, ahora siente empatía y amor por su madre, vuelve a casa para estar con ella. Ella termina sus días con domicilio en la casa solariega de Lord Redcar, quién convirtió la vivienda en una residencia para personas mayores a instancias de su propietario.La mayoría de los antiguos terrenos privados se han abierto para uso del público. La vida es ahora pacífica y todos son iguales entre sí gracias a los efectos de la colisión del cometa con la Tierra.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.allreaders.com/topics/info_27127.asp">Allreaders</a>, <a href="http://biografia-h-g-wells.blogspot.com/2009/09/h-g-wells-sus-opiniones-politicas.html">H. G. Wells y sus opiniones políticas</a> y <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Days_of_the_Comet">Wikipedia</a>, ambas en inglés.<br /><br />Aparte de la premonición de Wells al considerar una guerra entre Alemania y Gran Bretaña (tal como ocurrió más tarde con la Primera Guerra Mundial 1914- 1918, que empezó 8 años después de publicado el libro), la novela fué un escándalo. Wells fue denunciado por la prensa y en los púlpitos como un abogado de la promiscuidad y de querer compartir esposas. Esta novela quizás pueda considerarse parcialmente autobiográfica, ya que Wells estaba insatisfecho con su vida marital.devorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-28564149120980324112009-09-16T05:44:00.000-07:002009-10-18T08:13:58.861-07:00Misery of Boots<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil1u9cWwI_KWD7e8uRvneyCPhHihrCvw2kdvtaqPRE0HWA3zaxtbw2b0UiC0Qtkr2r7O25Tja0Pp4PLuxDTe87AdTf996d_yygRPt6zVQOPy9pzbIjnMjlnKlGmWtaQpAsqBhZaHhgE-5g/s1600-h/Misery+of+boots.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 186px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil1u9cWwI_KWD7e8uRvneyCPhHihrCvw2kdvtaqPRE0HWA3zaxtbw2b0UiC0Qtkr2r7O25Tja0Pp4PLuxDTe87AdTf996d_yygRPt6zVQOPy9pzbIjnMjlnKlGmWtaQpAsqBhZaHhgE-5g/s320/Misery+of+boots.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5386255475519712354" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Es un libro publicado en 1906 en Gran Bretaña basado en un discurso leído por H. G. Wells en la Sociedad Fabiana en diciembre de 1905. La edición norteamericana fue publicada en 1907. Las botas de los pobres no aptas para ser llevadas son citadas como un ejemplo de un sufrimiento sin sentido ocasionado por un sistema donde el capital es de propiedad privada. Este ensayo es especialmente notable por la manera en que Wells usa su propia visión infantil del mundo desde un semisótano, es decir, una habitación (en este caso la cocina) que está sólo parcialmente bajo el nivel de la calle. La cocina tiene en su parte alta, cerca del techo, una ventana alargada y estrecha, por la que se ve, a diferencia de las ventanas normales (donde se ven las partes superiores de los peatones), la parte inferior de las personas, especialmente las botas y los zapatos. Wells pareció destinado, en esos primeros quince años de su vida, a pasar mucho de su tiempo "bajo tierra", en la oscuridad, en un vecindario deprimente. Criado en la cocina semisubterránea, desde la cual, a través de la reja, sólo podía ver los pies de los peatones, durante su niñez se alojó sólo en los sótanos o en las buhardillas, débil, encerrado dentro en un lugar lleno de sombras y lejos del sol, en todas las casas de aprendices donde dentro de las cuales se vió forzado a permanecer.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/w/h-g-wells/this-misery-of-boots.htm">Fuente</a>.<br /><br />Hay una traducción al castellano en esta <a href="http://www.elaleph.com/libro/La-miseria-de-los-zapatos-de-H.-G.-Wells/528078/">dirección</a>. Requiere registro, pero es gratuito.devorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-17419253604166586582009-09-15T07:10:00.000-07:002010-10-29T05:34:03.530-07:00Las más importantes predicciones de H. G. Wells<a href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_go2133/is_200709/ai_n32237337/">Fuente</a>.<br /><br />En 1901, H.G. Wells miró al naciente siglo y predijo cosas como los suburbios, las máquinas voladoras, que EEUU se iba a convertir en una superpotencia y las áceras móviles. Pero también tuvo algunos errores.<br /><br />Durante la primera mitad del siglo XX, H. G. Wells fue considerado como uno de los intelectuales más destacados del momento. Él influyó en la dirección de la literatura, la educación, la biología, la ciencia, la política social y la historia del siglo. Fue amigo y condidente de prácticamente todas las grandes personas de Inglaterra, como George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Henry James, T.H. Huxley, Bertrand Russell, y Winston Churchill. Su académico Outline of History [Bosquejo de la historia] de 1920 fue un éxito de ventas durante muchos años y todavía se imprime.<br /><br />Hoy en día, sin embargo, H.G. Wells es principalmente recordado, en todo caso, como el autor de unas pocas novelas de ciencia ficción, como <span style="font-style: italic;">La máquina del tiempo, El hombre invisible</span> y <span style="font-style: italic;">La guerra de los mundos</span>. Estas novelas, sin embargo, no son consideradas como grandes obras de arte, y existe poca conciencia de sus logros o su influencia sobre el mundo moderno, excepto entre los especialistas.<br /><br />En su novela de 1914 <span style="font-style: italic;">The World Set Free</span> [El mundo se hace libre], él predice la división del átomo, el desarrollo posterior de las bombas atómicas y el lanzamiento de las mismas desde aviones. En su novela de 1933 <span style="font-style: italic;">The Shape of Things to Come</span> [La formas de las cosas que vendrán], él predice el estallido de una Guerra Mundial en 1940, asombrosamente cerca de la fecha real, el 1 de septiembre de 1939. Pero de lejos el mayor y más inquietante trabajo profético fue su libro Anticipaciónes.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">Anticipaciones: Analizando los pronósticos de Wells<br /></div><br /><br />En 1901, a la edad de 35, Wells publicó un libro pequeño pero ampliamente leído llamado <span style="font-style: italic;">Anticipaciones</span>, y subtitulado <span style="font-style: italic;">Sobre las reacciones del progreso científico y mecánico sobre la vida y el pensamiento humanos</span>. Ofreciendo mucho más que una lista de accesorios y cosas asombrosas y nuevas por venir, Wells trata con diferentes clases de cambios técnicos y sociales. Los cambios tratados en el capítulo 1 a menudo sirven como base para la discusión en el siguiente capítulo, casi en una exposición matemática. El objetivo fue describir el desarrollo del mundo en los 100 años siguientes a 1901. El libro contiene predicciones sobre tecnología, distribución de la población, economía, la estructura de clases, dirección de empresas y liderazgo, educación, política, la vida diaria, problemas sociales, las lenguas dominantes y los asuntos internacionales.<p></p> <p>Anticipaciones está escrito en un estilo narrativo, sin una clasificación numerada, lo cual hace difícil la tabulación y clasificación de las predicciones de Wells. <span id="result_box" class="long_text"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" title="For example, deciding whether one prediction is encompassed within another or is otherwise duplicative, or deciding whether an item is significant enough to deserve separate mention, is sometimes a matter of judgment.">Por ejemplo, decidir si una predicción se engloba dentro de otra o que sea redundante, de decidir si un artículo es lo suficientemente importantes como para merecer una mención aparte, a veces es una cuestión de juicio.</span></span> Además, las predicciones de Wells muchas veces toman la forma de una propuesta o una suposición. <span id="result_box" class="long_text"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" title="In order to evaluate Wells's predictive hits and misses, the discussion that follows includes a somewhat judgmental but representative summary of the predictions in his Anticipations narrative.">Con el fin de evaluar los éxitos predictivos de Wells y los fallos, la discusión que sigue incluye un resumen un poco crítico, pero representativo, de las predicciones en la narración de sus <span style="font-style: italic;">Anticipations</span>.</span></span></p><span id="zippyspan" onclick="_rolldown()" style="display: block;"><img src="http://www.google.com.ar/images/cleardot.gif" style="margin-right: 0.33em; visibility: visible;" id="zippyicon" class="buttons square13 zippy-plus" /></span><p> <span id="result_box" class="long_text"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" title="In order to evaluate Wells's predictive hits and misses, the discussion that follows includes a somewhat judgmental but representative summary of the predictions in his Anticipations narrative.">Con el fin de evaluar los éxitos predictivo de Wells y sus fallos, la discusión que sigue incluye un resumen un poco crítico, pero representativo, de las predicciones en la narración de sus Anticipations.</span></span></p><p>Predicción: la decadencia de los motores de vapor y el auge de nuevos modos de transporte.</p><span id="result_box" class="medium_text"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" title="The first chapter of Anticipations analyzes developments leading to increases in the speed of travel in the course of the twentieth century.">El primer capítulo analiza la evolución de las previsiones que conduce a aumentos en la velocidad de los viajes en el curso del siglo XX. </span></span>Wells apunta a los factores que pueden resultar en un declive de la fuerza del vapor para buques y ferrocrriles en favor de los motores de combustión interna y de las turbinas. <span id="result_box" class="long_text"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" title="Rail traffic, he indicates, will find its greatest use in hauling heavy goods, and he discusses the pending decline of railroads compared to road traffic and cars, including the coming of limited-access freeways.">El tráfico ferroviario, indica, se encuentra su mayor uso en el transporte de mercancías pesadas, y analiza la disminución del tiempo de espera de los ferrocarriles en comparación con el tráfico y los coches, incluidos los procedentes de las autopistas de acceso limitado.</span></span> Wells prevé el desarrollo de áreas libres de vehículos en el centro de las ciudades, el metro y el uso a gran escala de aceras móviles. Una nota al pie en este capítulo analiza el uso de máquinas voladoras. Wells propone que aunque estarán en uso en el siglo XX, "no introducirán importantes modificaciones en los transportes y las comunicaciones".<br /><p>* Resultado: acierta de lleno en los motores de combustión interna y los cambios en el estilo de vida sociado; falla en los viajes aéreos.</p><p>Wells prevé con precisión los cambios del la propulsión a vapor al motor de combustión interna y a la turbina. También prevé con acierto la viniente especialización del ferrocaril hacia las mercaderías y la del trasnporte por carreteras hacia el trafico de vehículos particulares independientes. Él previsiones de autopistas, paseos libres de tráfico y una estricta regulación de vehículos y el tráfico en las ciudades resulta profética.</p> <p>De otro lado, Wells es completamente ajeno al eventual significado del aeroplano para el transporte de masas a larga distancia y los viajes internacionales. Él perfectamente prevé las aceras móviles pero sobrestima su significado y su importancia. Irónicamente, porque él no anticipa los aeropuertos, no prevé que estos usarán masivamente las áceras móviles en el futuro. El metro atrae poco su atención, quizás porque puso demasiado enfasis en las aceras móviles.</p> <p>Predicción: un nuevo estilo de vida, el complejo ciudad-suburbio.</p> <p>El incremento de la velocidad y la disponibilidad de los transportes, junto con un mayor uso de los servicios de correo y teléfono, le llevó a Wells a pronosticar en el capítulo segundo una gran aumento del tamaño de las ciudades, junto a una disminución de la densidad media; en una palabra, suburbios. Los centros de las ciudades se convertirán en centro de compras y entretenimiento, más que como áreas de gran densidad de viviendas.</p><p>Una de las localizaciones de los gigantescos complejos ciudad-suburbios que é prevé para ela ño 2000 es la megalópolis Boston-Washington. Habrá una tendencia hacia agrupar los barrios por estilos de vida y estilos arquitectónicos, como por ejemplo, enormes barrios sin estilo. También pronosticó las oficinas en los suburbios y vecindarios separados por riqueza y raza, y que por 1950 la oficina postal entregará todo tipo de productos, tanto alimenticios como fuel.</p> <!-- google_ad_section_end (name=s1) --> <!-- google_ad_section_start (name=s2 weight=.3) --> <p>* Resultado: acierta de pleno en la expansión de los suburbios y las megaciudades.</p><p>Wells, aunque certero sobre la vida en las ciudades del siglo XX y su expansión desordenada, calculó en exceso el tamaño de los mayores centros urbanos del mundo. Wells predice que la población de Londres podría ser de unos 20 millones para el año 2000, mientras que Londres y sus áreas urbanas colindantes tienen una población de poco más de 8 millones. La zona urbana de Nueva York es de 19 millones, mientras que Wells predijo la cifra de alrededor de 40 millones. Sin embargo, uno debe hacer constar que lo que Wells considera una zona urbana no está precisamente definido y, sea cual sea la cifra, un error de la mitad o una tercera parte en una previsión de 100 años no es tan mala.</p> <p>Predicción: estratificación social</p> <p>En el capítulo 3º, Wells describe el desarrollo que espera de cuatro reconocibles pero no totalmente distintas clases sociales en el siglo XX. En primer lugar, anticipa el continuo crecimiento de una parte de la sociedad relativamente rica compuesta por propietarios e inversores no gerentes. Esto es lo que él llama riqueza "no responsable". Wells cree que esta clase social será potencialmente poderosa y no progresista y demasiado variada en sus intereses como para defender sus intereses durante mucho tiempo.</p> <p> En segundo lugar, en una manera muy distópica, Wells augura la existencia de una subclase compuesta por los pobres, los analfabetos y aquellos que han quedado desempleados a rsultas del cambio tecnológico. Wells pronostica que esta clase estará compuesta por criminales, inmorales y arásitos del resto de la sociedad.</p> <p>Una tercera clase social, que Wells imagina como la única clase social realmente productiva, estaría compuesta por aquellos individuos que tienen la capacidad intelectual y el caracter personal adecuada a loas necesidades de los científicos y técnicos, así como ciertas profesiones como doctores y soldados.</p> <p>Una cuarta clase comprende a aquellos “hombres que no son productivos pero están activos y que se dedican a la organización, promoción, publicidad y el comercio”. Comprenden a “los directivos empresariales, tanto públicos como privados, los organizadores políticos, intermediarios, comisionistas, financieros, especuladores y la gran masa de sus empleados, secretarias, mecanografistas y asistentes”.</p> <p>* Outcome: A hit on stratification; misses on minorities and human potential. </p> <p>The four classes of society that Wells delineates-i.e., the "irresponsible" wealthy, the poor underclass, the technicians and professionals, and the managers-can easily be said to exist today in the United States as well as in all other developed countries. The prediction becomes especially accurate in that Wells describes these classes as not totally distinct, but as blurring into one another.<br /></p><p>The problem with the accuracy of his social stratification prediction is that, while he envisions some blurring of these class lines, he obviously expects the four classes to be more discrete than they are now or typically were during the twentieth century. He also seems to anticipate a greater degree of class identification and shared values within each of the four classes than has actually been the case.</p><p>Furthermore, Wells states that none of the classes, except the technical and professional, has any productive role in a scientific and technological society. This view has never been accepted by society at large, and, of course, in the twentieth century it became common for technical and professional people to have inherited wealth, be business managers, promoters, etc., and vice versa. Wells's chief concern in his discussion of social class is to highlight the increasing importance of the scientific and technically trained individual in modern society. Hardly anyone would dispute that Wells is right in emphasizing-from the 1901 perspective-the future importance of this group, but he is wrong in thinking the scientific and technical professions would be divorced from many other niches. </p> <p>There are jarring instances of gender, racial, ethnic, and national prejudice in Anticipations, which may have predisposed Wells to envision future class rigidities and attitudes. More importantly, Wells's Anglosupremacist attitudes may have prevented him from foreseeing some of the really dramatic social changes during the course of the century. Despite his insistence that merit would eventually come to prevail over privilege in the modern world, he seems to carelessly and tastelessly dismiss the potential of African, Asian, Irish, Jewish, and other groups. </p> <p>Prediction: Moral Relativism and the Decline of Codes of Conduct </p> <p>The fourth chapter of Anticipations, focusing broadly on the home and family environment, forecasts a general breakdown of commonly accepted standards of morality in favor of many different standards. Wells predicts all kinds of vice being practiced and tolerated, an increase in the number of childless marriages, and the decline of traditional marriage. He sees a relaxation of marriage laws and living arrangements and more children of all ages in boarding schools. </p> <p>* Outcome: A hit on a twentieth century rejection of Victorian ideas of morality and "normalcy." </p> <p>It is a modern truism that moral standards changed dramatically over the course of the twentieth century. While historians might debate the degree of hypocrisy implicit in Victorian morality, it is obvious that there was more agreement then on what constituted the moral ideal than exists now. Wells's predictions about a coming breakdown relative to Victorian standards must be judged as correct. His forecast about marriage laws and cohabitation are a case in point, as is his prediction about a rise in childless marriages. His prediction that young people would be routinely sent to boarding school instead of being raised at home has not proved true.<br /></p><p>From a twenty-first-century perspective, vice may not be as rampant and widely tolerated as Wells anticipated, but it is necessary to remember the audience for Anticipations was a 1901 readership. What we now consider normal, or at least common in terms of male and female relationships-divorce and remarriage, homosexuality, pornography, depiction of violence, drug use, etc.-would probably seem to be a shockingly high level of vice to the average person at the beginning of the twentieth century, fully validating Wells's judgments in that frame of reference. </p> <!-- google_ad_section_end (name=s1) --> <!-- google_ad_section_start (name=s2 weight=.3) --> <p>Prediction: The End of Democracy and the Decline of Serious News Media<br /></p><p>The fifth chapter foresees the end of representative democracy, possibly after a period of control by </p> <p>a group of highly forcible and intellectual persons . . . financiers and their associates, their perfected mechanism of party control working the elections boldly and capably, and their public policy being directed towards financial ends. </p> <p>The extent or duration of this control, should it take place, Wells sees as being limited by the weighty influence of the middle class mentioned in chapter three-i.e., technicians, engineers, scientific personnel, doctors, and the military. Wells sees democracy and associated rule by "irresponsible" wealth being superseded as a result of the failure of democracies to successfully function under the stresses posed by modern warfare. His rationale for believing that democracy will pass away is that political parties in a democracy always choose the appearance of action over the reality of actually doing anything, and this just won't work in wartime. Along the way, newspapers will increasingly turn from providing in-depth news to providing entertainment, hourly news, and advertising. Making money will be the newspaper's dominant goal. </p> <p>* Outcome: Two misses-democracy succeeds, media multiply. </p> <p>The twentieth century did not, as Wells forecast, see the end of parliamentary-style democracy. Rather than proving unequal to the strain of total war, democracies adapted, overcoming the supposedly more focused and efficient authoritarian regimes of Germany, Japan, and Italy. </p> <p>As Wells thought, an evolution of specialized newspapers and reporting has occurred, but the explosion in types of media and their hugely important role in twentieth-century society seems to have been overlooked. </p> <p>Prediction: New Modes of Warfare-Total, Industrial, Scientific, and Unconventional </p> <p>Machines and technicians will replace horses and unsophisticated soldiers as the primary means of waging war, says Wells. This, in turn, will require the involvement of civilians and the economy to an unprecedented degree as a part of the war-making effort. This involvement of erstwhile civilians will increasingly make them as much targets of military action as uniformed soldiers. Furthermore, the need for scientific, factory, and logistical support of the new form of fighting will require governments to efficiently mobilize all of the people, control and direct business, and harness science in order to avoid losing in this kind of war.<br /></p><p>In adapting to war needs, both government and society at large will be transformed in ways that will carry over to the intervals of peace. Wars would be between peoples, not merely between armies and navies. </p> <!-- google_ad_section_end (name=s1) --> <!-- google_ad_section_start (name=s2 weight=.3) --> <p>In the process of making these broad points, Wells makes a number of other specific observations, such as: </p> <p>* Automatic weapons and other small arms improvements will make guerrilla warfare more effective and prevalent. </p> <p>* Infantry movement using cover, concealment, night fighting, and foxholes will supersede mass clashes. </p> <p>* Aerial observation and air support will be increasingly important. </p> <p>* Armored guns and "land ironclads" will play a role on the battlefield.<br /></p><p>* Communications based on telephone and wireless will be important. </p> <p>* A military and civilian meritocracy will displace aristocratic privilege. </p> <p>* Future "wars will be won in the schools and colleges and universities." </p> <p>From his perspective in 1901, Wells thinks that airplanes would not be perfected until 1950 or so, and maybe as late as 2000. He dismisses submarines because he thinks they would be too blind and toxic to the crew to be effective. He dismisses capital ships in favor of small fast ships using ramming as a primary offensive technique. He believes that bicycles would be the primary means of increasing the mobility of infantry and that tanks are probably too slow to be decisive. </p> <p>* Outcome: Hits on total war, guerrillas, scientific role, World War I strategy; misses on naval war and World War II strategy. </p> <p>Wells correctly foresees that wars in the twentieth century would serve as an important catalyst for achieving increased societal recognition for scientific and technical personnel. In other words, he correctly sees the rise of the military-industrial complex. </p> <p>Wells successfully predicts the advent of the long-drawn-out total wars of the twentieth century, along with many of the postwar social changes brought about by the two World Wars and the Cold War. </p> <p>He is fairly successful in predicting developments along the lines of the trench warfare that occurred in World War I, but less successful in predicting land-fighting developments thereafter. </p> <p>He correctly anticipates that small arms improvements would make guerrilla warfare more effective and more likely. He is wrong, however, on naval battles as being more likely fought between small ships using ramming tactics and submarines becoming useless. </p> <p>Prediction: The Rise of One Dominant Language and a Global Information Network </p> <p>The chapter on "The Conflict of Languages" emphasizes the role of poor travel and communications in bringing about language differences. Conversely, good communications and increased trade will help do away with dialects and languages limited to a specific geographic area. Wells says that English, but perhaps French, will be the dominant world language in the twentieth century, although Chinese or Japanese may dominate in the Far East. Wells views educational achievement, the amount of publications, and the distribution of knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, as critical to world language dominance. In this regard, Wells advocates assembling a world encyclopedia of all human knowledge that would be available to all. Partly on the basis of the vanishing national languages in Europe, Wells foresees an economically united Europe by 1950.<br /></p><p>* Outcome: A hit and a near miss, English and Wikipedia overtaking the globe. </p> <!-- google_ad_section_end (name=s1) --> <!-- google_ad_section_start (name=s2 weight=.3) --> <p>Just as Wells expects, English is used across the world for business, scientific, and technical communication. Increasingly it is also displacing or radically changing other languages, even for local use. One language is quickly becoming-but is not yet-the world standard. </p> <p>Wells's proposal for an encyclopedia of all human knowledge sounds as if it is intended to function like today's World Wide Web (or perhaps the Web and Wikipedia), although Wells does not anticipate the use of computers. </p> <p>Prediction: Fuller Economic, Cultural, and Political Integration on a Global Scale<br /></p><p>Chapter eight notes that as of 1901 a world economy already exists in terms of its interdependencies. According to Wells, processes like those favoring economic integration will facilitate widespread political and cultural assimilation. Specifically, while Wells expects considerable numbers of subcultures to persist, such as the Jewish culture, he expects that eventually three overarching political-cultural areas of influence will cover the globe in the course of the twentieth century. The first one to appear is an Englishspeaking power bloc, then a central European, and finally an East Asian power bloc. </p> <p>The English-speaking power bloc would be centered in the eastern United States and exist in the form of a federation that "administers" the former British empire, the Americas south of the Mexican border, much of the South and Middle Pacific, the East and West Indies, and much of Africa. The European bloc would include western and eastern Europe, the Mediterranean basin, and western Russia. Wells anticipates a Russia eventually split into two parts, with the eastern part drawn into the Asian area of influence. The East Asian area includes China, Japan, eastern Russia, and presumably what we would refer to these days as Southeast Asia. </p> <p>Wells does not anticipate that the formation of these blocs would necessarily be the result of peaceful evolution. He writes, for example, that Germany might try for dominance in place of the united republic-type Europe that he foresees, but to do that, "She must fight the Russian and fight the French and perhaps the English, and she may have to fight a combination of these powers." </p> <p>He also forecasts: </p> <p>German aggression will either be shattered or weakened . . . by a series of wars by land and sea. </p> <p>* Outcome: Hits-after two World Wars, a globalized, westernized planet. </p> <p>With some exceptions, the geopolitical world that Wells thinks will materialize during the twentieth century is strikingly similar to the world that actually has emerged. In the form of "Westernization," political and cultural assimilation, as Wells anticipates, has occurred worldwide. </p> <p>Subcultures continue to thrive largely within terms of the overarching Western cultural thrust. </p> <p>Wells accurately foresees that Germany will attempt to dominate Europe, if not the world, but be defeated repeatedly in this attempt. </p> <p>European economic integration, which Wells predicts happening by 1951, actually came into being in stages beginning in 1952. A Federal Europe that he thinks would be in place by the beginning of the twenty-first century is now substantially in place as the European Union (EU), and it covers most of the area that Wells thought it would.<br /></p><p>Today, China and Japan are the economic powerhouses in East Asia. In total, but not yet acting together, they exercise a great and growing influence-cultural, military, political-on the whole Asian region. With the growth of Japan, China, and the Asian tigers, it is not too difficult for us to imagine an East Asian power bloc eventually coming into being on a par with the United States and Europe, as Wells believed would come about. </p> <!-- google_ad_section_end (name=s1) --> <!-- google_ad_section_start (name=s2 weight=.3) --> <p>Prediction: A Technocratic State, a New Religion, and Eugenics<br /></p><p>Chapter nine of Anticipations describes the religious attitudes, moral environment, and public policies that are likely to prevail by the time a world state arises. Wells indicates that a globally interconnected state will come into existence due to the growth of an international corporate sense of self-awareness among the world's scientific, technical, and professional elites. Wells refers to this international corporate function as the New Republic. The common interests of the technocratic elites gradually cause the disappearance of nation-states and the eventual integration of the three global power blocs. </p> <p>The theory of evolution will, he says, allow humanity to dispose of the belief in human equality. Only a portion of the population is fitted to understand and operate efficiently in the scientific and technical world of Wells's New Republic. An elite technocratic portion of the population will manage the world of tomorrow-i.e., our world today. Consistent with this, Wells thinks that various policies, including severe eugenic control and euthanasia, will be exercised by the state to limit reproduction among the noncontributory parts of the population. Wells presumes, however, that the productiveness and efficiency of individuals will be the sole criterion for one's membership in the coming New Republic's technocratic elite. </p> <p>The religious outlook he anticipates to be in vogue today perhaps resembles Unitarianism in its attitude toward the Creator more than modern Protestantism or Catholicism, but includes an almost fundamentalist emphasis on free will, individual responsibility, and activism. </p> <p>According to Wells, the New Republic will limit great wealth. As a result, public policies of progressive taxation and heavy death duties will be in place to even out income differences. </p> <p>Due to a decreased incidence of traditional marriage, the state will assume an increased role in assuring the health, education, and general welfare of offspring, Wells believes. It will vigorously enforce the acceptance of parental responsibilities, and "be the reserve guardian of all children." In particular, the technocratic state will guarantee each child (as well as adults) access to lifelong educational opportunities. </p> <p>* Outcome: Hits on child care and educational opportunity; misses on a world state, eugenic controls, and religion. </p> <p>Despite the existence currently of the United Nations and international organizations like the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, a politically unified world state has not come about. It seems unlikely that it will happen by the mechanism that Wells contemplates-i.e., a conscious undertaking by common agreement of the world's scientific and technical elite. Nevertheless, it doesn't seem farfetched to imagine that globalization policy makers, experts, and technocrats may eventually morph into a twenty-first-century world state. He appears to be somewhat in error on the timing of such a state and maybe even in its ultimate existence, but he should be given credit for identifying real tendencies of various actors on the twentieth-century world stage.<br /></p><p>Wells's belief that great wealth would be discouraged by progressive taxation and death duties has been a policy that most Western governments have pursued for much of the period Wells describes. Wealthlimiting policies, however, have been more characteristic of European than American practice, and more typical of the middle of the twentieth century than the end. </p> <!-- google_ad_section_end (name=s1) --> <!-- google_ad_section_start (name=s2 weight=.3) --> <p>He also believes that the laissezfaire market would be highly regulated. Over the course of the century, the amount of regulation by governments has been mixed, varying from a socialist perspective to freewheeling capitalism. Again, the European and developing world experience has been substantially different from the American. On market regulation, Wells is about half right.<br /></p><p>His attempt to predict the religious beliefs of the twentieth century must be marked mostly a failure. The Unitarian-like religion foreseen for the technocratic core of society he postulates seems not to have developed. </p> <p>The rise of the policy ethic that modern governments should provide universal educational opportunity to youth, and have a particular concern for scientific and technical fields, is accurately foreshadowed in Anticipations. Wells is also correct in suggesting that the state will deem itself to be the reserve guardian of all children. </p> <p>He seems to have been right in insisting that competence would increasingly replace privilege as a dominant societal ethic of twentieth century. </p> <p>How Successful Was Wells? </p> <p>According to a detailed tabulation by the author almost 80% of Wells's Anticipations predictions were right or partly right, with about 60% being extremely accurate. </p> <p>Perhaps the most glaring oversight in Anticipations is that it reads as if the Victorian roles assigned to women-homemaker and companion-were the only roles possible. That there would be about as many women in the modern workplace as men apparently did not occur to him. </p> <p>Wells also failed to comment on the possibility of Islam and other world faiths having a significant effect on twentieth-century history. </p> <p>Additionally, Wells also did not foresee many of the most important technical developments of the twentieth century in Anticipations. His later works, however, forecast many of these missing twentieth-century advances well before they became reality. </p> <p>From the various societal and technical omissions and mistakes cited, one can conclude that Wells was still far from achieving a true "history-in-advance" of the twentieth century. What he did accomplish must nonetheless be judged to be an amazing achievement, and one that begs for further investigation as to how he managed it. </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>devorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-16488019409375889162009-09-08T14:08:00.000-07:002009-10-24T15:07:26.678-07:00H. G. Wells, sus opiniones políticasEn septiembre de 1884, Wells se matriculó en al Escuela Normal, donde estudió durante un curso con T. H. Huxley. Estudió bien al principio para finalizar el curso de 1887 sin graduarse. La causa, o al menos una de las causas, de su fracaso universitario fue sus inicios en el periodismo amateur. Wells fundó y editó el Periódico de la Escuela de Ciencias durante el curso 1886-1887, y se vió involucrado en la política socialista londinense a través de su participación en la Sociedad de Debate y participando en debates abiertos de la Sociedad Fabiana (Fabian Society) y los encuentros nocturnos en en la Kelmscott House de <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Morris">William Morris</a>. Allí, Wells escuchó a Morris, <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bernard_Shaw">George Bernard Shaw</a>, Graham Wallas y a un "grupito de extranjeros, que discutían con pasión, y con una tendencia a alargar sus intervenciones, en lo que ellos consideraban era la lengua inglesa" (Experiment in Autobiography 193).<br /><br />La primera declaración pública de Wells sobre sus ideas políticas se produjo en la reunión de una Sociedad de Debate el 15 de octubre de 1886, donde presentó un documento titulado "Socialismo Democrático". Para Wells, el socialismo significa "una causa común de los hombres con el propósito de la felicidad mutua" ("Normal School of Science and Royal School of Mines Debating Society" 23), y esta causa común se lograría a través "de la fusión del individuo con el Estado" (qtd. in "Normal School" 24). En la práctica, Wells sugirió que "los estados producen y los individuos consumen" y así "el supremo gobierno del país sería el Consejo de los directores jefe de los departamentos ministeriales relacionados con la actividad: Producción, Distribución y Defensa ("Normal School" 24). Wells concluyó su ponencia afirmando<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Cita:</legend>Sólo he pretendido mostrame a favor de un acuerdo social más equitativo, lo que implica un gran aumento en el nivel de vida de la mayoría y una pequeña disminución de las clases superiores (qtd. in "Normal School" 24).</fieldset><br /><br />A pesar de que Wells no describió en dicha ocasión lo que él entendía como "clases superiores", su significado se aclaró el 11 de enero de 1889, cuando se dirigió de nuevo a la Sociedad de Debate con el tema del socialismo. Wells empezó esta segunda intervención declarando que la abolición de la "herencia y la propiedad" fue "el único objetivo de la nueva y progresista órden de los Socialistas". Entonces anunció que "El marxismo socialista ... es algo nuevo basado en el Darvinismo, y por eso algo totalmente diferente" del socialismo utópico de principios del siglo XIX ("Mr H. G. Wells on Socialism" 153). Al definir lo que él pensaba que el marxismo representaba, se salió fuera y se volvió contra el Fabianismo, y mientras el "socialismo científico aspira a la igualdad de las oportunidades ... el acientífico socialismo fabiano aspira a la igualdad de las condiciones" (Mr H. G. Wells on Socialism, 153; vista restringida en inglés <a href="http://books.google.com.ar/books?id=TIo9zQzV2fkC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false">aquí</a>).<br /><br />Resumiendo, el socialismo inicial de Wells pretendía simplemente la abolición de las barreras de clase. Él deseaba la libre competencia entre individuos independientemente de su origen social. El papel del Estado en semejante sociedad debía ser regular los medios de "Producción, Distribución y Defensa para establecer una competencia meritocrática". Como un darvinista que aceptó la teoría maltusiana de la población, Wells rechazó el control de la natalidad". Wells creía que la competencia biológica dentro de una sociedad meritocrática elevaría la fuerza de la misma y eliminaría la incompetencia. Al abogar por la eliminación de la propiedad privada y la herencia, Wells pretendía asegurar que su eliminación no sólo beneficiara a los pobres sino además condenara a los inadaptados hijos de los ricos.<br /><br />Después de 1899, los intereses políticos de Wells hibernaron durante algunos años mientras él se labró una carrera para si como educador y escritor. En julio de 1887, tras su salida de la Escuela Normal, tomó posesión del cargo de maestro de escuela en la Holt Academy, al norte de Gales, pero después de un mes fue obligado a renunciar tras un accidente futbolístico de importancia en el que sufrió un fuerte golpe en el riñón. Durante de una larga covalescencia en la que ganó un ingreso ocasional dibujando diagramas biológicos y geológicos para el Instituto Birkbeck, Wells volvió a la docencia. Fue profesor asistente en Henley House School, Kilburn, en mayo de 1899. Al año siguiente, completó su licenciatura en Ciencias por correspondencia en la Universidad de Londres e inmediatamente fue profesor particular y enseñaba a estudiantes para la licenciatura de ciencias de la misma Universidad de Londres.<br /><br />Tan pronto H. G. Wells se estableció como profesor, empezó a publicar regularmente artículos periodísticos desde 1891. Publicó relatos de entretenimiento, gran número de ensayos de ciencia popular y numerosos artículos sobre teoría de la educación. Su avance más importante ocurrió con la publicación de "The Rediscovery of the Unique" (1891) en la Revista Fartnightly, un ensayo que estableció su creencia en la unicidad de todas las cosas (desde átomos hasta balas, desde sillas hasta personas), y su rechazo a la clasificación como un acercamiento científico. Esta posición impactó significativamente en el pensamiento político de Wells al rechazar la noción de guerra de clases y al mostrarse a favor del poder de la educación y la provisión de la igualdad de oportunidades como métodos para la liberación de los explotados y los reprimidos.<br /><br />Wells permaneció en la University Tutorial College hasta mayo de 1893 cuando una posterior caída en su salud le obligó a abandonar la enseñanza. Fue en aquella época cuando obtenía un ingreso regular, pero no lo suficiente como para mantenerse a él mismo y a su esposa Isabel Mary Wells (1865-1931), con quién se había casado en octubre de 1891. Sin embargo, su alejamiento de las aulas de enseñanza le permitió concentrarse en la escritura, y desde 1894 se convirtió en un prolífico escritor de historias cortas y un "contribuyente" líder de la Pall Mall Gazette y su publicación hermana, el Pall Mall Budget. Durante los años siguientes Wells obtuvo ingresos regulares procedentes del periodismo, convirtiéndose en crítico teatral para la Pall Mall Gazette y un crítico literario para la Saturday Review. Con un ingreso regular y suficiente, Wells se centró en obras más largas e hizo su irrupción como novelista en 1895 cuando publicó La máquina del Tiempo con gran éxito de crítica.<br /><br />Su éxito literario coincidió con la ruptura de su matrimonio, y en 1895 Wells se divorció de Isabel y se casó con su antigua estudiante Amy Catherine (Jane) Robins (1872-1927). A pesar de que Wells se convirtió en un galán, produciendo dos hijos ilegítimos [con Amber Reeves (Anna Jane Kinnaird nee Blanco-White, 1909) y Rebecca West (Anthony Panther West, 1914-1987)], su segundo matrimonio duró hasta la muerte de Jane y produjo dos hijos, George Philip (1901-1985) y Frank Richard (1903-1982). En total tuvo 4 hijos conocidos.<br /><br />Después de la publicación de The Time Machine, la fortuna literaria de Wells cambió para siempre. A pesar de que continuó sufriendo serios problemas de salud hasta 1899, se volvió un hombre rico mediante la publicación, en años sucesivos, de La isla del Doctor Moreau (1896), El hombre invisible (1897), y La Guerra de los mundos (1898). A pesar de que La máquina del tiempo retrata una visión fantástica de las relaciones sociales al final de la época victoriana proyectada adelante hasta el año 802,701, (con la clase trabajadora, los Morlock canibalizando la clase superior, los Eloi) y a pesar de que When the sleeper wakes (1899) cuenta la historia de un comatoso socialista despertando en una oligarquía sin reglas en el año 2100 antes de intentar liderar una revolución contra el tirano, Ostrog, Well no entrará en la arena política hasta el siglo XX.<br /><br />Desde 1902, Wells publicó una serie de trabajos sociológicos que trataban sobre las relaciones internacionales, clases sociales, educación y la reproducción. Estos eran "Predicciones de la Reacción del Progreso Científico y Mecánico en la Vida y Pensamiento Humanos" [<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/anticipationsofr00welluoft">Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1903)</a> para descargarlo o leerlo online en inglés, y un <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/7886665/Anticipations-The-Remarkable-Forecasts-of-HG-Wells">resumen en inglés</a>], <a href="http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/wells/hg/w45ma/">Mankind in the Making (1903)</a> y Una Utopía Moderna [A Modern Utopia (1905); <a href="http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/wells/hg/w45mu/">para leerlo en inglés</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modern_Utopia">un resumen en inglés en Wikipedia</a>]. Los primeros intentos de Wells de especulaciones futurológicas fueron en sus "Predicciones". Wells predice la aparición de bloques de poder transnacionales, una "Europa Federal" que se transformaría hacia una "Nueva República que dominaría el mundo". Wells también predijo la eliminación de "los ricos pasivos" y de los "campesinos y trabajadores analfabetos" a través del crecimiento de una nueva clase tecnocrática de "mecánicos e ingenieros". En su deseo de eliminar los tipos ineficientes a la sociedad, Wells extremó al máximo su celo eugenésico y elogió a "la nación que más educa, esteriliza o exporta a su Gente del Abismo" (Predicciones 212). Aunque sus ideas eugenésicas persistieron hasta la décadas de los 30 y los 40, "H. G. Wells's Eugenic Thinking of the 1930s and 1940s", Wells inmediatamente atemperó sus aspectos más duros de ellas. Lo hizo escribiendo Mankind in the Making (1903), ridiculizando el programa eugénico de <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton">Francis Galton</a> en favor de las políticas educativas y presentando un Estado Mundial altamente regulado en Una Utopía Moderna (1905), donde las opciones eugenésicas se ofrecen a las parejas considerando el matrimonio pero sin recurrir a la coacción (Partington, "The Death of the Static: H. G. Wells and the Kinetic Utopia"). En un debate sobre eugenesia patrocinado por la Sociological Society en 1904, Wells respondió a las propuestas de Galton para la promoción entre "jueces, obispos y otras personas eminentes" (Wells, "Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims" 10) considerándolas ridículas. Wells afirmó que "es en la esterilización de los fallidos y no en la selección de de los mejores que existe la posibilidad de mejora de los valores humanos(Partington, "The Death of the Static: H. G. Wells and the Kinetic Utopia" 11)". Sin embargo, Wells sintió que la definición biológica de "fallido" era inadecuada en aquel momento (Mankind 40). En Mankind in the Making, Wells mostró la educación como el mejor método para mejorar la calidad de la raza humana, aunque también favoreció el pago del Estado a la madres en Una Utopía Moderna, como veremos más adelante. El pensamiento eugenésico de Wells, en vez de apoyar la superviviencia del más apto, estaba más en la línea de apoyar a cuanta más gente mejor para ayudarles a sobrevivir.<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>NOTA:</legend> Como H. G. Wells se manifestó a favor de algún tipo de eugenesia, tengo que aclarar un poco que se entiende por esta palabra. A finales del XIX y principios del XX, estaba de moda la <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenesia"><u>eugenesia</u></a>. Científicos o pseudocientíficos progararon la eugenesia, que incluso tuvo repercusión legal en algunos países, como Estados Unidos, la Alemania nazi, la Argentina y Brasil. En Argentina y Brasil se promovió la inmigración blanca. En EEUU se llegó a esterilizar a los que se consideraban débiles mentales. En Alemania se hizo lo propio con gitanos, testigos de Jehová, homosexuales y judíos. También se estirilizaron a unos 400.000 <span style="font-style: italic;">no aptos</span> entre 1934 y 1937. Los nazis fueron más allá cuando mataron a decenas de miles de inválidos oficiales mediante programas obligatorios de eutanasia. Además de la eliminación de los no aptos, los nazis promovieron la reproducción de los más aptos o políticas eugenésicas positivas. Muchas mujeres solteras «racialmente puras» eran fecundadas por oficiales de las SS.<br /><br />En EEUU, varios estados (comenzando con Connecticut en 1896) muchos estados aprobaron leyes que prohibian a cualquiera a "casarse con cualquiera que fuese epileptico, imbecil o débil mental". En EEUU se adoptó la Ley de inmigración Johnson-Reed que limitaba la inmigración de personas procedentes del este y del sur de Europa. La Corte Suprema de los EEUU sentenció en el caso Buck contra Bell de 1927 que el Estado de Virginía podría esterilizar a los <span style="font-style: italic;">no aptos</span>. La época más importante de la esterilización eugenésica fue entre 1927 y 1963, llegándose a esterilizar a 64.000 personas. Durante el juicio de Nuremberg, los jerarcas nazis adujeron que ellos aplicaron las mismas leyes y procedimientos que se aplicaban antes en EEUU. Hitler llegó al poder en Alemania en 1933, es decir, cuando EEUU ya había iniciado su polírica eugenésica.<br /><br />Otros países que en algún momento de su historia adoptaron políticas eugenésicas, bien sean positivas o negativas, fueron, además de los ya citados, Australia, Canadá, Dinamarca, Estonia, Finlandia, Francia y Suiza.<br /><br />Con las técnicas médicas modernas, dos países han adoptado medidas eugenésicas pre natales. Chipre ha reducido el porcentaje de niños nacidos con <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talasemia">talasemia</a> de 1 cada 158 a prácticamente cero. En Israel se puede aplicar a la embarazada una prueba de la enfermedad <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enfermedad_de_Tay-Sachs">Tay-Sachs</a>, y si resulta positiva, se puede realizar el aborto.<br /><br />También hubo quién propuso abandonar a los no aptos en la calle a su suerte.<br /><br />En la literatura, la novela <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_mundo_feliz">Un mundo feliz</a></span>, de <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley">Aldous Huxley</a></span>, plantea un mundo donde la eugenesia está totalmente implantada.<br /><br />Cuando se afianzó la creencia de que le eugenesia tenía una base científica, en realidad se confundió la verdadera causa con otra causa inexistente. La explicación de que bastantes personas de las clases más pobres tengan un menor inteligencia tiene que ver más con la insuficiente y deficiente alimentación durante la niñez, etapa durante la cual se desarrolla el 90% del cerebro, que con causas genéticas.<br /></fieldset><br /><br />Sus predicciones recibieron una tremenda acogida y llevaron a la consideración de Wells como un serio pensador político. El resultado más significativo de sus declaraciones futurológicas fue una invitación para participar en el Co-efficients Club, un grupo iniciado por Beatrice [<a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_Webb">1</a> y <a href="http://www.eumed.net/ce/jlrg-webb.htm">2</a>] y <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Webb">Sidney Webb</a>, que "se reunía una vez al mes durante todo el período parlamentario entre 1902 y 1908 para debatir el futuro de este Imperio nuestro desconcertante, prometedor y frustrante (Experimento en autobiografía 650-651). Entre los participantes estaban <a href="http://www.biografiasyvidas.com/biografia/g/grey_edward.htm">Sir Edward Grey</a> (aristócrata y político), <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Milner,_1st_Viscount_Milner">Lord Milner</a> (aristrócrata y político), <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Amery">L. S. Amery</a> (periodista y político), <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Burdon_Sanderson_Haldane">R. B. S. Haldane</a> (científico, marxista y comunista, que participó en el bando republicano en la guerra civil española), <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cecil,_1st_Viscount_Cecil_of_Chelwood">Lord Robert Cecil</a> (abogado, político, diplomático y uno de los creadores de la Liga de Naciones), <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Masterman">C. F. G. Masterman</a> (político y periodista), and <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell">Bertrand Russell</a> (filósofo, matemático y escritor). De acuerdo con Russell: "Todos los miembros excepto Wells y yo mismo eran imperialistas y miraban al futuro sin mucha aprensión al considerar una posible guerra con Alemania... Las cosas llegaron a un punto crítico cuando Sir Edward Grey, entonces en la oposición, abogó por lo que más tarde fue la política de entente con Francia y Rusia, la cual fue adoptada por el gobierno conservador dos años más tarde, y fue aplicada por Sir Eduard Grey cuando se convirtió en Secretario de Estado. Yo hablé vehementemente contra esa política, que sentía conducía a la guerra mundial, pero nadie excepto Wells estuvo de acuerdo conmigo" (Russell 77).<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>NOTA:</legend> en los años previos a la PGM, se formaron dos bloques de paises:<br /><br /><ol><li>La triple Entente, formada por Gran Bretaña, Rusia y Francia.</li><li>La triple Alianza, formada por Alemania, el imperio austro-húngaro e Italia.</li></ol><br /><br />Esta política de formar bloques antagónicos fue lo que llevó a la Primera Guerra Mundial. Russell y Wells se oponían a que Gran Gretaña entrara a formar parte de uno de esos dos bloques antagónicos.</fieldset><br /><br />Wells también se opuso al Empire Free Trade Crusade al asegurar que "El Imperio Británico ... debería ser el precursor de un estado mundial o nada"(Experiment 652). NOTA: el Empire Free Trade Crusade fue un partido político que proponía un bloque de libre intercambio comercial entre los países que componían el Imperio Británico. De alguna manera y durante algunos años, esta aspiración de este partido político se materializaría en 1931 con una mayor integración económica de los países que integraban la Commonwealth, ya que estos países se aplicaban entre si tarifas arancelarias menores que las que aplicaban a países externos.<br /><br />Su conocimiento de los principales pensadores políticos, facilitado por los encuentros del Co-efficients Club, incrementó la confianza en Wells como una figura pública, y cuando en 1903 presentaron su candidatura para la Fabian Society, Wells aceptó con gusto. La Sociedad Fabiana había sido creada en 1884 como un foro para los socialistas de clase media con el objetivo de alcanzar el socialismo a través de la persuasión, como opuesto a los más revolucionarios y populistas métodos de la Social Democratic Federation [SDF] (Federación Socialista Democrática) y la Socialist League (Liga Socialista). La Sociedad Fabiana abogó por la "inevitabilidad del gradualismo" y la "permeabilidad" de los partidos políticos existentes como el camino para alcanzar el socialismo. La Sociedad fue prolífica en producir pafletos y libros (incluido el influyente Ensayo Fabiano para el Socialismo (Fabian Essays in Socialism) [<a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Shaw"><u>George Bernard Shaw</u></a>] y en enviar oradores a los mitines públicos. Sin embargo, su composición fue deliberadamente restringida a los profesionales con éxito y a los empleados públicos. Su estrategia fue la de constituirse en una vanguardia influyente más que en una organización popular. Esto influiría en los tomadores de decisiones a través de la red social y convertiría al público a su modelo de municipalización del socialismo a través de discursos y publicaciones baratas. Al unirse a los fabianos, Wells no podía hacer nada bien. Durante su primer año de pertenencia, él presentó un documento titulado "The Question of Scientific Administrative Areas in Relation to Municipal Undertakings," [El tema de las Áreas Científicas Administrativas en relación a las Empresas Municipales] y si bien fue concebido como un discurso práctico sobre reorganización municipal, en realidad contenía un claro ataque a la política de municipalización de la Sociedad fabiana. Wells empezó su discurso señalando su socialismo moderado. Wells afirma que su "repudio a la propiedad afecta sólo a los intereses comunes de la comunidad, la tierra que ocupa, los servicios en que la sociedad está interesada, el mínimo necesario de educación y la interacción sanitaria y económica de una pesona o grupo familiar sobre otro" (Mankind in the Making 400). En resumen, busca "garantizar la igualdad de oportunidades y la libertad para un desarrollo individual completo de todos los ciudadanos" (Mankind 400). Luego, dirigiéndose a la administración del gobierno local, Wells argumenta que la mayoría de las corporaciones locales son patéticamente pequeñas y sugirió que Gran Bretaña debería regionalizarse en base a las distancias cercanas. "Una propiedad privada regulada- por ejemplo, una compañía privada con sus cuentas publicadas, impuestos sobre los dividendos, con un representante público en su Consejo de Administración y con poderes del Parlamento- sería un servicio público infinitamente más honesto, eficiente y controlable por el Parlamento que el elegido por una junta de gobernadores u oficiales" (Mankind 402).<br /><br />Este ataque a la polìtica de municipalización fabiana fue generosamente bien recibida por los oyentes de Wells. Incluso fue publicada en los folletos The New Heptarchy Series de la Sociedad fabiana (1905-1906). Sin embargo, la inclinación de Wells para la crítica de la Sociedad quedó establecida desde el principio. En el siguiente discurso importante en la Sociedad Fabiana títulado "Los fallos de la Sociedad Fabiana" ("Faults of the Fabian") realizado el 9 de febrero de 1906, sus oyentes fabianos fueron menos tolerantes a sus críticas. Tras iniciar su discurso declarando que el mundo está preparado para el socialismo, Well sigue afirmando que la Sociedad Fabiana es una organización elitista y pide que se abra a otras clases sociales. "Nosotros somos, según sostengo, una organización extraordinariamente debil e inadecuada en medio de un mundo que está lleno de posibilidades no desarrolladas de apoyo y ayuda para la causa que profesamos" (Faults of the Fabian 391). Después de reconocer el trabajo hecho por los grupos socialistas como Socialist Democratic Federation y el Independent Labour Party en las ciudades industriales del norte de Inglaterra, Escocia y Gales, Wells señala que "nos queda un enorme campo todavía virgen, en el que no sólo prodríamos trabajar, pero en el que yo sostengo que podríamos trabajar más enérgicamente ahora, y es el campo de la propaganda entre las clases educadas y las clases medias... esa gran masa está necesitada de educación para el socialismo, y no estamos haciendo practicamente nada, excepto algunos esfuerzos aislados, un libro aquí, un discurso allí de vez en cuando, nadie parece hacer nada en esta dirección" (Faults of the Fabian 392). Finalmente Wells pide a la Sociedad fabiana que ponga fin a su exclusividad y se convierta en un movimiento de masas:<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Cita:</legend>"Haz socialistas y obtendrás el socialismo; no hay otra manera. El socialismo democrático es el único socialismo posible, sano y vivo. El único estado socialista posible es un estado que se entiende, es apoyado, que es vivido con ganas y con alegría, al lado de la gran masa del pueblo. ¿Es posible alcanzar instituciones realmente socialistas de una manera insidiosa? ¡Debemos tener el cuerpo del socialismo sin su espíritu, debemos ganar nuestra utopía sin trabajo y esfuerzo y contemplarlo nacido muerto! (Faults of the Fabian 401)".</fieldset><br /><br />En el plazo de un año, según Wells cree, la sociedad puede reunir 10.000 miembros si aumenta su junta directiva, facilita el acceso a los nuevos miembros, insta a los miembros más jóvenes y entusiastas a volverse más involucrados e incrementa el número de publicaciones. Como modelo de esta última sugerencia, Wells regaló a la Sociedad Fabiana su <a href="http://biografia-h-g-wells.blogspot.com/2009/09/misery-of-boots.html"><u>Misery of Boots</u></a>, su único panfleto fabiano, que se convirtió en un éxito editorial, fue traducido a varios idiomas, y fue continuamente impreso hasta los años 20. "Encontrarás socialistas por todas partes ... que te asegurarán que algunos pequeños y extraños trabajos sobre el suministro de gas y agua municipal es Socialismo, y una mediación entre Conservadores y Liberales el camino hacia el milenio. ¡Es lo mismo que llamar a un chorro de gas en el vestíbulo de una casa, la gloria de Dios en el cielo! [Faults of the Fabian 13]).<br /><br />"Faults on the Fabian" fue considerado un desafío directo a "la vieja guardia" de la Sociedad fabiana (<a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bernard_Shaw">Shaw</a>, <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Webb">Sidney Webb</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Bland">Hubert Bland</a>, and <a href="http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/TUpease.htm">Edward Pease</a>). Sin embargo, en respuesta el ejecutivo estableció un comité especial para investigar las sugerencias de Wells y para que reportara sus hallazgos. Como autor de la respuesta de cambio, le fue permitido a Wells seleccionar el comité, y "fue compuesto por el Reverendo <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Headlam">Stewart Headlam</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Payne-Townshend">Mrs. Bernard Shaw (Charlotte Payne-Townshend)</a>, and <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/455858.G_R_S_Taylor">G. R. S. Taylor</a> of the Executive; <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanton_Coit">Dr Stanton Coit</a>, <a href="http://books.google.com.ar/books?id=QY6SlaE3u70C&pg=PA158&lpg=PA158&dq=W.+A.+Colegate&source=bl&ots=b99zqFf_D3&sig=PWIztJhxepOsS1DGubgLQ3OogLI&hl=es&ei=CY7CSradHaqvtge1r_HyBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7#v=onepage&q=W.%20A.%20Colegate&f=false">W. A. Colegate</a>, Dr Haden Guest, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Olivier,_1st_Baron_Olivier">Sydney Olivier</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Pember_Reeves">Mrs Pember Reeves</a> (padre de su amante, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Reeves">Amber Reeves</a>), H. G. Wells, and Mrs Wells. Después de 8 meses, el Comité especial reportó en octubre de 1906. Recomendó la publicación de más libros y folletos, el establecimiento de sucursales de la sociedad por todo el país, una contribución mínima fija, una nueva constitución y proponer candidatos "en armonía con otros partidos políticos socialistas y laboristas" y la adopción del nombre "Partido Socialista Británico", "British Socialist Party". El Comité también recomendó ampliar el número de miembros del Comité Ejecutivo de la Sociedad y la creación de subcomités para Publicaciones, Propaganda y Propósitos Generales. En respuesta a este informe de la Comisión, el Ejecutivo también realizó su propio informe. Este último informe apoyó el aumento del número de miembros del Ejecutivo, se mostró de acuerdo en la abolición de ciertas restricciones para acceder a la condición de miembro y apoyó la publicación de un periódico semanal. Los dos informes fueron enviados a los miembros de la Sociedad, y se celebraron una serie de encuentros para discutirlos, que se celebraron entre el 8 de marzo y el 14 de junio de 1907. En la primera de esas reuniones, George Bernard Shaw propuso aceptar el informe del Ejecutivo, pero Wells, en lugar de aceptar esa moción proponiendo la adopción del informe del Comité Especial, propuso enmendar el informe del ejecutivo, llamando al Ejecutivo para que dimitiera para celebrar elecciones a un Ejecutivo más grande. Este nuevo Ejecutivo debía implementar el Informe del Comité Especial. Según Pease, la enmienda planteó la siguiente cuestión: "¿La Sociedad debía ser controlada por aquellos que la crearon o debía ser manejada por Mr. Wells?" (Faults of the Fabian 173), y "Wells fue entregado en las manos de sus más experimentados exponentes al desafiar a la Sociedad a deshacerse de ellos y a que entrara una nueva generación bajo su guía" (174). Se suspendió la sesión para considerar la enmienda de Wells, y en el encuentro final, Shaw dijo a Wells que su enmienda equivalía a "una moción de falta de confianza" en el Ejecutivo. Shaw le requirió que retirara la enmienda para permitir que el Informe del Comité Especial fuera reconsiderado punto por punto (Faults of the Fabian 174). Los puntos de la enmienda parecían, así vistos, poco razonables, así que Wells se mostró de acuerdo con retirar la enmienda, y su desafío a los líderes de la Sociedad finalizaron, aunque posteriormente Wells sirvió en el Ejecutivo de la Fabiana.<br /><br />Aunque Wells no tuvo éxito en desalojar la "vieja guardia" Fabiana, sus esfuerzos en convertir a la Sociedad en una organización socialista más popular fructificaron en algunos cambios positivos. Más importante, la combinación de su personalidad y la conmoción que causó Wells en la Sociedad hizo que sus miembros se elevaran desde alrededor de 500 en 1905 hasta 1267 en marzo de 1907 (incluyendo 90 nuevos miembros en ese mes sólamente) (Pease 173). Este creciente números de miembros incluso permitió el establecimiento de sucursales en todo el país, especialmente en las Universidades. Wells incluso se las arregló para que las Bases de la Sociedad fueran reescritas de tal modo que incluyeran "igualdad de pertenencia para hombres y mujeres" (Faults of the Fabian 177). El Ejecutivo ampliado, elegido en abril de 1907, tenía un mayor equilibrio, con 12 miembros de la "vieja guardia" y 8 miembros welsianos. El mismo Wells fue cuarto en las elecciones, detrás de Sidney Webb, Pease y Shaw. Al año siguiente, Wells fue elegido en sexto lugar y se incorporó al Ejecutivo junto a su esposa (quién fue miembro hasta 1910). Al mismo tiempo en que Wells se vió envuelto en la batalla por la reforma de la Sociedad Fabiana, inavertidamente se vió envuelto en un debate sobre el matrimonio y la familia que dañó su reputación literaria y amenazó con empañar, por asociación, el buen nombre del Fabianismo. En 1906, Wells publicó una novela de fantasía, <a href="http://biografia-h-g-wells.blogspot.com/2009/09/in-days-of-comet.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">En los días del cometa</span></a>. en el que un mundo en una guerra internacional y al borde de un conflicto industrial es transformado por los vapores de un cometa que se estrella contra la Tierra. De esta transformación sale una nueva sociedad basada en la mutua cooperación y la paz global. Dentro de este panorama general, el personaje principal, Leadford, es también transformado. Deshecha su intención de cometer un crimen pasional con su novia y su nuevo novio, Verral, y en lugar de ello, acuerda vivir un <span style="font-style: italic;">menage a quatres</span> con ellos y su nuevo amor, Anne. La conclusión de la novela causó indignación, y "Wells se encontró a si mismo denunciado por la prensa y los púlpitos como un abogado de la promiscuidad (Mackenzie & Mackenzie 334) y de "compartir esposas en común" (Socialism and the Family 56-57). Los líderes fabianos, especialmente los Webbs, por la mala publicidad que el socialismo fabiano estaba recibiendo, condenaron en privado la moral relajada de Wells. A fin de contener la situación y ofrecer una imagen clara de la actitud socialista con respecto al matrimonio y la familia, Wells publicó ElSocialismo y la familia (Socialism and the Family) en el cual "refutó la acusación de que el socialismo tiene tendencia al amor libre y estableció completamente la actitud real del socialismo moderno con respecto a la vida familiar" (portada de Socialismo).<br /><br />Wells comenzó el panfleto con una crítica a la familia burguesa, especialmente al poder del marido y del padre: "Hoy en día en nuestra propia comunidad, pesa todas las mitigaciones y eufemismos, la propiedad del cabeza de familia todavía es un hecho manifiesto. Él vota. Él protege y cuida. Él determina la educación y la profesión de sus hijos. Él tiene el derecho a un consuelo monetario de cualquier infracción de sus derechos sobre su esposa e hija (Socialism and the Family 28-29)." The acuerdo con Wells, la potestad paternal es tal que "Las chicas educadas no se resignan a la pérdida de libertad en el matrimonio, la mujer casada educada también se da cuenta de la pérdida del ámbito de libertad que el matrimonio supone" (Socialism and the Family 36), al tiempo que "la tasa de natalidad cae y cae". "La familia declina en su objetivo principal" (Socialism and the Family 51). Opuesto a esta realidad, Wells afirma que "la posición socialista es el rechazo a la propiedad de seres humanos; ... mujeres y niños ... El Socialismo además propone al abolición de la familia patriarcal ... y la elevación de la mujer a un plano de plena ciudadanía equivalente a la del hombre" (Socialism and the Family 56). En términos prácticos, esta propuesta significa eliminar los poderes legales del marido en la familia, dándole un estatus regulatorio, y hacer de la madre la cabeza del hogar. "El Estado pagará por los hijos nacidos legítimamente en el matrimonio. Una mujer, con una descendencia sana y bien educada recibirá un salario del Estado, y durante el tiempo que todo funcione correctamente. Este será su propio salario. Bajo la dirección estatal ella controlará la educación de sus hijos" (Socialism and the Family 58-59). En su artículo "La dotación de la maternidad" publicado el 22 de junio de 1910 en el Daily Mail, Wells cambió su énfasis en su propuesta política- sin duda, como resultado de su ruptura con el Fabianimso- al sugerir que "La gente de clase excelente que gastan más de cien libras al año en cada hijo debería obtener más del Estado, y la gente que gasta cinco chelines a la semana por cabeza debería obtener más o menos esa cantidad" (An Englishman Looks at the World 232).<br /><br />En "Socialismo y la familia", Wells no fue explícito sobre las sanciones que el Estado debería tomar contra aquellos padres cuando no cuiden adecuadamente de sus hijos, pero cierta clase de castigo piensa que deberían tomarse cuando escribe que "el socialismo deniega totalmente el derecho de cualquiera a procrear sus hijos sin cuidado y en promiscuidad, y para la prevención de enfermedades y malos partos, los socialistas deben estar preparados para insistir en la inteligencia y el autocontrol mucho más allá de la práctica actual" (Socialism and the Family 58). También insistió en algunas características de los futuros padres: deben tener un cierto mínimo de eficiencia personal, deben ser solventes, independientes, por encima de una edad mínima, un mínimo de desarrollo físico y deben estar libres de cualquier enfermedad transmisible (Socialism and the Family 184). Si un padre o madre no reune estas características...<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Cita:</legend>...nosotros, por el bien de la humanidad, debemos hacernos cargo de la víctima inocente de sus pasiones, pero vamos a insistir en que se encuentra en deuda con el Estado de algún tipo de urgencia, y el padre seguramente va a pagar, incluso se le retendrá sus ingresos para obtener el pago de la deuda. Es una deuda que, en último caso, perderá su libertad como medida de seguridad, y, si además, esto ocurre por segunda vez, o si es enfermedad o imbecilidad, vamos a tomar una garantía efectiva de que ni usted ni su pareja ofende de nuevo en este tema (184).</fieldset><br /><br />En resumen, a cambio de nuevos derechos y la prestación social para las madres, se exigirían algunas responsabilidades, y las sanciones serían ejercidas cuando dichas responsabilidades no se cumplan. Mientras la paternidad sería extrictamente regulada, Wells hizo hincapié en que, mientras no hayan niños involucrados, "la moral privada de los ciudadanos adultos no atañen al Estado" (Socialism and the Family 205) y "El amplio rango de las relaciones humanas posibles, dentro o fuera del ámbito del matrimonio, son enteramente un asunto de elección individual e imaginación" (Socialism and the Family 206).<br /><br />Wells promovió su dotación de recursos de su sistema de maternidad durante todo el período eduardiano, especialmente en su novela de 1911, <a href="http://biografia-h-g-wells.blogspot.com/2009/09/los-nuevos-maquiavelos-new-machiavelli.html">Los Nuevos Maquiavellos (The New Machiavelli)</a>, en la cual los Webbs son perversamente satirizados como los Baileys. Sin embargo, Wells fracasó en su esfuerzo por "modificar la base fabiana para trabajar en un sistema de subsidios para hacer a las madres independientes" (Mackenzie y Mackenzie, 350), y utilizó esta derrota a manos de la vieja guardia como una excusa para abandonar la Sociedad Fabiana en septiembre de 1908: "Un régimen que se propone dejar a la madre y al hijo economicamente dependiente del padre, para mi, no es socialismo en absoluto, sino una pervsersión miserable del socialismo" (Correspondencia 2: 224).<br /><br />En junio de 1907, cuando su campaña para radicalizar la Fabian Society y modificar sus Bases empezó a agotarse, Well se vió involucrado en otra controversia pública tras un artículo que él publicó en la Nueva Era (New Age) titulado "El movimiento socialista y los partidos políticos socialistas". En este artículo, Wells se opuso a la creación de un partido socialista arguyendo que el movimiento socialista debe ser "un intento de crear una fuerza de convicción en la sociedad" en lugar de "un intento de utilizar las fuerzas de la comunidad" (Correspondencia 105). Wells quiere socialistas libres de las limitaciones de un partido para trabajar en sus posiciones en todos los aspectos de la vida, defender su causa y convertir al público, especialmente el público de la clase media, para la causa. Aunque "Con respecto a la propiedad y a la organización económica, el Partido Laborista es profundamente socialista" y aunque "si la Sociedad Fabiana no puede mantenerse fuera de la política , la Sociedad Fabiana debería trabajar en cercana cooperación con el Partido Laborista", Wells siente que el socialismo debería tratar con temas más allá del económico, y dado que no hay un consenso socialista en temas morales, como la emancipación de la mujer, la reforma constitucional, el futuro del Imperio, "sería mucho mejor que la Sociedad Fabiana no actuara en absoluto en el terreno político" (105). Sería mucho más rentable para el movimiento si los socialistas emplearan su tiempo en el "desarrollo intelectual libre del Socialismo" (105).<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Cita:</legend>Sin embargo, la formulación del socialismo es sólo una razón por la que los socialistas deberían permanecer fuera de las limitaciones de las organizaciones de partido. Wells también cree que un partido específicamente socialista resultaría contraproducente a aquellos miembros de las clases medias que simpatizan con los objetivos del socialismo, pero no quieren ir tan lejos como para etiquetarse a sí mismos como socialistas. Esta gente no está preparada para militar en un partido socialista; a pesar de que admiten la verdad de las proposiciones generales socialistas, ellos todavían retienen sus viejas simpatías por su vieja clase o partido, como los Conservadores, los Liberales, o quizás porque ellos piensan que muchas cosas buenas se pueden hacer por los Conservadores o los Liberales (105).</fieldset><br /><br />Wells cree que los socialistas deben esforzarse por ganar los corazones y las mentes de los electores indecisos y apoyar los candidatos socialistas sin importar a que partido pertenezcan.<br /><br />El artículo de Wells provocó una amplia respuesta en las páginas de New Age, incluyendo un inmediato apoyo editorial:<br /><br />Esta posición welsiana recibió apoyo de gente como Frank Brewster, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Sharp">Clifford Sharp</a> o F. B. Kirkman. La oposición al artículo de Wells también fue evidente, a pesar de que estaba fragmentada en varias posiciones, con Cecil Chesterton, que deseaba un partido socialista para atraer socialistas de todas las clases sociales y cooperar con el Partido Laborista durante las elecciones y en el Parlamento, S. G. Hobson, que ve a Wells como un "permeable" y cree que la diferencia entre él y sus antiguos compañeros fabianos es "no sustancial, sino de terminología" (Hobson, 169), y J. Wild, quien asegura que todos los socialistas deberían apoyar el Partido Laborista.<br /><br />Aunque durante el tiempo que Wells formó parte de la Sociedad Fabiana esencialmente dedicó su tiempo a criticar a sus colegas, también se esforzó en explicar su versión del socialismo. En marzo de 2008 Wells publicó una exposición global, New World for Old (El nuevo mundo para el viejo), subtitulada A Plain Account of Modern Socialism for the 1909 (Una cuenta normal del socialismo moderno para 1909). El libro se vendió bien. Fue reimprimido cinco veces en los siguientes seis años; fue revisado en 1909 y 1914; y fue calificado como "el más importante y persuasivo camino hacia el socialismo que nunca he visto" (Arnold Bennet). En el estudio Wells analiza la historia del movimiento socialista; elogia a los socialistas utópicos por su demostración de que los esfuerzos humanos deliberados pueden cambiar la sociedad; apoya a Marx en su internacionalización del socialismo y le da una dimensión democrática; y les concede a los fabianos el reconocimiento la necesidad de una administración capaz en una sociedad socialista. Wells cree que los socialistas deben orientar el esfuerzo humano, el espíritu internacional y democrático, y una administración capacitada para orientar la sociedad socialista a través de la regulación y planificación a gran escala. De acuerdo con Wells, socialismo "es la negación de que el impulso y la voluntad individual son los únicos posibles métodos por los cuales la cosas pueden mejorar en el mundo" así que "en lugar de un esfuerzo individual desordenado y cada persona haciendo lo que le plazca, el Socialista quiere esfuerzos organizados y un plan" (New Worlds [1908] 22, 26). Wells fue especialmente agudo para ver la planificación estatal en dos áreas de política pública: la crianza de los niños y el control de la producción y distribución.<br /><br />En el primer punto, Wells vuelve a su posición expresada en "El sociaslismo y la familia" argumnetando que "la medida del progreso de una generación es la medida en que los niños mejoran en calidad física y mental, en coordinación social y en oportunidades" (New Worlds [1908] 28). Reafirmando su defensa de la dotación de la maternidad y su oposición a la familia patriarcal, Wells insiste en que<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Cita:</legend>...la patria potestad no puede ser más un asunto privado; de que el bienestar de los niños es un asunto de importancia universal, y debe, por tanto, ser un asunto de interés colectivo. El Estado, que un centenar de años atrás no se ocupaba de los niños, está ahora conviertiéndose cada vez más en su Tutor, su Gran Padrino (New Worlds [1908] 39).</fieldset><br /><br />En el último punto, Wells insistió en que la propiedad privada debe ser reconsiderada en una sociedad socialista:<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Cita:</legend>El socialista sostiene que la comunidad en su conjunto debe ser inalienable del propietario y administrador de la tierra, de las materias primas, de los valores y los recursos acumulados en el pasado, y la propiedad privada debe ser de caracter rescindible, volviendo a la comunidad y sujeta al bienestar general (New Worlds [1908] 88).</fieldset><br /><br />Sin embargo, lejos de adoptar una postura proudhoniana, Wells abogó por una nacionalización con compensación, así como conceder más compensaciones a los propietarios expropiados. Así, si bien asegura que "el Estado será el único banquero ... así como el terrateniente universal" y defiende la nacionalización de los ferrocarriles, canales, minas de carbón, "el comercio de la leche, de la bebida, de los mataderos, tráfico local, alumbrado y suministro eléctrico en el ámbito local" y también sugirió que los antiguos propietarios de tierras y capitanes de la industria se beneficiarían de la seguridad del socialismo a través del cambio de estatus de propietarios de las tierras y de las industrias a gerentes estatales (New Worlds [1908] 145, 184).<br /><br /><br />A pesar del tenor radical del socialismo wellsiano, en New Worlds for Old es principalmente un gradualista. Habiendo sido criticado por lo fabianos por tratar de conseguir el socialismo de una "manera insidiosa", afirma que "la expropiación debe ser un proceso gradual, un proceso de reajuste político y económico, acompañado en cada paso por un proceso de explicación de los motivos" (New Worlds [1908] 163). Wells rechaza la idea de la opinión pública expresada en elecciones parlamentarias, pero cree firmemente en la formación de lo que él denomina "la mente colectiva" (New Worlds [1908] 283), y es en este sentido que siente que su socialismo avanza más que el de sus predecesores. Como "necesitamos discursos libres, debates libres, publicaciones libres tanto como un Estado enteramente socialista", consiguientemente "la educación debe preceder al Estado socialista" (New Worlds [1908] 208, 116). La centralidad de la educación en el compromiso político de Wells aumentó considerablemente a medida que maduró su visión del mundo en el período de interguerras. En New World for Old, Wells identificó su tema de la educación como el punto que más separa a su socialismo del de "la vieja guardia" de los fabianos y de otras variantes. Sin embargo, en las elecciones del 24 de abril de 1908, los socialistas sondearon el apoyo de Wells al candidato liberal, <a href="http://www.blogger.com/These%20facts,%20combined%20with%20the%20Liberal%20government%27s%20willingness%20to%20use%20troops%20to%20break%20strikes,%20led%20to%20working-class%20support%20for%20strike%20action%20as%20a%20political%20weapon,%20the%20rise%20in%20influence%20of%20syndicalism,%20and%20the%20rapid%20creation%20of%20general%20unions%20along%20with%20their%20use%20of%20sympathetic%20strikes.">Wiston Churchill</a> y la crítica de Wells al Partido Social Demócrata de Dan Irving y al conservador William Joynson-Hicks, también contribuyeron al deseo de Wells de retirarse de cualquier organización política socialista durante algunos años. El Partido Laborista no presentó ningún candidato, y el que presentó el Partido Socialdemócrata no gustó a nadie, así que Wells recomendó el voto para Churchill, quien ya había ganado el mismo escaño en la misma circunscripción electoral para el Partido Liberal: "No será fácil perdonar la imbecilidad de los socialistas locales de proponer un candidato cuyas posibilidades eran tan ridículamente pequeñas". A pesar de que este era un sentimiento general, de todos modos fue un golpe muy duro para los socialistas leer en el Daily News del 21 de abril una carta abierta de Wells a los electores del noroeste de Cambridge alentandoles a rechazar a Irving y votar a Churchill.<br /><br />A pesar de que el apoyo de Wells a Churchill, el escritor fue criticado por sus antiguos compañeros socialistas, pero a pesar de ello, no se hizo ningún intento para defender la candidatura de Irving.<br /><br />Al apoyar a candidato del Partido Liberal Winston Churchill, Wells puso en práctica los argumentos que escribió el año anterior en su artículo "El movimiento socialista y los partidos socialistas" "The Socialist Movement and Socialist Parties" y, como Sturt, abogó por un socialismo pragmático, el de apoyar al candidato más progresista, sin importar el partido al que pertenezca, al tiempo que propagaba una "declaración franca y abierta de nuestra fe socialista". Al fracasar en las elecciones del noroeste de Manchester [Winston Churchill perdió esas elecciones - <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill#Oficina_Ministerial">Enlace</a>], al no conseguir el liderazgo de la Sociedad Fabiana, de reformar sus bases y de fracasar en persuadir a la Sociedad de que aprobaran su Fondo para la Maternidad, finalmente renunció a seguir en el Ejecutivo de la Sociedad Fabiana en septiembre de 1908, y se retiró de la actividad política organizada, aunque no estaba completamente mudo en temas políticos. Continuó abogando por su "Fondo para la Maternidad" hasta 1914 y se declaró a favor de la representación proporcional en 1912 (An Englishman 229-234, 53). Más importante fue, sin enbargo, la publicación de una serie de artículos bajo el título "La conflictividad laboral", en los que ofreció un análisis de los conflictos laborales de 1911-1912.<br /><br />"En 1910 la tasa de desempleo era la mayor desde 1886 y todavía estaba creciendo, mientras que el poder de compra de la libra había caído alrededor de un cuarto desde 1895 y todavía cayendo" (An Englishman 93). Estos hechos, junto a la voluntad del gobierno liberal de usar las tropas para romper las huelgas, llevó a la clase trabajadora a apoyar las huelgas como un arma política, el incremento de la influencia del sindicalismo y la rápida creación de sindicatos generales junto al uso de huelgas por afinidad o apoyo a las primeras. La primera prueba de agitación nacional ocurrió durante 1911 cuando la recién creado Federación de Trabajadores del Transporte (Transport Workers' Federation) acudió en apoyo a la huelga de los trabajadores del Puerto de Londres que rápidamente escaló en una huelga nacional y llevó a los principales puertos del país y a su red de ferrocarriles a un punto muerto. Pronto se sumó a la huelga la Federación de Mineros (Miners' Federation of Great Britain) el 1 de marzo de 1912, con sus millones de afiliados, y se convirtió en la huelga más larga jamás realizada en el Reino Unido. Debido a la inminente paralización del país por la falta de carbón, el gobierno liberal en el cual Churchill era ministro, aprobó rápidamente la Ley de Salarios de la Minería, que estableció un salario mínimo para los mineros. Pensando que el espítitu de las relaciones industriales había cambiado para siempre, Wells publicó "La conflictividad laboral", (The Laboour Unrest, artículo que después formó parte del libro <span style="font-style:italic;">An Englishman Looks at the World</span>), en el periódico conservador de clase media, en un intento de identificar a sus lectores las causas generales de las disputas industriales y sugerir soluciones generales a los antagonismos de clase que claramente habían emergido en los dos años previos.<br /><br />Wells comienza su "El conflicto laboral" con este aviso: "Puede que estemos en la fase inicial de una guerra de clases real e irreparable" (Publicado en el libro An Englishman 43).<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>El párrafo completo es:</legend>Nuestro país está, según creo, en un peligroso estado de tumultos. Los descontentos de las masas laborales de la comunidad están aumentando y profundizando en su malestar. Puede que estemos en la fase inicial de una guerra de clases real e irreparable. <a href="http://books.google.com.ar/books?id=-pxJKohrVx4C&pg=PA43&lpg=PA43&dq=%22The+Labour+Unrest%22+H.+G.+Wells&source=bl&ots=JnbZm-k1Ds&sig=gvKx6mIIij7G-dGnXJQqRUXjaPY&hl=es&ei=NjXbSqGrGYjh8Qbpj823BQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CBIQ6AEwAjgK#v=onepage&q=&f=false">Fuente.</a></fieldset><br /><br />Mientras que las primeras generaciones de trabajadores tomaron acciones "para definir los incrementos salariales o limitar la jornada laboral", las nuevas generaciones "están empezando a hacer huelgas por fines sin precedentes, en contra del sistema, huelgas cuyos fines no estan definidos en absoluto" (An Englishman Looks at the World 43-44). Según Wells, esto se debe a "la educacion elemental, una prensa muy barata y a un período de gran prosperidad general" (An Englishman Looks at the World 62), así como "la tendencia de los periódicos, teatro, cinematografía, etc... para llenar las mentes [de los trabajadores] con ideas de una vida infinitamente más agradable que la suya propia" (56).<br /><br />Este contraste entre las diferentes experiencias de clase, según Wells, acaba en una "desconfianza del trabajador tan profunda que deja de creer en la ley, en el Parlamento". Esta desconfianza "es la influencia más desmoralizadora" que ha sido la causa que ha provocado "una huelga, que las tácticas represivas convertirán en una huelga criminal". Si la situación continúa sin resolverse, entonces "se convertirá en una revolución". Si aplastas la esperanza, surgirá el sabotaje y una simpatía general por el crimen anarquista"(An Englishman Looks at the World 45-46, 55). Para prevenir desórdenes sociales, Wells propone una serie de medidas socio políticas para mejorar las relaciones de clase, y en última instancia, abolir la clase trabajadora.<br /><br />El primer cambio que Wells desea ver es en la relación entre la clase trabajadora y la clase gobernante. La clase gobernante debe reconocer su responsabilidad de traer la paz social, y este reconocimiento significa tratar a los trabajadores con una nueva dignidad: "todos nosotros que tenemos el tiempo y la oportunidad de encarar el problema muy enérgicamente... de establecer un nuevo método de cooperación con aquellos que parecen definitivamente decididos a no seguir siendo los asalariados durante mucho más tiempo" (An Englishman Looks at the World 60-61). En otras palabras, "necesitamos un nuevo contrato social" (An Englishman Looks at the World 50). Wells deseaba ver al gobierno y a los capitanes de la industria negociar con las organizaciones de los trabajadores para crear<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Cita:</legend>"esquemas por un tipo más permanente de empleo y un tipo de participación de los trabajadores en los beneficios y en la dirección de las empresas. Estos esquemas admiten una amplia variación, desde un mero sistema de bonos, pasando por un depósito periódico a favor de los trabajadores para evitar la huelga, y llegando incluso a una real y honesta coparticipación[sic].... De semejantes ideas pasa uno muy fácilmente a la concepción de los negocios cogestionados, en los cuales el factor capital ya no se destacaría como un elemento distintivo y en confontración con la posesión de la fuerza de trabajo. Uno ve al trabajador... como un pensionistas o quizás ... o un perceptor de royalties durante sus años de declive (An Englishman Looks at the World 64)."</fieldset><br /><br />En resumen, Wells pedía a la clase dominante eliminar totalmente al asalariado. "La humanidad se está rebelando contra la persistencia de la clase trabajadora como tal", declaró.<br /><br />Con la propuesta de eliminar al asalariado, Wells reconoce que "debemos descubrir una forma nueva y más equitativa de trabajo", especialmente en los trabajos menos agradables "como construir carreteras y ferrocariles, la minería ... y la mayor parte de la construcción. (An Englishman Looks at the World 60-61, 67-68). Pero se pregunta: "¿Por qué contratamos a gente para hacer la mayor parte de estos trabajos? ¿Por qué no las hacemos nosotros mismos de modo comunitario? ¿Por qué, en otras palabras, no tenemos un servicio obligatorio similar al militar dedicado al trabajo que dure un año o más de servicio y que lo realize todo el mundo, sea de clase alta o baja?" (An Englishman Looks at the World 67-68). Aquí Wells parece haber tomado como prestada una idea de <a href="http://www.google.com.ar/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fes.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FWilliam_James&ei=3M-7StS4KJyStge-8eS8DQ&rct=j&q=William+James&usg=AFQjCNF8TfnDswRd4DflcpZ403l4Ifr3tg">Williams James</a>. (1910). Wells busca resolver el problema económico de una sociedad sin clases, aunque está de acuerdo con James en el valor moral de ese servicio civil obligatorio. "Creo que este servicio civil obligatorio sería un beneficio moral enorme para nuestra comunidad. Creo que en hacer del trabajo una parte de la vida de todo el mundo y no la vida entera de unos pocos se encuentra la solución última de estas dificultades industriales" (An Englishman Looks at the World 67-68).<br /><br />Después de haber examinado las relaciones de clase y el problema de obtener un trabajo no desagradable, Wells sugiere dos paliativos tras los disturbios de la clase trabajadora. En primer lugar, dada la desconfianza de los trabajadores en el gobierno, Wells propone una reforma electoral: abolir el método electoral entonces vigente y sustituirlo por un método más proporcional. Con un método más proporcional, "destruiría la maquinaría del sistema de partidos y "ya no pondría más al hombre independiente con una desesperanzadora desventaja enfrentado a los nominados por los partidos" (An Englishman Looks at the World 52-53). Su segundo paliativo sería "un vigoroso desarrollo de nuevas zonas urbanas para realojar a la gran mayoría de la población de una manera más civilizada y más agradable"(An Englishman Looks at the World 64).<br /><br />Aunque Wells había predicho conflictos bélicos en sus escritos imaginativos durante años (veáse The War in the Air [1908] y The World Set Free [1914], por ejemplo), cuando la Primera Guerra Mundial empezó en 1914, Wells se quedó tan sorprendido como el resto de Europa, y dado su socialismo e internacionalismo, mucho contemporáneos suyos quedaron sorprendidos cuando Wells se declaró en apoyó de la guerra. Declaró que deseaba ver un final para el poder "Kaiser-Krupp" [NOTA: <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krupp">Krupp</a> fue una empresa de fabricación de armas alemana que vendió armas a todos los gobiernos alemanes en todas las guerras en las que intervino este país desde 1861 hasta 1945] y aseguró que "Cada espada que se levanta contra Alemania se levanta por la paz" (War That Will End War 78, 22). De hecho, la "espada de la paz" con la que Wells representó su posición en la guerra, en 1917 se declaró a sí mismo como "pacifista" que quiso "hacer la paz al derrotar al hombre armado hasta que se rinda y admita el error, se desarme y se reorganice el mundo para conseguir la represión por la fuerza de las aventuras militares en el fututo (War and the Future 193).<br /><br />Aunque Wells fue un partidario de la guerra, nunca fue un nacionalista. Vio a la guerra más como ideológica que como "racial". Escribió: "No nos ceguemos por las pasiones de la guerra para confundir a la gente con su gobierno" (What is Coming? 198) y "nuestra pelea es contra el Imperio Germánico, no contra su pueblo o contra una idea" (The War That Will End War 51). Pronosticó en el título de su primera obra durante la guerra que sería The War That Will End War (1914) - La guerra que acabará con la guerra, que la Primera Guerra mundial sería la última. Atacó a gritos el pacifismo de izquierdas escribiendo "Los así llamados Papeles Laboristas son quizás menos representativos del laborismo británico que cualquier otro; el líder del laborismo, por ejemplo, es el órgano de semejante gente como Bretrand Russell, Vernon Lee, Morel, rentistas académicos que conocen de la parte laboral de la industrialización como de la pelea de gallos" (War and the Future 251), pero tomó la causa de los trabajadores en temas como la escasez de alimentos y los precios, el nivel de vida y la democracia industrial. También apoyó algunas políticas avanzadas de organizaciones sociales. Para prevenir problemas, Wells urgió al gobierno:<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Cita:</legend>ir una vez a cada localidad, requisar toda la comida almacenada en exceso y todas las monedas de oro - que pueden ser devueltas después de la guerra - no sólo a las tiendas de los minoristas especuladores, sino a las tiendas de los mayoristas que retienen las mercancías para sostener los precios altos... Deben constituirse comités de alimentación en cada condado para realizar informes sobre las necesidades de las masas y realizar investigaciones en materia de acumulación, incautación y distribución. (<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/warthatwillendwa00welluoft">War That Will End War</a> 27)</fieldset><br /><br />Además de abogar por una acción inmediata del gobierno para asegurar la disponibilidad de mercancias para satisfacer las necesidades básicas, Wells ràpidamente se dio cuenta de que la guerra era una oportunidad para reformar, e incluso transformar, la economía capitalista británica en una socialista. "¿Se dan cuenta los liberales que el sistema capitalista individualista está ahora desarmado?" preguntó al observar que:<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Cita:</legend>"El Estado se hace cargo de los molinos de harina y el suministro de alimentos, no sólo para fines militares, sino para el bienestar general de la comunidad. El Estado controla los ferrocarriles con un repentino y completo desprecio a los accionistas... Si el Estado considera necesario retener estas cosas para el bien general, o si afloja un poco para volver a apretar, me pregunto si queda en las mentes de los hombres la idea de disputar su posesión" (War That Will End War 66-67, 64).</fieldset><br /><br />Wells sugirió que "podemos dar vuelta a nuestras necesidades actuales a una reorganización social más duradera; con un esfuerzo mínimo ahora, podemos ayudar a fijar los métodos y la maquinaria que en el futuro pondrán la alimentación y la vivienda y la administración de la tierra fuera del alcance de la codicia y el egoísmo para siempre" (War That Will End War 67-68). Dos años después del inicio de la geuerra, Wells vio este proceso cercano. El creyó que "tras el final de la guerra veremos el transporte marítimo, las minas de carbón y gran parte de la maquinaria de la producción de alimentos y bebidas y la distribución no bajo la dministración de la propiedad privada, sino bajo alguna clase de administración pública provisional" (What is Coming? 112). Aparte de las necesidades bélicas, Wels pensó que un cambio de mentalidad había ocurrido en Gran Bretaña, y detrás de la expansión del Estado en los tiempos bélicos, "es una idea, una nueva idea, la idea de que la nación es un gran sistema económico trabajando unido... La realidad es una vasta e interdependiente fábrica que le hubiera parecido increíble a <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fourier">Fourier</a>" (What is Coming? 113). El único ingrediente de esta fórmula, al que Wells quiere añadir derechos, es al mundo del trabajo organizado: "Si debe haber alguna conversión ràpida de la maquinaria económica, pues las oportunidades y las necesidades de este tiempo lo exigen, los trabajadores debe tener la confianza de aquellos que quieren llevarla a cabo. Deben ser tranquilizados e ilustrados. Los trabajadores debe conocer lo que se va a hacer; deben consentir y cooperar" (What is Coming? 117-118). A los trabajadores se les debe dar seguridad a largo plazo en lugar de la incertidumbre del fluctuante mercado laboral de preguerra. "Muy pocos empleadores privados pueden negociar con un hombre durante toda su vida; pero la industria nacionalizada si puede; Pueden pagar un salario atractivo y pueden dar seguridad, pueden garantizar el ocio del hombre y su independencia (Elements of Reconstruction 65). Si dicha coparticipación, tal como Wells abogó por ella en artículos titulados "Labour Unrest" de 1912, fueran llevada a la práctica:<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Cita:</legend>>Creo que sobre las ruinas del sistema capitalista decimonónico que esta guerra ha destrozado surgirá, incluso desde ahora mismo, en este extraño andamiaje de fábricas de munición nacionales y servicios públicos nacionalizados con precipitación, el marco de un orden económico y social basado en la propiedad y los servicios nacionales. (What is Coming? 123)</fieldset><br /><br />Además de defender lo que considera una política de nacionalización amistosa con los trabajadores, Wells volvió a las imprentas durante la guerra para apoyar las sugerencias de <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Dene_Morel">E. D. Morel</a> sobre la posición de África después de la guerra (hecha en The African Problem and the Peace Agreement - El problema africano y el tratado de paz) de 1917. Aunque Wells se opuso al pacifismo de Morel, respetó el conocimiento de Morel sobre África desde los días de la última cruzada contra la esclavitud y el esclavitud en el <a href="http://www.aprendergratis.com/stag/congo-belga.html">Congo Belga</a>. Morel se mostró a favor de poner fin al control imperialista del África sub-Sahariana, y, en su lugar, abogó por el establecimiento de una agencia internacional que supervisara la región, la limitación de la explotación europea y la provisión de educación y adiestramiento de los indígenas con vistas a un eventual autogobierno.<br /><br />Aunque Wells apoyó estas propuestas generales y reconoció la necesidad de proteger a los africanos de la explotación, también se dió cuenta del peligro que esto suponía para <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divisi%C3%B3n_internacional_del_trabajo#Teor.C3.ADa_cl.C3.A1sica">la división internacional del trabajo</a> y los trabajadores británicos. Sugirió, por ejemplo, que "la esclavitud en África, abierta o encubierta, bien sea forzada por el látigo o llevada a cabo mediante el robo de tierras, golpea el hogar de la libertad de cada trabajador europeo", y alertó sobre el potencial uso de los africanos en cualquier futuro conflicto: "Es absolutamente necesario para la paz del mundo que no haya negros armados mas allá del mínimo necesario para las labores de policía en África" (In the Fourth Fear: Anticipations of a World Peace 46, 43). Para asegurar el desarrollo de África y la satisfación nativa, Wells argumenta que: "Queremos una ley común para África, una Declaración general de Derechos humanos, algunos derechos elementales y una autoridad común a la cual los negros y nativos puedan apelar en busca de justicia", y continuó, "Queremos y demandamos un comercio justo y franco con África, que sólo se puede realizar por un poder regulador superior, una Comisión" (Fourth Fear 46, 47-48). Wells respaldó con entusiasmo el argumento de Morel al concluir que "debemos delegar a una Comisión Africana las aduanas interiores africanas, la regulación del comercio interestatal, los trenes y los ríos interestatales y el establecimiento de una Corte Suprema para resolver los asuntos africanos" (Fourth Fear, 49). Además de abogar por los derechos humanos en África, Wells también vio la necesidadde tomar medidas paliativas para prevenir una rápido colapso imperial tras la guerra: "La era de la 'expansión' está cerca a su fin. Nadie que sepa leer los signos de los tiempos en Japón, China, India, puede dudarlo. Finalizó en América un centenar de años atrás, está finalizando en Asia, finalizará en África, e incluso en África el fianl se vislumbra próximo" (What is Coming? 241). El dilema para Gran Bretaña es una retirada gradual del imperio o la expulsión definitiva, y una política de respeto y educación en África es el único camino para conseguir la primera".<br /><br />Además de una nueva política laboral y el tema imperial para después de la guerra, Wells vio en la guerra una oportunidad para aplicar por su reforma legal de igualdad de las mujeres con los hombres. En 1916 declaró: "Las chicas que se han enfrentado a la muerte y a las heridas tan gallardamente en nuestras fábricas de municiones ... han matado para siempre el pobre argumento de que las mujeres no deberían votar porque ellas no tienen ningún valor militar" (What is Coming? 177-178). Más allá, Wells siente que determinadas actituddes deberían cambiar para acomodarse a la nueva autoconfianza de las mujeres después de la guerra.<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Cita:</legend>No creo que la invasión por las mujeres de cientos de empleos hasta ahora vedados a ellas sea un acuerdo temporal que será revertido después de la guerra .... El mundo tras la guerra tendrá que adjustarse a esta extensión del empleo femenino, y su incremento en la proporción de respeto y apoyo a las mujeres" (179-180).</fieldset><br /><br />A pesar de que las preocupaciones sociales de Wells durante la guerra estuvieron en sintonía con sus posiciones anteriores al período bélico, su máxima preocupación durante el conflicto fue la promoción de un acuerdo tras la guerra para prevenir otro embrollo posterior que diera lugar a otra guerra. Desde tan temprano como 1914, Wells identificó unj número de cambios en los asuntos internacionales que harían un mundo más pacífico en el futuro y elaboró otras durante el resto del conflicto. Eran:<br /><br /><ul><li>el control de la fabricación y comercio de armas,</li><li> la creación de una organización internacional para la presevación de la paz</li><li> y la utilización de acuerdos federales en áreas del mundo donde las fronteras internacionales no estuvieran fácilmente delimitadas.</li></ul><br /><br />En línea con su deseo de ver las principales industrias Británicas permanentemente nacionalizadas, Wells buscó "la absoluta exclusión en todo el mundo de la industria de armamentos para el beneficio privado" (War That Will End War 40). No sólo deben "Todas las plantas de fabricación de material de guerra en todo el mundo ... tomada por los gobiernos estatales", sino que además el comercio de armas debe ser absolutamente prohibido" (War That Will End War 44). De hecho, Wells pensó que sólo "unos pocos estados industriales [son] capaces de producir equipamiento armamentístico moderno [y] ellos deberían cerrar el suministro de semejante material a todos los otros estados del mundo (War That Will End War 275). Para regular la producción armamentística, pensó que "será posible establecer un consejo mundial para la regulación de armamentos como la consecuencia natural de esta guerra" (War That Will End War 46).<br /><br />La restricción de la producción de armas para "unos pocos estados industriales" y el establecimiento de de un "consejo mundial para la regulación de armamentos" formaron el núcleo del pensamiento político de Wells en la creación de una organización internacional de paz posterior a la guerra. Dicha organización estuvo presente en la mente de Wells desde el principio del conflicto cuando escribió que "una Liga de Paz controlará el globo (War That Will End War 67-68). Wells creyó que esa agencia emergería de una rápida derrota alemana y se establecería bajo la presión estadounidense y sería apoyada por elementos liberales dentro de los gobiernos británico y francés. Sin embargo, como la guerra se prolongó y una aplastante victoria de cualquiera de las partes llegó a parecer poco probable, Wells puso sus esperanzas en el cansancio entre los beligerantes y la negociación de una "Liga de Paz", aunque todavía con la presión neutral estadounidense como una influencia liberalizadora, una liga que tomaría la forma de "un Tribunal Internacional para la discusión y solución de las controversias internacionales" (War That Will End War 276). Todas las cuestiones entre estados que produzcan roces con otros estados deben ser referidas al Tribunal Internacional. El Tribunal "debería administrar la ley del mar, el control de los fletes en interés común de la humanidad", y "sería más necesario crear una Comisión Internacional de Límites ... para volver a dibujar el mapa de Europa, Asia y África" (War That Will End War 276-277, 278). Estas son las bases del modelo de un Tribunal Internacional welsiano durante la guerra, con un cambio significativo: desde 1918 Wells insistió que la "Liga de Naciones" debería "tener poder y ejercitarlo, y varios poderes deberían ser delegados en ella" (In the Fourth Fear 28), y esto significaba que la "Liga de Naciones" debería "prácticamente controlar el ejército, la armada, las fuerzas aéreas y la industria de armamento de cada nación" (In the Fourth Fear 36). Para facilitar el establecimiento de un cuerpo internacional como este, Wells fue uno de los primeros miembros de la Asociación de la Liga de Naciones Libres, que fue establecida en 1918. Esta fue una organización liberal que se erigió como un rival de la pacifista Sociedad de la Liga de Naciones. Sin embargo, los objetivos de las dos organizaciones eran muy similares, y en 1919 se fusionaron, y tomaron un nuevo nombre: la Unión de la Liga de Naciones, de la cual Wells fue miembro brevemente.<br /><br />Con el final de la fabricación y comercio de armas y el establecimiento de una "Liga de Naciones Libres", Wells consideró que la única cuestión final que se resolvió después de la guerra sería el de la delimitación de las fronteras. Sin embargo, antes de que el mapa de Europa fuera redibujado, Wells insistió que no debería haber "ninguna amargura de 'territorios conquistados'que perturbara la paz en el futuro de Europa" (War That Will End War 52). En cuanto a la redefinición de las fronteras, Wells pensó que que en el caso de la Europa occidental sería fácil:Bélgica y Luxemburgo deberían ser restaurados, <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorio_imperial_de_Alsacia_y_Lorena">Alsacia-Lorena</a> [territorio en disputa entre Aemania y Francia]y la parte danesa de <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleswig-Holstein">Schleswig-Holstein</a> [territorio en disputa entre Alemania y Dinamarca] serían devueltas a Francia y Dinamarca, respectivamente [hoy el primero pertenece a Francia y el segundo a Alemania]. En Europa oriental y los Balcanes Wells prevé mayores problemas (War That Will End War 55-56). Así, las áreas de los imperios austro-húngaro y Otomano, que contenían pueblos de etnicidad mezclada deben ser federalizados entre cantones, y los cantones deberían ser pequeñas unidades homogéneas en grandes estados multiétnicos. Esta solución debería ser supervisada por la "Liga de Naciones Libres", y debería terminar con las aventuras imperiales en Europa oriental y los Balcanes, que crearía estados suficientemente fuertes para coexistir en la Liga con sus antiguos amos imperiales.<br /><br />A pesar del júbilo por la llegada de la paz en 1918, Wells estaba desilusionado con la llegada de la paz, tanto en Gran Bretaña como a nivel internacional. El estado socializado que fue realizado durante la guerra se revierte, y la economía capitalista fue reintroducida sin otorgarle ningún papel a los trabajadores. El imperialismo británico fue reforzado después de la guerra contra Alemania y varios territorios otomanos cayeron bajo la "protección" británica; y la fabricas de armamentos privadas continuaron sin obstáculos. Lo peor de todo para Wells fue que, a pesar de su defensa de la "Liga de Naciones Libres", la eventual Liga de Naciones <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociedad_de_Naciones#Admisi.C3.B3n_de_integrantes">fue rechazada por los Estados Unidos</a>; y Alemania, Rusia y Turquía fueron rechazadas, y fue en efecto una liga de Ministros de Asuntos Exteriores. (Outline of History [1920] 2: 740). Wells escribió en 1920: "Lo que el mundo necesita no es una liga de naciones como esta o una mera liga de pueblos, sino una liga mundial de hombres. El mundo perece a menos que la soberanía se fusione con la nacionalidad subordinada." (Outline of History [1920] 2: 752), y previó que la historia general del siglo XX en adelante será, en gran parte, de una u otra manera según se enmienden o se revoquen las disposiciones menos generosas y menos científicas del Tratado de Paz de 1919." (Outline of History [1920] 2: 740). La desilusión de Wells con la Liga de Naciones le llevó a renunciar a la League of Nations Union, y se pasó el resto de su vida criticando la Liga como un mal cuerpo internacional que no liga en absoluto.<br /><br />Con el fin de la guerra, los intereses de Wells en los asuntos políticos continuó, tanto a nivel doméstico como internacional. Aunque generalmente rechazó el análisis marxista, Wells se quedó intrigado con la <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revoluci%C3%B3n_de_octubre">Revolución Bolchevique</a> durante la Primera Guerra Mundial. Ël simpatizó con su republicanismo, su planificación central, su rechazo de la diplomacia tradicional. En 1920, sin embargo, viajó a Rusia para evaluar los logros iniciales del Régimen Bolchevique. Visitó Moscú y San Petesburgo, y se entrevistó con un número de líderes rusos, incluyendo el escritor <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A1ximo_Gorki">Máximo Gorki</a>, el fisiólogo <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iv%C3%A1n_P%C3%A1vlov">Ivan Pavlov</a> y el nuevo líder del país, <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin">Vladimir Lenin</a>.<br /><br />Después de su viaje, Wells publicó sus pensamientos sobre el Régimen Bolchevique en <span style="font-style:italic;">Rusia en las Sombras</span> <a href="http://biografia-h-g-wells.blogspot.com/2009/09/rusia-en-las-sombras-russia-in-shadows.html">(Russia in the Shadows - Sinopsis y libro)</a>. Sus experiencias no cambiaron su actitud hacia el marxismo. "La filosofía marxista cruda, que divide a los hombres en burgeses y proletarios, que enfoca toda la vida social como una estúpida 'guerra de clases', no tenía conocimiento de la vida mental colectiva" (Russia in the Shadows, 57-58) y continúa:<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Cita:</legend>en lo que respecta a la vida intelectual de la comunidad, Wells descubre que el marxismo comunismo no tiene ni planes ni ideas. El comunismo marxista ha sido siempre una teoría de la revolución, una teoría que carece de ideas creativas y constructivas, sino que además ha sido hostil a las ideas creativas y constructivas. Cada orador comunista ha sido entrenado para condenar la utopía, es decir, ha sido entrenado despreciar la planificación inteligente. (Russia in the Shadows 59-60)</fieldset><br /><br />De acuerdo con Wells:<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Cita:</legend>De una parte a otra de Rusia, y en la comunidad ruso parlante repartida a lo largo y ancho del mundo, sólo existía una clase de persona que tenía una idea general común sobre el trabajo, una voluntad común y una voluntad común, y esta comunidad fue el Partido Comunista... Fue y es el único tipo de solidaridad posible en Rusia ... El Partido Comunista, a pesar de ser criticado, tiene una idea y el partido entero puede ser convocado para realizarla. Hasta ahora es algo moralmente superior a todo lo que se ha hecho en su contra (Russia in the Shadows 76-77)</fieldset><br /><br />Mientras Wells considera que la solidaridad comunista es el mortero que mantiene a Rusia unida, Wells mantiene un aprecio real por el liderazgo mostrado por Lenin en los primeros años de la revolución: "En él [Lenin] me di cuenta de que el comunismo, a pesar de Marx, es enormemente creativo ... Él, al menos, tiene una visión del mundo que es cambiado, planificado y construido de nuevo" (Russia in the Shadows 161-162). Mientras elogia la creatividad de Lenin, Wells yerra en el lado de la precaución, cuando considera lo que Lenin puede conseguir en la Rusia de los años 20. "Lenin está poniendo todo su poder en un régimen para el desarrollo de grandes estaciones de producción eléctrica, transporte e industria ... ¿Puede alguien imaginar un proyecto más valiente en las vastas llanuras y bosques, campesinos analfabetos, sin centrales hidroeléctricas disponibles, sin conocimientos técnicos disponibles y con el comercio y la industria en el último suspiro? (Russia in the Shadows 158-159). Más que el liderazgo de Lenin, Wells piensa que la disciplina del Partido Comunista es el factor de mantenimiento de Rusia. Al mometo de la muerte del dictador, Wells escribió: "Para muchos fines prácticos, el trabajo de Lenin se acabó antes de 1920. Su muerte ahora o un poco después hará sólo una mínima diferencia en los destinos de Rusia" (A Year of Prophesying 110). Wells escribió que "es a partir de sus nuevas raíces comunistas que el nuevo óden ruso crecerá. Está manifiestamente destinado a ser un gran sistema, unos Estados Unidos del Viejo Mundo, que se extienda desde el báltico al Pacífico (A Year of Prophesying 112). Para todos aquellos a los que no les gusta el marxismo, su rechazo a la ideología comunista y su escepticismo acerca de los ambiciosos planes de Lenin, Wels confiaba en que "el único gobierno posible que puede evitar ese colapso final de Rusia es el actual gobierno bolchevique ... No hay otra alternativa a este gobierno" (Russia in the shadows 173).<br /><br />En Rusia en las Sombras, Wells presenta una evaluación equilibrada de los puntos fuertes del nuevo gobierno bolchevique y sus debilidades, pero también intenta desengañar a sus lectores de las muchas ideas falsas sobre el régimen. Cuando Wells considera el estado de Rusia antes de la revolución y el crecimiento del poder bolchevique, sus puntos de vista son claros:<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Cita:</legend>Se falsea la situación mundial, se establece que la gente está totalmente perdida, para afirmar que la miseria espantosa de la Rusia de hoy es consecuencia de los comunistas. Se falsifica la situación en todo el mundo, se establece que la gente está totalmente perdida en sus acciones políticas para acabar afirmando que la espantosa miseria de la Rusia de hoy es en gran medida a consecuencia del esfuerzo comunista, que los malvados comunistas han conducido a Rusia a su difícil situación actual, y que si se puede derrocar a los comunistas de todo el mundo y en Rusia, pronto el país volverá a ser un país feliz de nuevo. Rusia cayó en su actual situación de miseria por la guerra munidal y por la insuficiencia moral e intelectual de su clase social rica y de sus gobernantes (Russia in the Shadows 66)</fieldset><br /><br />El comunismo, como una ideología esteril, según Wells, es incapaz de crear una revolución, pero como un movimiento popular está bien situado para sacar provecho de los fallos de sus rivales: "El comunismo no es un dragón que devora a los estados ricos; es más bien el basurero de los estados podridos y fallidos. No se puede decir que el comunismo es, o muy fuerte o se expande con mucha rapidez como una doctrina agresiva en Europa. Y sin embargo todavía puede prevalecer en algunas partes de Europa" (A Year of Prophesying 112).<br /><br />Wells fue muy escético sobre la posibilidad del comunismo en Europa, porque creía que el capitalismo liberal europeo se reharía. Sin embargo, en EEUU y en los imperios europeos, la situación podría ser muy diferente: "Hay un considerable temor a las actividades comunistas en EEUU. Esto es en gran parte debido a una mala conciencia, consciente de que hay una gran masa de mano de obra inmigrante sin asimilar, muy injustamente tratada y con un nivel de educación muy bajo. Puede haber un futuro para el comunismo allí, y probablemente habrá un gran movimiento hacia el comunismo en los centros industriales de India, China y Japón. Pero en Europa pienso que el comunismo ha pasado su máximo y la mente popular se está moviendo hacia un tipo de socialismo más constructivo y esperanzador (Prophesying 244). La última esperanza de Wells para obtener el socialismo en Europa era que en este continente naciera una democracia social de un capitalismo moribundo, que Rusia liberalizara su rígido comunismo, y las dos esferas se encontrarían en un terreno socialista común:<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Cita:</legend>El movimiento comunista es una parte del mundo actual, es una sombra proyectada por ciertos absurdos económicos, y una reacción a los mismos. En 25 años los proyectos de un socialismo científico se habrán convertido y absorvidos en su mayoría por el entusiasmo juvenil y la energía de resentidos que ahora encuentra su expresión en el comunismo. El comunismo es una fase, una experiencia amarga y estéril en el desarrollo de la idea socialista. El socialismo es su padre y también su heredero.(Prophesying 241)</fieldset><br /><br />Con su decepción, tanto por el acuerdo post bélico y por los esfuerzos bolcheviques en Rusia, Wells volvió al activismo político institucional en 1922, en un esfuerzo para influenciar la reconstrucción doméstica y la política internacional. En aquel año se unió al Partido Laborista y se mostró de acuerdo para presenarse como candidato en la Universidad de Londres, un sólido bastión conservador imposible de ganar desde su creación en 1868. Como parte de su campaña electoral, Wells pronunció una serie de discursos en la universidad y publicó dos documentos: una "carta electotal" a sus electores y un folleto titulado "El mundo, sus deudas y el hombre rico" [The World, Its Debts, and the Rich Man]. En esas publicaciones, Wells presenta las prioridades de Gran Bretaña y especifica lo que él considera son los puntos fuertes del Partido Laborista. En su "carta electoral", Wells condena los beneficios hechos durante la guerra, la salvaje especulación financiera en el mercado de capitales y las empresas de negocios improductivos. Según Wells, estos no son más que las lixiviaciones de la riqueza nacional que no suministran productos útiles o importantes a los niveles de empleo. Debido a sus afiliaciones de clase, Wells también condenó a los partidos Liberal y Conservador por no legislar para restringir las ganancias escesivas y la especulación financiera y por no iniciar reformas social-reformistas para ayudar a la reconstrucción del país. También critica a los "viejos partidos" que mantienen, después de la guerra, un alto gasto militar, y su uso de la Liga de Naciones como una extensión del ministerio de asuntos exteriores, incluso cuando rechazan la inclusión de Alemania, Rusia y Turquía como miembros, en vez de centrarse en la reconciliación, que debería ser el foco de la política de exteriores británica.<br /><br />Wells presenta el Partido Laborista de postguerra como el partido de "una nación". A diferencia del Partido Comunista, ideológicamente no es un partido monolítico: "aunque incluye un ala socialista - y yo personalmente soy socialista -, el Partido laborista no es, como partido, un partido socialista" (The World, Its Debts, and the Rich Man 11). Wells además afirma que, en contraste con la sectorialización de los liberales y conservadores, el Partido Laborista ya no se limita sólo a la representación de la clase trabajadora:<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Cita;</legend>Hoy el Partido laborista está a favor de todo el trabajo creativo en el Estado, desde el trabajo del campo hasta el trabajo del médico, periodistas, profesores, clérigos, investigadores científicos, en medio de una confusión tensa, rota, inútil en medio de la cual vivimos hoy. El Partido laborista no es antagónico con los intereses y las reivindicaciones de la propiedad privada honestamente administrada para la producción y el bienestar general, pero se establece de forma constante y sistemática contra todas las propiedades improductivas y parasitarias"... Su lema principal es el bienestar de todos antes que las ganancias de una clase o camarilla.(Correspondence 3: 115)</fieldset><br /><br />En relaciones internacionales, Wells aboga por un fuerte papel de Gran Bretaña en promover una mayor integración económica:<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Cita;</legend>Yo soy un firme defensor de la urgente necesidad de controles internacionales en los asuntos mundiales. Pero es de sentido común que dichos controles mundiales deben representar a los principales poderes en el mundo... Debemos hacer lo que podamos con y para la Sociedad de Naciones y particualrmente, debemos apoyar su organización Mundial del Trabajo, pero nunca hemos de olvidar cuan provisional y experimental es y la necesidad urgente de apoyar la reconstrucción de Alemania, Rusia y Turquía, y otras Potencias excluidas de una cooperación equitativa y honorable (Correspondence 3: 116).</fieldset><br /><br />Habiendo desarrollado su posición general en su "carta electoral", Wells usa su segunda publicación electoral para identificar ciertas áreas de la política, principalmente entre ellos la tasa "Capital Levy".<br /><br /><fieldset></legend>Nota:</legend> La tasa capital levy sería un impuesto sobre el capital, en vez de sobre el ingreso, que se pagaría una sola vez, en vez de anualmente.</fieldset><br /><br />El Capital Levy fue una política del Partido Laborista que supondría el pago de una sola vez de los grandes ahorros no invertidos. El Levy sólo tendría un efecto significativo en los ahorros superiores a las 20.000 libras esterlinas, pero se creía que reduciría a la mitad los intereses por el pago de la deuda británica causada por la guerra. Wells usa su pamfleto para explicar los efectos del Capital Levy. Él la llama la política "antiresiduos" y pone el acento en el pequeño número de gente muy rica que se vería afectada. Al mismo tiempo, destaca, retóricamente, los sectores de inversión que se abrirían a consecuencia del alivio de la carga de la deuda por la guerra.<br /><br />Lejos de ser antagonista contra el capital, Wells asegura que "estamos listos para el compromiso creativo. Estamos listos por una cooperación franca con toda clase de líderes industriales y financieros que realmente están trabajando para conseguir fines creativos y productivos" (The World, Its Debts, and the Rich Man 12).<br /><br />En las encuestas, fue el que obtuvo menos intención de voto. En las elecciones celebradas el 15 de noviembre de 1922, fue el último, detrás del candidato conservador y tocayo, Sir Sydney Russell-Wells, y el candidato liberal.<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Universidad de Londres 1922</legend><br /><br />Sir Sydney Russell-Wells (Conservative)-4.037<br />Professor Frederick Pollard (Liberal)---2.593<br />H. G. Wells (Labour)--------------------1,420<br /></fieldset><br /><br />Las elecciones de 1922 devolvió una mayoría conservadora, pero, en le plazo de un año y de conformidad con la promesa electoral del partido, el Primer Ministro Stanley Baldwin convocó unas elecciones para dilucidar la cuestión de la reforma arancelaria, con los conservadores a favor de introducir tarifas protectoras y los laboristas y las dos facciones del Partido Liberal oponiéndose a la protección. Así, a fines de 1923, Wells estaba preparando una revancha.<br /><br />Como parte de su segunda campaña, Wells publicó cuatro panfletos electorales, Socialismo y el móvil científico (1923)[Socialism and the Scientific Motive], una "carta electoral", el ideal de la educación laborista (1923)[The Labour Ideal of Education] y una caminata a lo largo de los embarcaderos del Támesis (1923)[A Walk Along the Thames Embankment], el último de los cuales es un estracto del capítulo primero de New Worlds for Old [Nuevos mundos para el viejo]. A los lemas de la campaña anterior, Wells añadió su apelación por el atractivo del socialismo en una economía mixta y declarándose a favor del comercio libre.<br /><br />Sobre la cuestión del socialismo, Wells descarta el argumento de que el colectivismo conduce a la uniformidad y sugiere que, moralmente "en teoría todos somos comunistas y todos somos extremadamente individualistas": "todos repudiamos el egoísmo, todos decimos, en teoría, 'uno para todos y todos para uno" y justificamos casi todas las actitudes políticas" al tiempo que simultáneamente "todos creemos que hacemos lo mejor cuando somos libres de elegir el trabajo que queremos hacer y libres de hacerlo cada uno en nuestra forma de hacerlo" (Socialism and the Scientific Motive 2). Para Wells las palabras "socialismo" y "capitalismo" no son opuestas y señala que "estamos viviendo hoy en día en un sistema mixto. "Nuestro sistema es parcialmente socialista. Incluso aunque estamos viviendo bajo un sistema de 'beneficio' puro. Casi todo lo fundamental, el trabajo vital del mundo está hecho por gente que no está trabajando por el provecho" (Socialism and the Scientific 2-3).<br /><br />Resumiendo, Wells apoya "la limitación de la propiedad a las cosas privadas" al tiempo que afirma que "la propiedad privada absoluta de la tierra, los recursos naturales y los servicios públicos es un robo a la comunidad hecho por el individuo"(Wells' Social anticipations 134).<br /><br />Después de defender los beneficios prácticos del socialismo en una sociedad moderna, Wells vuelve al debate "comercio libre vs. protección arancelaria", y, desde una perspectiva internacionalista, señala los males de la protección para un país como Gran Bretaña. En primer lugar, presenta el argumento histórico afirmando que "nuestro país nunca ha sido una economía de subsistencia. Varios millones de británicos han vivido en base a nuestras importaciones pagadas con nuestras exportaciones pasadas y presentes" (Correspondence 3: 159) y no se debe impedir las importaciones de productos industriales (Correspondence 3: 160). En oposición a la prootección, Wells sugiere una mayor difusión del poder de compra. (Correspondence 3: 160) conseguida mediante la tasa Capital Levy, que gravaría los ahorros superiores a 5.000 libras y se "aplicaría sobre todo para el alivio fiscal del hombre común, lo que liberaría dinero para impulsar el gasto. (Correspondence 3: 160-161). Este simple mecanismo para "cebar la bomba" demuestra que Wells defendía una <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesianismo">economía keynesiana</a> mucho antes de que las teorías de <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes">Keynes</a> fueran publicadas y hubieran ganado aceptación. Wells probablemente fue influido por Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform 1923, la cual Wells revisó el 19 de enero de 1924 [A Year of Prophesying 97-101].<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>NOTA:</legend> el hecho de que Wells leyera un libro del economista compatriota suyo John M. Keynes muestra hasta que punto el escritor de ciencia ficción estaba en los años 20 involucrado en la política y en las ciencias sociales, seguramente impulsado por el afán de aprender y por un cierto caracter autodidacta.<br /><br />La economía británica, durante más de un siglo y desde que adquirió una ventaja en costes de producción por la utilización mayor y mejor de la técnica productiva, en comparación con otros países como EEUU, Francia y los distintos estados del norte y centro de Europa, y porque disponía deun amplio sistema colonial que le proporcionaba materias primas como algodón a precios sin competencia, se mostró a favor del librecambio, es decir, tarifas aduaneras cero, porque esta política le beneficiaba. Pero cuando tras la Primera Guerra Mundial su economía empezó a perder parte de esas ventajas comparativas, se instaló en la sociedad británica el debate proteccionismo vs. librecambio.<br /><br />Desde que en 1776 <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith">Adam Smith</a> publicara su obra más conocida <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_riqueza_de_las_naciones">La riqueza de las naciones</a> hasta la Primera Guerra Mundial, la única posición económica sobre el papel del Estado en la economía era el <span style="font-style: italic;">laissez <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez_faire">faire, laissez passer</a></span>, es decir, reservarle un papel mínimo. Durante la Primera Guerra Mundial, como hemos visto, el estado británico se vió obligado a jugar un rol más activo en la economía, y al terminar la guerra, volvió a su papel anterior. Pero la semilla de la intervención estatal ya estaba sembrada. La llegada al poder del fascismo italiano de Mussolini (30-10-1922) y del nazismo alemán de Hitler (30-01-1933) por la derecha, y las ideas de Keynes y otros economistas por la izquierda en favor de un papel más social del Estado en la economía, acabaron con el liberalismo económico hasta la llegada al poder en los años 80 de Margaret Tatcher en Gran Bretaña y Ronald Reegan en EEUU.</fieldset><br /><br />Al tiempo que Wells claramente considera el proteccionismo contrario a los intereses económicos de Gran Bretaña, también se opone a él por motivos internacionalistas. El declara que: "Las tarifas arancelarias son actos internacionales, una forma más suave de guerra... Teóricamente, son tan justificables como un ejército o una armada, y su utilización activa es, probablemente, tan ruinosa para el hombre común como la guerra" (Correspondence 3: 160). Wells prefiere una comercio libre y amigable y sugiere apoyar la sociedad de naciones.<br /><br />Aunque el resultado de las elecciones de 1923 no fue bueno, Wells pudo consolarse pensando que fue el único candidato que creció en número de votos con respecto a las elecciones del año anterior. El resultado de las elecciones del 5 de diciembre de 1923 fue:<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Resultado de las elecciones Universidad de Londres 1923</legend><br /><br />Sir Sydney Russell-Wells (Conservative)-3.833<br />Professor Frederick Pollard (Liberal)-----2.180<br />H. G. Wells (Labour)---------------------1.427</fieldset><br /><br />Tras su segunda derrota electoral, Wells puso fin a sus ambiciones parlamentarias. Libre de enredos de partido, Wells tomó la pluma y procedió a comentar las actividades del gobierno de <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsay_MacDonald">Ramsay MacDonald</a> y el futuro de la centro izquierda. Su primera oportunidad de evaluar las actividades del gobierno laborista vino de la mano de la <span style="font-style: italic;">Westminster Gazette</span>, que le había encomendado escribir una columna semanal sobre asuntos nacionales e internacionales entre septiembre de 1923 y septiembre de 1924. Empezó evaluando su política educativa. A pesar de que acusó al gobierno de ser "un gabinete bastante liberal de izquierdas" y de mostrar una "discreción conservadora", y a pesar de que se contradijo a si mismo al hacer notar de que "la Revolución Social no tiene prisa por llegar", Wells se mostró interesado en el Ministro de Educación C. P. Trevelyan. Wells insistió en que "el test inmediato del Gobierno Laborista será su tratamiento de la educación nacional". (A Year of Prophesying 121). A pesar de su acusación de conservadurismo, él todavía pensaba que el partido estaba comprometido en formar "una sociedad muy organizada inspirada no en la caza de beneficios sino en el espíritu de cooperativas, y trabajar y producir mucho por el bien común". La política educativa fue, pues, el centro de los objetivos de partido, pues Wells pensaba que "es imposible al Gobierno Laborista realizar su ideal ... con el actual nivel de educación." "Para incrementar tal nivel", afirmó Wells, "es necesario para la extensión de los servicios públicos en la vida económica y el reemplazo de la lucha por el dinero en el orden económico." (A Year of Prophesying 122). Con eso dicho, Wells pasó a ofrecer a Trevelyan un número de sugerencias políticas. Escribió en 1924 la sugerencia de prolongar los estudios escolares, tanto por abajo como por arriba. Afirmó que "las escuelas infantiles públicas deben ser las guarderías de los pobres" y que "la educación debe prolongarse, por lo menos, hasta la edad de 16" (A Year of Prophesying 123, 122). En cuanto al contenido, Wells sugirió que la educación "debe incluir un conocimiento general de la historia del mundo y la humanidad, elementos básicos de la ciencia política y la económica, un poco del conocimiento de los métodos y del alcance de las ciencias biológica y física y un conocimiento razonable y empleo de al menos una lengua extranjera" (A Year of Prophesying 122). Finalmente, Wells instó la potenciación de los alumnos en dirigir su propia educación. Sostuvo que los niños ya se están diferenciando después de los doce años, y debe haber una elección de estudios, ya que la educación de un niño es el veneno de otro niño. (A Year of Prophesying 124).<br /><br />Si Wells tenía muchas esperanzas puestas en la educación en febrero de 1924, ya estaba desilusionado para marzo cuando el gobierno anunció sus gastos militares. La decisión laborista de ese mes de marzo, de construir cinco nuevos cruceros para la Royal Navy fue recibida con indignación por muchos en la izquierda, incluyendo a Wells, quién escribió:<br /><br /><fieldset>Esos cruceros van a costar 5 millones de libras ... y van a dar empleo a unos pocos miles de hombres. Mientras tanto, tengo entendido que ese programa educativo Laborista para extender la educación hasta los 16 años para la próxima generación se va a quedar sin falta de fondos.(A Year of Prophesying 141)</fieldset><br /><br />La ira de Wells sobre la política laborista de rearme naval fue más allá de la simple crítica por la diversión de los fondos de las políticas sociales. Para él, la acción tendría un fuerte impacto en las relaciones exteriores de Gran Bretaña, pues mientras él creía que "el reconocimiento de Rusia es para bien", pensó que "los cañones de esos cinco cruceros serán armas obsoletas antes de que puedan ser finalizados, se habrá hecho añicos el prestigio del gobierno laborista como pacificador europeo" (A Year of Prophesying 121, 139-140). Wells creía que la decisión laborista era cínica, una maniobra de corta visión de futuro: "Uno no compra un arma sin un enemigo a la vista, y estoy totalmente pedido para vislumbrar que enemigo tiene MacDonald a la vista, a menos que consideremos como tales a los candidatos conservadores en los distritos electorales donde la construcción naval es poderosa" (A Year of Prophesying 140). Ni siquiera ha habido un gesto hacia la nacionalización del transporte, las minas y la producción de productos básicos... La tasa capital Levy ha sido olvidada." (A Year of Prophesying 180).<br /><br />A pesar de su decepción con el gobierno laborista, Wells continuó apoyando a los dos partidos liberales (el Partido Liberal y el Patido Laborista) contra lo que él denominó Baldwinismo: un Peligro para el Mundo": (The Way the World Is Going 89). Wells pensó que la política del gobierno conservador de 1924 a 1929 estaba dirigiendo al país a otra guerra europea: con las relaciones con Rusia rotas y con la idea instalada en Rusia "de que Gran Bretaña es el enemigo del gobierno soviético" con "la incapacidad de llegar a un entendimiento con los Estados Unidos sobre el tema del desarme", y, especialmente, con el gobierno habiendo "llevado su apoyo a la dictadura de Mussolini" (The Way the World Is Going 92, 91, 90). Para Wells, "en el desarrollo de una amistad franco-alemana se cuelga toda la esperanza que tenemos de un gran futuro para Europa", así que la política británica debería estar dirigida a fomentar esa amistad" (The Way the World Is Going 90). Convencido de que "La parálisis del liberalismo inglés lleva con ella la parálisis del progreso en todo el mundo", a fines de 1927 Wells hace un exámen de la base de apoyo del centro-izquierda y trata de encontrar formas de asegurar su regreso a las próximas elecciones generales (The Way the World Is Going 83).<br /><br />Aún reconociendo las diferencias en su apoyo histórico, Wells cree que la división ideológica entre entre los Partidos Liberal y Laborista es insignificante comparada con la que existe entre ellos y los conservadores. Reflexionando sobre el primer gobierno de MacDonalds, por ejemplo, Wells señala: "Una vez alcanzado el poder, el gobierno laborista se ha mostrado snob, socialmente ignorante en vez de virtuoso y patéticamente ansioso de asegurar al mundo que no hay peligro en el 'Socialismo en nuestro tiempo'. Son liberales con corbatas rojas". (The Way the World Is Going 84-85). Los laboristas son liberales porque son demasiado tímidos para ser socialistas, mientras que los liberales han aprendido de la época eduardiana de pensadores tan capaces como Keynes que el 'laissez-faire'económico ya no es una propuesta práctica. Por otro lado:<br /><br /><fieldset>tanto un gobierno liberal como uno laborista lanzaría un programa educativo, controlaría el armamento, liberaría al mundo de esas aventuras contra Rusia y China, sostenida más o menos furtivamente por Gran Bretaña, rompería la asociación con Mussolini y mostraría un mayor apoyo a la libertad de expresión (The Way the World Is Going 86)</fieldset><br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Nota:</legend> los gobiernos de <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerra_civil_rusa#Consecuencias_del_tratado">Gran Bretaña y Francia</a> apoyaron al <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movimiento_Blanco">ejército Blanco</a> formado por zaristas, socialistas y anticomunistas en general, en su lucha contra el ejército rojo.</fieldset><br /><br />La única diferencia que Wells admite entre el Partido Liberal y el Laborista es que el primero gastaría menos en las áreas sociales y los segundos gastarían menos en las áreas militares. Así que, en conjunto, un gobierno mixto liberal- laborista "podría ser mejor que cualquiera de las partes, y los fallos podrían compensarse." (The Way the World Is Going 95-96).<br /><br />Habida cuenta de tales afinidades ideológicas, los dos partidos de centro izquierda podrían combinar sus fuerzas en un frente anti-conservador, y así podría extenderse en el tiempo el poder de la centro-izquierda, mientras que la desunión llevaría a los Conervadores al Gobierno. El examen welsiano de la situación produce dos estrategias relacionadas la una con la otra: una, para ser ejercitada por los partidarios de ambos partidos, y la otra para ser negociada por sus dirigentes. A nivel de base, Wells defiende "la formación de una serie de organizaciones políticas de base, junto a, pero independiente de los funcionarios locales de los partidos Liberal y Laborista, que se unirían en el voto anticonservador. Estas organizaciones crearían "un bloque de votantes que votarían en primer lugar contra el gobierno, y sólo secundariamente para cualquier partido, bien el Liberal, bien el Laborista". Esta táctica electoral conduciría a "un voto en cada circunscripción electoral para cualquiera de los dos partidos políticos que obtuviese la mayor votación en contra de los conservadores en las elecciones precedentes. independientemente de las puyas sin sentido que se lanzaran ambos partidos el uno contra el otro. Uno votará liberal aquí y otro laborista allí para no desperdiciar el voto." (The Way the World Is Going 87). Con la creación de un movimiento de base anti-conservador, Wells cree que los líderes de los partidos Laborista y Liberal se verían obligados a una negociación común para expulsar a los conservadores. Wells declara: "Como la mayoría de la gente en Gran Bretaña. deseo una coalición de los partidos Liberal y Laborista. Esta sencillamente sería nuestra salvación." (The Way the World Is Going 95-96).<br /><br />Un obstáculo a la creación de dicha coalición de centro izquierda, sin embargo, es el líder Ramsay MacDonald. Wells se encuentra frustrado porque: "El pobrecito Daily Herald, bajo su influencia, gasta la mayor parte de su munición contra los liberales," y que "gente como Macdonald están encima de sus locuras de partido" (The Way the World Is Going 95, 96). Esos sentimientos, combinado con un rendimiento mediocre de Macdonald como primer ministro, lleva a Wells a "buscar algún tipo de liderazgo más allá de la mera estrategia de partido en la lucha que se acerca" (The Way the World Is Going 96). Aunque reconoce que "Henderson, Thomas, Clynes son seguramente ministros en una coalición," Wells afirma que "Snowden ... es el hombre que mejor puede liderar el Imperio Británico, bajo un gobierno de coalición, de vuelta a la sanidad, seguridad y a la paz", ya que el "es el más respetado y el que tendría el mayor grado de confianza que ningún otro contemporáneo" (The Way the World Is Going 97).<br /><br />A pesar de los llamamientos de Wells, sin embargo, las elecciones generales de 1929 trajeron un gobierno minoritario laborista bajo la dirección de MacDonald. Este se negó a trabajar con el Partido liberal. Más aún, cuando la <a href="http://www.portalplanetasedna.com.ar/crisis29.htm">crisis financiera del 29</a> y la <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gran_Depresi%C3%B3n">Gran Depresión</a> alcanzó Gran Bretaña dos años más tarde, MacDonald se volvió hacia los conservadores para formar un nuevo gobierno. Actuando de esta manera, MacDonald condenó al Partido laborista a la oposición durante casi una década y abrió una brecha entre los pro y los anti liberales. Esa división marcó la importancia del Partido Laborista durante más de 40 años. La auto-destrucción laborista desilusionó a Wells, lo que le llevó a señalar en 1938 que:<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Cita:</legend>El Partido Laborista ... es ... una pesada carga .... Los partidos laboristas han fallado en convertirse en algo más que en partidos de los sindicatos y los sindicatos no son más que organizaciones defensivas de los trabajadores bajo un sistema de capitalismo privado. Sus tácticas son defensivas y obstructivas. Sus objetivos naturales son la reducción de la jornada laboral, una mayor remuneración y la defensa ante los despidos. Son incapaces de imaginar un mundo mejor. (World Brain 111)</fieldset><br /><br />Aunque continuó votando a los laboristas durante el resto de su vida, su fe en los partidos políticos, sacudida después de 1924, fue destruida en 1931, y declaró que 'final' es la palabra por lo que cualquier político laborista parece probable que haga en el camino a la reconstrucción creativa" (World Brain 112).<br /><br />Con el ataque de la Gran Depresión, las preocupaciones de Wells se centraron más que nunca en temas internacionales. En obras como La conspiración abierta,planos para una revolución militar (1928), El trabajo, la riqueza y la felicidad de la humanidad (1932) y El cerebro mundial (1938), Wells desarrolló la teoría del <span style="font-style: italic;">funcionalismo</span>. Wells era partidario de un gobierno mundial, la creación de una enciclopedia mundial y una red mundial educativa (como una internet para organizar la información). En 1933 fue elegido presidente del <a href="http://www.internationalpen.org.uk/">International PEN Club</a>, la organización de derechos humanos de los escritores, en nombre de la cual visitó la Unión Soviética en un esfuerzo fallido de establecer una rama de la organización en Rusia. En 1934, se inscribió en la Federación de Sociedades Progresistas y los Individuos, y escribió una introducción a su manifiesto en el que pidió "la producción colectiva", "un sistema mundial de dinero y crédito", "la organización de la paz mundial" y el fin de las fábricas privadas de armamento y "la modernización de la educación en todo el mundo", y la garantía de la libertad de expresión, de la libertad de prensa y el derecho a la libre circulación en todo el mundo." (Introduction 15-16). En 1936, se convirtió en el primer presidente de la Sección de Educación de la Asociación Británica, y se fue de viaje a Australia en 1939 en su representación. En el frente interno, firmó el manifiesto de "Los próximos cinco años", al que denominó "una reconstrucción coherentemente planeada de la vida económica de la nación, para el reajuste del orden social, para la preservación de un desarrolla imaginativo de la tierra que heredamos y un vigoroso efuerzo colectivo para fortalecer el sistema de paz colectivo" (Liberty and Democratic Leadership 309-310). Dentro y fuera de estas organizaciones, los esfuerzos de su presidente, Wells, se centraron en establecer la paz mundial y una mayor cooperación internacional.<br /><br />Durante los 1930, Wells insistió más y más en la necesidad de una revolución mundial; sin embargo, la suya debía ser una revolución en ideas y en la planificación, más que una revolución que derrocara violentamente de los régimenes existentes. Wells ya había identificado a la Unión Soviética como el punto crucial, aunque con fallos, durante su encuentro con Lenin en 1920, y continuó con su apoyo a Rusia durante la década de los 30, con algunas salvedades. En aquella década, sin embargo, Wells vió surgir el <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal">New Deal</a> en los EEUU, la aparición de la planificación estatal, tanto en la Unión Soviética, como en los EEUU, el resurgimiento de Rusia trás los desastres de la guerra civil, lo que le ofreció un atisbo de esperanza de que el mundo se encaminaba en la dirección de su deseada revolución mundial. Durante todo el período de entreguerras, Wells se mantuvo al tanto de la evolución de la Unión Soviética y continuó promocionando unas relaciones amistosas con ella. En un ensayo de 1927 reiteró, por ejemplo, que "el gobierno de Rusia es el único gobierno posible allí y ahora" y "la única esperanza de salvar las vastas áreas y recursos, tanto de la Rusia europea como de la asiática para la civilización reside en tomar el compromiso con ese gobierno y cooperar con su desarrollo" (The Way the World is Going 108). Al año siguiente, Wells comentó que "Stalin es evidentemente un comunista obcecado e intransigente dispuesto a detener cualquier cualquier movimiento hacia, bien el capitalismo, bien el cristianismo", al tiempo que expresó su disgusto por la expulsión, dispuesta por Stalin, "el más capacitado salvador de la República Soviética, Trotsky" (Outline of History [1930] 1125). A pesar de su preocupación por el desplazamiento de Stalin hacia un gobierno cada vez más personalista, Wells fue un entusiasmado defensor del <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Quinquenal_%28URSS%29">Plan Quinquenal</a>, explicando que:<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Cita:</legend>Toda la Unión Soviética está en medio de un gran experimento, el más amplio y extraordinario intento de reconstruir la vida económica como nunca se ha intentado... Dentro de cinco años, si el Plan tiene éxito, Rusia se transformará en un país de grandes latifundios dirigidas por el gobierno del pueblo... La Unión Soviética se va a convertir en una enorme organización productora cuyas tierras trabajarán para el beneficio común. (Outline of History [1930] 1125)</fieldset><br /><br />El entusiasmo de Wells por el Plan Quiquenal, sin embargo, fue atemperado por dos temores. En primer lugar, se temía que Rusia podría estar avanzando con demasiada rapidez, ya que "con las intituciones políticas provisionales, sin siquiera el esqueleto de una administración pública eficiente, sin libertad de crítica, con la utilización de los métodos terroristas más sangrientos y crueles, Rusia ha intentado crear una organización económica de más de cien millones de personas" (The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Manhind 505-506). Segundo, para que Rusia tenga éxito, Wells insistió en que las reformas socio-políticas han de ser introducidas a la par que las económicas: "Se requiere una amplia educación, una atmósfera libre, intelectual, y toda una clase social, no sólo de técnicos, sino también de hombres capaces con ideas comunes y un sentido común de la responsabilidad. Un autócrata con un ego exagerado, con un partido disciplinado hasta la muerte, una oficina de prensa y una policía secreta no son sustitutos de lo anterior." (After Democracy 188).<br /><br />Esta falta de libertad intelectual continuó dejando perplejo a Wells duranta la década de los 30 y la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Wells consideró que, bajo Stalin, "El país está todavía viviendo bajo el impulso mental de Lenin y el socialismo democrático del siglo XIX" (The Fate of Homo Sapiens 263), y que es la inercia de las doctrinas de Lenin lo que ha llevado al país a través de los esfuerzos supremos del Plan Quinquenal" (The New America 18). Al tiempo que expresaba el gusto personal por Stalin, Wells afirmo que:<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Cita:</legend>Me han desilusionado principalmente las películas tontas de propaganda electoral, como por ejemplo, Lenin en Octubre. Allí Trotsky es menospreciado y Stalin es el héroe sabio de la historia. Stalin se plantó encima de Lenin. Modesta pero firmemente, Stalin señala los puntos estratégicos en el mapa y señala que hacer. Al parecer, Stalin está tratando de distorsionar la historia entera de la revolución para su glorificación personal. (The Fate of Homo Sapiens 263)</fieldset><br /><br />En 1935, Wells pensó que "En ningún sentido se puede decir que Rusia es ahora un país revolucionario: se ha convertido en una país dogmático" (The New America 18), y en 1941, con el prestigio de Stalin en su cima a causa de su intervención en la Segunda Guerra Mundial, Wells escribió: "Me temo que Stalin ha desempeñado su papel en el mundo" (Guide to the New Worm 131). A pesar de estas preocupaciones, Wells continuó viendo a Rusia como un modelo global". Sostuvo que: "Hacia el final de su gobierno, buscó con tanta pasión, a toda prisa, con amargura y con torpeza, que el orden económico mundial se desplaze despacio pero seguro" y que "defiende la bandera desgarrada de la colectividad y el mundo sigue siendo algo espléndido y lleno de esperanza" (The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind 505-506, 507).<br /><br />Simultáneamente con su interés en el Plan Quinquenal estaliniano, Wells se muestra cada vez más interesado en el desarrollo de los EEUU. Wells creía que la economía mundial estaba fuera de control y que la humanidad se encuentra ante el problema de distribuir la enorme riqueza que es capaz de generar (The New America 9). En el mundo había un triple problema: "el problema político generado por la guerra, el desempleo y el problema monetario-financiero" (New America 32, 13). En Rusia, el Plan Quinquenal estaba intentado reconstruir la economía". En EEUU, Wells pensó que el New Deal estaba intentado hacer lo mismo. Aunque Wells apoyó el New Deal, no fue totalmente acrítico. Estaba entusiasmado en los masivos programas de empleo público, especialemente con el <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority">Tennessee Valley Authority</a> y otros proyectos similares en todo el país, pero pensó que el gobierno estadounidense no estaba siendo suficientemente audaz en la toma de control de empresas privadas. Así comentó sobre el Federal Emergency Relief Administration (Programa Federal de Socorro de Emergencia) dirigido por Harry Hopkins*, que es:<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>cita textual:</legend>un intento a medias de crear una especie de embrión de un estado socialista... Mr. Hoprkins está... poniendo los desempleados para hacer cosas, muebles, artículos de algodón, jabones, zapatos, enlatados, etc, para ellos mismos y para promocionar el trueque entre ellos (70-71).</fieldset><br /><br /><fieldset><legend>NOTA:</legend>*Tras asumir como presidente, Roosvelt encarga a Hopkins la dirección del Federal Emergency Relief Administration (Programa Federal de Socorro de Emergencia). Convencido de que el trabajo es el antídoto contra la pobreza [en realidad esto no es cierto, ya que se puede cobrar un sueldo inferior al ingreso mínimo para salir de al pobreza], Hopkins proporcionó trabajos patrocinados por el Estado en obras públicas, y también un programa asistencial para paliar la pobreza. En 7 años creó 8,5 millones de puestos de trabajo.</fieldset><br /><br />Wells visitó los Estados Unidos roosveltianos en cuatro ocasiones (1934, 1935, 1937, and 1940), y fue testigo de los altibajos de la recuperación económica. A pesar de los reveses del Congreso y una significativa oposición a las políticas roosveltianas, Wells pensaba que "El New Deal implica tal control colectivo de los negocios nacionales que sería absurdo llamar a esto cualquier cosa excepto socialismo" (The Fate of Homo Sapiens 273), especialmente "Si los beneficios especulativos tienen que ser eliminados y la regulación de precios tiene que continuar" (The New America 75-76). A lo largo de la década de los 30 del siglo pasado , "tanto Roosvelt como Stalin estaban intentando crear un Estado socialista moderno, gigantesco y científicamente organizado." (The New America 275), y este sentimiento le llevó a creer que un eje Moscú-Washington lanzaría al mundo fuera de la depresión económica y la guerra. Durante su visita a Rusia en 1934, Wells intentó persuadir a Stalin de que este eje debería ser creado:<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Cita:</legend>A mi me parece que está teniendo lugar en los EEUU una profunda reorganización, la creación de una economía planificada socialista. Usted y Roosvelt, empiezan desde diferentes puntos de partida. ¿Pero no hay ninguna relación en ideas, un parentesco en ideas y necesidades entre Washington y Moscú? (Stalin and Wells 4).</fieldset><br /><br />Stalin negó el parentesco. Él argumentó que el objetivo de Roosvelt era salvar el capitalismo, y el de Stalin era crear un Estado socialista. Wells, sin embargo, discutió ese argumento por dos motivos: primero, argumentando que "Si empezamos con el control estatal de los bancos y después sigue el control de la industria pesada, de la industria en general, del comercio, etc., este control que abarca a los principales sectores de la economía, es equivalente a la propiedad estatal de todas las ramas de la economía nacional. Este será el proceso de socialización"; segundo, al afirmar que "Me parece que, en lugar de poner el acento el antagonismo entre los dos mundos, deberíamos, en las presentes circunstancias, esforzarnos en establecer una lengua común para todas las fuerzas constructivas" (Stalin and Wells 7, 5-6). Sin embargo, el gradualismo de Wells no dejó ninguna huella, y aunque finalizó la entrevista señalando que "En la actualidad, sólo hay en el mundo dos personas cuyas opiniones escuchan millones de personas, usted y Roosvelt", estaba claro que la iniciativa ruso-estadounidense para terminar con la depresión mundial no estaba en la agenda. (Stalin and Wells 18). De hecho, en 1940 Wells pensó que Rusia se ha convertido "en un imperialismo nacionalista" (The Rights of Man 105).<br /><br />Con el crecimiento de los nacionalismos agresivos, de un lado, y el aislacionismo internacional por el otro, Wells pensó que el mundo iba encaminado hacia otra guerra mundial. Cuando la Segunda Guerra Mundial estalló, no optó por amargas recriminaciones, sino que inmediatamente lanzó una nueva campaña por unos Derechos Humanos Universales. Incluso antes de que la 2ª Guerra Mundial estallase, en su libro The Fate of Homo Sapiens, Wells había expresado su preocupación por las rupturas con la democracia, tanto a nivel mundial como en Gran Bretaña. Con el endurecimiento ds los Air Raid Precautions (ARP) a lo largo de 1939, Wells se mostró preocupado por su impacto sobre los derechos civiles, y aunque fue un defensor de la ARP, pidió garantías de que cualquier sacrificio de los derechos debía ser compensado por una mayor transparencia gubernamental y una mayor particiapción popular en la toma de decisiones. Estas garantías se hicieron cruciales con el establecimiento de una "tregua electoral" en septiembre de 1939 y la Prolongación de la Ley del Parlamento de 1940, un ley que efectivamente pospuso las elecciones generales hasta que terminase la contienda en Europa.<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>NOTA:</legend>La Air Raid Precautions (ARP) fue una organización británica creada en 1924 para proteger a los civiles durante los bombardeos aéreos de ciudades. Las actividades de esta organización se incrementaron notablemente tras el bombardeo de Guernica de 1937 y, especialmente, desde pricipios de 1939, cuando el fantasma de la próxima Gran Guerra se avecinaba. Era responsable del reparto de máscaras antigás, de los refugios antiaéreos, de dar la alarma, del mantenimiento del apagón de luz durante los bombardeos y del rescate de las personas atrapadas en los edificios destruidos. </fieldset><br /><br />En The Fate of Homo Sapiens (EL destino del Homo Sapiens) Wells empezó su defensa de la democracia en términos liberales y convencionales al declarar que "la democracia significa la subordinación del Estado a los fines y el bienestar común", y que "una comunidad moderna democrática frustraría su propia declaración de objetivos sin un marco legal completo y detallado impuesto por un poder judicial y una policía actuando estrictamente en virtud de la ley" (The Fate of Homo Sapiens 56, 58). También afirma que "el consentimiento de los gobernados en una democracia... debe ser un consentimiento contínuo. Este consentimiento debe ser sujeto de una continua revisión y renovación" (The Fate of Homo Sapiens 59, 64). Sin embargo, a esta postura liberal-internacionalista Wells añadió dos aspectos más radicales a su definición de democracia. Primero, afirmó que "la democracia es socialismo. Wells encara todo abuso de la propiedad; en segundo lugar, sostiene que "la libertad y la igualdad están incompletas sin el libre acceso al conocimiento y el debate libre y abierto. (The Fate of Homo Sapiens 64, 66, 67). Aunque sus " Derechos Humanos Universales" no aparecerán hasta un mes más tarde después de la publicación de El Destino del Homo sapiens (con la declaración de guerra contra Alemania ocurriendo en el intervalo), es evidente que incluso en tiempos de paz, los derechos humanos preocupan y ocupan el pensamiento de H. G. Wells.<br /><br />Wells formalmente lanzó su campaña por su "Derechos Humanos Universales" en una serie de tres cartas a The Times entre el 26 de septiembre y el 25 de octubre de 1939. En la primera, acoge con satisfacción el debate sobre la guerra al declarar que le "recuerda la controversia sobre los objetivos de la guerra de 1917-18" (Correspondence 4: 235). Wells descarta la Liga de Naciones como un resultado pobre e ineficaz, elogia el espíritu (aunque no los logros) de la Revolución Bolchevique y la nobleza fundamental de la concepción del sistema de justicia social y de un mundo en paz, del cual el incentivo para el beneficio privado debe ser eliminado" (Correspondence 236). Él tiene esperanza de que el dabate sobre ocurrirá en "un ambiente de franqueza y tolerancia mutua, en una discusión abierta sobre la traición a la patria y la revolución." (Correspondence 237). En su segunda carta, datada el 30 de septiembre de 1939, Wells se defiende de los cargos lanzados por una editorial de The Times de ser materialista ("The End and the Means"). Se reafirma en la necesidad de "un pensamiento honesto, franco y tolerante" así como "evitar la 'solución' de 1918-20" (Correspondence 4: 238). Entusiasmado por el considerable número de comentarios a sus dos cartas anteriores... tanto de EEUU como de cualquier otra parte del mundo de gente muy capacitada, Wells envia una tercera carta a The Times en la que, en resumen, presenta una declaración a prueba de los Derechos Universales del Hombre (Correspondence 242).<br /><br />La propuesta de Wells por una nueva carta de derechos humanos recibió el apoyo inmediato y continuo de gente procedentes de todo el mundo, y también sugerencias para revisarlas. El Daily Heral publicó el documento inicial de Wells sobre los Derechos Humanos, y abrió sus páginas a un debate público general. Se estableció un comité, formado por 10 personas para refinar el documento a la luz de la opinión pública internacional (Correspondence 42 a 44). Entre 1939 y 1944, Wells reimprimió su documento sobre los derechos en nueve de sus libros y panfletos y aparecieron traducidos a docenas de idiomas en periódicos de todo el mundo. Una distribución en alemán fue distribuida por la Royal Air Force durante la ocupación europea durante sus <span style="font-style: italic;">raids</span> aéreos. Aunque los "Derechos Humanos Universales" fue, de acuerdo con Geoffrey Robertson (Correspondence 20-23) y Francesca Klug (Correspondence 89-91), un documento histórico puntual, gran parte de su contenido hace hincapié en derechos que ya existían antes en otros documentos, como la <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta">English Magna Carta</a> (1215), el <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights">American Bill of Rights</a> (1789) y la <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_Man_and_of_the_Citizen">Declaración Francesa de Derechos del Hombre</a> (1789) (The New World Order 138). Así, el documento de Wells afirmó el documento a la vida, a la propiedad privada, a la libertad personal, a la libertad de movimiento, de pensamiento, de debate y de culto. En consonancia con estos sentimientos contemporáneos, también se incluyó la protección a los menores de edad.<br /><br />El documento de Wells sobre los derechos fue una ampliación a nivel universal de los principios liberales que habían entrado en el pensamiento occidental durante la <a href="http://www.monografias.com/trabajos12/lailustr/lailustr.shtml">Ilustración</a>. Sin embargo, mediante el examen cuidadoso de la redacción del documento, también está claro que Wells no sólo busca la libertad individual, sino también la introducción de regulaciones económicas y sociales y el respeto por los derechos de un organismo internacional que transformaría el mundo en una confederación de estados colectivistas supervisados por una autoridad mundial. Entrando al nivel concreto de la regulación de estos derechos, Wells afirma en la claúsula cuarta "El derecho a ganar dinero" que: "la compra, tenencia y venta de bienes y servicios sin un servicio a la comunidad no es legal, es especulación", mientras que en la claúsula tercera "Derechos y Libertades" afirma que "nadie será forzado a trabajar, pero la comunidad debe encontrarle un trabajo apropiado cuando lo pida. Este es su derecho. En la claúsula siete, "El Derecho al Conocimiento" afirma: "El Hombre tiene el derecho a la enseñanza, la información y a obtener las noticias necesarias para hacer el uso efectivo de estos derechos" (The New World Order 42 a 44, 46 y 47). Estas tres claúsulas demuestran que la visión de Wells sobre <span style="font-style: italic;">sus</span> derechos humanos trata de introducir una mayor ética en el capitalismo y en insistir en las responsabilidades del Estado en proporcionar trabajo y una educación significativa para todos los ciudadnos. Wells va un poco más lejos al afirmar al final de su documento que los Derechos Universales del Hombre "son propios de su naturaleza y no pueden ser cambiados" y que "los gobernantes, rajás, gobiernos y directores no son más que servidores de estos derechos" y que "están obligados por la presente ley" (The New World Order 47, 48). Al colocar a estos derechos por encima de los gobiernos y al universalizarlos, Wells trata de responzabilizar legalmente a los gobiernos de sus acciones, y por lo tanto, de crear un marco en él que las relaciones internacionales puedan operar sin acudir al recurso de las guerras mundiales. Los conflictos entre países se pueden resolver mediante acciones legales preventivas, al tiempo que se toman medidas de fuerza armada para respaldarlas, el enjuiciamiento de los líderes nacionales por un tribunal internacional o las guerras localizadas por una agencia internacional.<br /><br />Aunque el documento de Wells "Los Derechos Universales del Hombre" parece un punto de partida radical alejado del gradualismo de las décadas anteriores, de hecho, simplemente lo confirma. Para Wells, sin embargo, su documento era una simple evolución de los derechos humanos establecidos en la Carta Magna británica ya que "en un país democrático y parlamentario, la centralización y la ampliación del poder estatal es una reafirmación clara y vigorosa de los derechos individuales del hombre" (The Common Sense of War and Peace 83). Los principios reformistas de Wells, sin embargo, no cambiaron, aunque su gradualismo fue necesariamente acelerado por el ritmo de los acontecimientos. Con el estallido de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, Wells se convenció de que la humanidad estaba a riesgo del exterminio si el ciclo de guerras mundiales no era detenido, y por ello, en 1941 declaró que: "Cualquier guerra ahora es una guerra civil... La unidad común bajo una ley común es ahora la única alternativa al caos" (Guide to the New World 66). Si bien la creación de un Estado Mundial había sido había sido un deseo de Wells tan temprano como 1901, en la década de los 40, Wells sentía que Cosmópolis no era más una decisión política, sino algo inevitable, dado el rápido avance de la tecnología y el enorme poder productivo en el mundo, que debía ser regulado y controlado por:<br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Cita:</legend>la exitosa organización del más universal y penetrante colectivismo que ahora se nos impone a todos, se verá frustrado en su aspecto más importante a menos que su organización sea acompañada por una nueva Declaración de los Derechos del Hombre, que debe, por la creciente complejidad de la estructura social, ser más generosa, detallada y explícita que ninguna de sus predecesoras. Esta Declaración debe convertirse en la ley fundamental común a todas las comunidades y colectividades unidas bajo la Paz Mundial (The New World Order 138)</fieldset><br /><br />Para salvar a la humanidad de la destrucción y llevar la guerra a una conclusión más rápida, Wells afirmó que "el debate actual de los 'Objetivos de la Guerra' debían ser sustituidos por la propaganda de esa nueva Declaración de los Derechos del Hombre" (The Rights of Man 168).<br /><br />La propagación de "los Derechos Universales del Hombre" fue la principal preocupación de Wells duranre la Segunda Guerra Mundial, y vio los derechos humanos como un aspecto de la reconstrucción mundial tras la guerra. Tan pronto como en 1940, Wells insistió en "un acuerdo basado en las tres ideas del socialismo, el derecho y el conocimiento" como "la única manera de escapar de la profundización de los desastres" (The New World Order 147). Además, insistió en que la solución sea global, porque él creía que la "soberanía de los estados, que empezó en las comunidades prehistóricas, ha terminado, y este presente caos es su caída" (Phoenix 13), ya que "estos gobiernos soberanos no nos ha dado nada más que guerras inconclusas a una escala cada vez mayor" (The Rights of Man 103). En lugar de estados-naciones soberanos, Wells deseaba "una federación unificada para anular la actual fragmentación peligrosa en la dirección de los asuntos humanos". Las competencias para ser ejercidas por esta federación mundial deberían ser "la limitación y superación de:<br /><br /><ul><li>(1) la soberanía política</li><li>(2) la propiedad privada y la dirección de la organización económica general de la humanidad</li><li> (3) la relación amo-súbdito por una ley fundamental igualitaria en todo el mundo" (Phoenix 60-61).</li></ul>Wells no preveía la creación de un parlamento mundial, sino que cree que muchas de las tareas expuestas correspondientes a una federación mundial debían ser realizadas por agencias funcionales a través de "un sistema mundial de autoridades federales de cooperación con las facultades delegadas por los gobiernos actuales" (Phoenix 181-182). Entre estas autoridades se incluye "una comisión de desarme, una comisión de reparaciones, una comisión internacional para el reasentamientode las poblaciones desplazadas, una de transporte, otra para la restauración de la producción, del comercio y el dinero y otra sobre sanidad, educación e información (The Common Sense of War and Peace 58, 94). De hecho, en el mundo postbélico, la comisión de educación será crucial, ya que "la reconstrucción del mundo implica nada menos que la reducación de todo el mundo" (Phoenix 75).<br /><br />Durante el transcurso de la guerra, Wells vio las bases de su mundo de estados federados emergiendo de las actividades de las potencias aliadas, primero en la "junta interaliada franco-británica para el suministro, transporte y otros asuntos económicos" entre 1939 y 1940, y más tarde, tras la entrada de los EEUU en la guerra y la caída de Francia en poder nazi, en la subsiguiente cooperación britano-estadounidense (Hancock and Gowing 180). Wells creía que los internacionalistas como él debían propugnar que estos organismos de cooperación militar se convirtieran en organismos internacionales, como parte de un acuerdo de paz permanente". A lo largo de la guerra, y especialmente con la entrada de la Unión Soviética y los Estados Unidos en el conflicto, el entusiasmo de Wells por una potencial federación mundial aumnentó, hasta tal punto que en sus últimos escritos se mostró a favor de que dicha federación controlara casi todos los aspectos de la vida. En 1942 declaró que "una Reconstrucción Revolucionaria del mundo incluye la abolición de la propiedad privada excepto en algunas cosas personales e íntimas"; y pensó que cualquier cosa que el gobierno federal mundial pueda hacer, debe ser hecha por el mismo, sin dividirla entre particularismos regionales y así sucesivamente, hasta la unidad política más pequeña" (Phoenix 62, 110).<br /><br />Aunque Wells continuó publicando hasta el último año de su vida, la salud de Wells se deterioró rápidamente desde 1942 en adelante. Su último libro, Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945), sugiere una desesperación final acerca de la humanidad.<br /><br /><fieldset><legend><a href="http://phinnweb.blogspot.com/2005/03/mind-at-end-of-its-tether.html">Fuente</a>:</legend>El último libro de Wells, Mind At The End of Its Tether (1945) [La mente al límite] expresó el pesimismo del escritor de ciencia ficción acerca de las perspectivas de futuro de la humanidad, después de haber sido testigo de dos guerras mundiales y el lanzamiento de las bombas atómicas sobre Hiroshima y Nagasaki. En la opinión de Wells:<br /><br /><br /><fieldset><legend>Cita:</legend>El Homo Sapiens, en su forma actual, está agotado. Las estrellas, en su curso, se han vuelto contra él, y él tiene que dejar sitio a algún otro animal mejor adapatado para enfrentar el destino que se cierra más rápidamente sobre la humanidad... La pantalla del cine nos mira a la cara... Nuestros amores, nuestros odios, nuestras guerras y batallas no son más que danzas fantasmagóricas ocultos por una tela, tan insustanciales como un sueño... No hay ninguna vía de escape en el callejón sin salida. Es la oscura Edad Media que vuelve otra vez.</fieldset><br /><br />Desde 1945, otros pensadores importantes han repetido las ideas de Wells, e incluso han superado su pesimismo. H. G. Wells representó la tradición que empezó con la Ilustración de la creencia de que la ciencia demolería la superstición (incluso la religión tradicional) y solucionaría todos los problemas de la humanidad, y finalmente traería para siempre "el Reino de los Cielos en la Tierra". Sin embargo, algo salió muy mal con este sueño. La Ciencia y el pensamiento racional demostraron que no son omnipotentes. Algo faltaba en esta ecuación.</fieldset><br /><br />Al año siguiente y justo un mes antes de morir, se animó a publicar un artículo titulado "That Mosley Money!"en el The Socialist and New Leader en el que demandó al rey Jorge VI a abdicar por sus relaciones con el lider fascista británico <span style="font-style: italic;">Sir Oswald Mosley</span>* de la British Union of Fascists (BUF). El 13 de agosto de 1946 Wells murió. Sus restos fueron cremados en Golders Green, London, 3 días después de su muerte. Después del servicio, sus cenizas fueron esparcidas desde un avión por Solent por sus hijos Anthony West y G. P. Wells.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">*un personaje de la novela The Holy Terror (1939) de H. G. Wells es un garndilocuente fascista británico con antecedentes arsitocráticos y muy similar a Sir Oswald Mosley.</span><br /><br />H. G. Wells fue un escritor prolífico, un educador y un hombre de estado mundial. Él fue socialista y cosmopolita. Mientas que su legado es múltiple, en tres áreas es especialmente significativas:<br /><br />En primer lugar, Wells fue responsable de ampliar el socialismo en áreas más allá de las cuestiones económicas, como la liberación de la mujer y la reforma educativa, y de hacer de ello una ideología global. Como William J. Hyde observó una década después de la muerte de Wells: "Desde su programa inicial y confuso para la Sociedad Fabiana hasta su último trabajo, su vida fue una larga promoción de la idea socialista. Margaret Cole dijo de él justo dos años después de su muerte: "La vida de H. G. isnpiró a miles de jovenes y les inoculó con la fe de que la libertad con la democracia y el socialismo pueden ser realizados en nuestro tiempo.... Él fue la levadura, la levadura humana, que previno, y todavía previene, nuestro movimiento de convertirse en una organización sin alma.<br /><br />En segundo lugar, Wells colocó los derechos humanos universales en la agenda política. Su defensa influenció el logro de la Declaración Universal de los Derechos Humanos de 1948, y los derechos humanos siguen siendo hoy un asunto central en los asuntos humanos.<br /><br />En tercer lugar, Wells aseveró que el nacionalismo y la independencia del Estado-nación ya no eran sostenibles. Él creó el clima de opinión en el período de entreguerras que hizo el establecimiento de organismo internacionales como las Naciones Unidas, pero especialmente la Unión Europea y sus precursores, y aumentó sus posibilidades en los años posteriorees a la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Como W. Warren Wagar señaló en 1961, "Ciertamente mucho más que cualquier otro hombre, él fue el instrumento para la creación del clima de opinión en el cual los gobiernos se apoyaron en Europa occidental" (H. G. Wells and the World State 274). Volviendo a la influencia de Wells en este punto, Wagar añadió: "Él nunca vaciló en su compromiso con un estado mundial y yo lo considero como una de las mentes más importantes en este campo en el siglo XX, y uno de los pocos cuya visión del mundo se mantiene fresca" (H. G. Wells: Traversing Time 277).<br /><br />A pesar de los numerosos cambios que han ocurrido desde la muerte de Wells, estos tres temas- el socialismo cotidiano, la protección de los derechos humanos y el movimiento por una mayor integración transnacional- siguen siendo importantes en su forma moderna, y el papel de Wells en la colocación de estos temas en la agenda internacional de una importancia duradera, The Ultimate Revolution (1933). Perhaps Wells himself, in his "auto-obituary" published in 1943, most accurately gauged his own significance when he called himself "a reef-building coral polyp," and stated that "Scarcely anything remains of him now, and yet, without him and his like, the reef of common ideas on which our civilisation stands today could never have arisen" ("My Auto-Obituary" 119).<br /><br />Works Cited<br />Bennett, Arnold. "Book of the Week: Wells and his 'New Worlds'." New Age 2.20 (March 14, 1908): 391.<br />Brewster, Frank. "A Socialist Party." Letter to the Editor. New Age 1.8 (June 20, 1907): 127.<br />Chesterton, Cecil "The Need for a Socialist Party." New Age 1.8 (June 20, 1907): 121-122.<br />Cole, Margaret. Makers of the Labour Movement. London: Longmans, Green, 1948.<br />"The End and the Means." The Times (London) September 26, 1939: 9.<br />Engels, Friedrich. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. London: Bookmarks, 1993.<br />Hancock, W. K., and M. M. Gowing. British War Economy. London: His Majesty's Stationary Office, 1949.<br />Herbert, Sydney. Letter to the Editor. New Age 3.1 (May 2, 1908): 19.<br />Hobson, S. G. "Is a Political Socialist Party Necessary? The Gospel of Superimposition: A Political Socialist's Rejoinder to Mr Wells." New Age 1.11 (July 11, 1907): 169-170.<br />Hyde, William. J. "The Socialism of H. G. Wells in the Early Twentieth Century." Journal of the History of Ideas 17.2 (Apr. 1956): 217-234.<br />James, William. The Moral Equivalent of War. New York: American Association for International Conciliation, 1910.<br />Keynes, J. M. A Tract on Monetary Reform. London: Macmillan, 1923.<br />Kirkman, F. B. "The Socialist Party." Letter to the Editor. New Age 1.13 (July 25, 1907): 207.<br />Klug, Francesca. Values for a Godless Age: The Story of the United Kingdom's New Bill of Rights. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Eng.: Penguin, 2000.<br />Liberty and Democratic Leadership. The Next Five Years: An Essay in Political Agreement. London: Macmillan, 1935.<br />MacKenzie, Norman, and Jeanne MacKenzie. The First Fabians. London: Quartet, 1979.<br />Morel, E. D. The African Problem and the Peace Settlement. London: Union of Democratic Control, 1917.<br />"Mr H. G. Wells on Socialism." Science Schools Journal 18 (1889): 152-155.<br />"Normal School of Science and Royal School of Mines Debating Society." Science Schools Journal 1 (1886): 23-25.<br />Norman, C. H. "Mr Wells and North-West Manchester." Letter to the Editor. New Age 3.3 (May 16, 1908): 58.<br />"Notes of the Week." New Age 2.6 (Apr. 25, 1908): 501-503.<br />Partington, John S. "The Death of the Static: H. G. Wells and the Kinetic Utopia." Utopian Studies 11.2 (2000): 96-111.<br />--. "H. G. Wells's Eugenic Thinking of the 1930s and 1940s." Utopian Studies 14:1 (2003): 74-81.<br />Pease, Edward R. The History of the Fabian Society. Third ed. London: Cass, 1963. Powell, David. What's Left? Labour Britain and the Socialist Tradition. London: Owen, 1998.<br />"Revolution or Evolution." New Age 3.1 (May 2, 1908): 5.<br />Robertson, Geoffrey. Crimes against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Eng.: Lane/Penguin, 1999.<br />Russell, Bertrand. Portraits from Memory and Other Essays. London: Readers Union / Allen & Unwin, 1958.<br />Sharp, Clifford. "Is a Political Socialist Party Necessary? A Plea for Inactivity." New Age 1.12 (July 18, 1907): 185-186.<br />--. Review of New Worlds for Oldby H. G. Wells. New Age 2.21 (Mar. 21, 1908): 412-413.<br />Shaw, G. Bernard, ed. Fabian Essays in Socialism. London: Scott, 1889.<br />"A Socialist Party." NewAge 1.7 (June 13, 1907): 104.<br />Stalin, Joseph, and H. G. Wells. Stalin--Wells Talk: The Verbatim Record and a Discussion. London: New Statesman and Nation, 1934.<br />Sturt, George. "A Defence of Liberal Evolution." Letter to the Editor. New Age 3:4 (May 23, 1908): 78.<br />Wagar, W. Warren. H. G. Wells and the World State. 1961. New Haven: Yale UP, 1963.<br />--. H. G. Wells: Traversing Time. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2004.<br />Wells, H. G. After Democracy: Addresses and Papers on the Present World Situation. London: Watt, 1932.<br />--. Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought. Eighth ed. London: Chapman & Hall, 1902.<br />--. The Common Sense of War and Peace: World Revolution or War Unending. London: Penguin, 1940.<br />--. The Correspondence of H. G. Wells. Ed. David C. Smith. 4 vols. London: Picketing & Chatto, 1998.<br />--. The Elements of Reconstruction: A Series of Articles Contributed in July and August 1916 to The Times. London: Nisbet, 1917.<br />--. An Englishman Looks at the World." Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters. London: Cassell, 1914.<br />--. "Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims." By Francis Galton. American Journal of Sociology 10.1 (July 1904): 10-11.<br />. Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866). 2 vols. London: Gollancz / Cresset, 1934.<br />--. The Fate of Homo Sapiens: An Unemotional Statement of the Things That Are Happening to Him Now, and of the Immediate Possibilities Confronting Him. London: Secker & Warburg, 1939.<br />--. "Faults of the Fabian." Feb. 9, 1906. The Edwardian Turn of Mind. By<br />Samuel Hynes. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1968. 390-409.<br />--. '42 to '44." A Contemporary Memoir upon Human Behaviour during the Crisis of the World Revolution. London: Secker & Warburg, 1944.<br />--. Guide to the New World: A Handbook of Constructive World Revolution. London: Gollancz, 1941.<br />--. In the Days of the Comet. London: Macmillan, 1906.<br />--. In the Fourth Year: Anticipations of a World Peace. London: Chatto & Windus, 1918.<br />--Introduction: "There Should be a Common Creed for Left Parties Throughout All the World." Manifesto: Being the Book of the Federation of Progressive Societies andlndividuals. Ed. C. E. M. Joad. London: Mien & Unwin, 1934. 12-19.<br />--. The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance. London: Pearson, 1897.<br />--. The Island of Doctor Moreau. London: Heinemann, 1896.<br />--. The Labour Ideal of Education. London: Craig, 1923.<br />--. Mankind in the Making. London: Chapman & Hall, 1903.<br />--. Mind at the End of Its Tether. London: Heinemann, 1945.<br />--. A Modern Utopia. London: Chapman & Hall, 1905.<br />--. "My Auto-Obituary." Strand 104a (Jan. 1943). H. G. Wells: Interviews and Recollections. Ed. J. R. Hammond. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1980. 117-119.<br />--. The New America: The New World. London: Cresset, 1935.<br />--. The New Machiavelli. London: Lane, 1911.<br />--. 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. London: Secker & Warburg, 1940.<br />--. New Worlds for Old. London: Constable, 1908.<br />--. New Worlds for Old." A Plain Account of Modern Socialism. Pop. ed. London: Constable, 1909.<br />--. New Worlds for Old." A Plain Account of Modern Socialism. Rev. ed. Lon don: Constable, 1914.<br />--. "A Note on Methods of Controversy." Letter to the Editor. New Age 1.9 (June 27, 1907): 143.<br />--. The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints far a World Revolution. London: Gollancz, 1928.<br />--. The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind. 2 vols. London: Newnes, 1920.<br />--. The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind. Pop. ed. London: Cassell, 1930.<br />--. Phoenix: A Summary of the Inescapable Conditions of World Reorganisation. London: Secker & Warburg, 1942.<br />--. "The Rediscovery of the Unique." Fortnightly Review 50 (July 1891): 106-111.<br />--. The Rights of Man, or What Are We Fighting far? London: Penguin, 1940.<br />--. Russia in the Shadows. New York: Doran, 1921.<br />--. The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Revolution. London: Hutchinson, 1933.<br />--. Socialism and the Family. London: Fifield, 1906.<br />--. Socialism and the Scientific Motive. London: Co-operative Printing Society, 1923.<br />--. "The Socialist Movement and Socialist Parties." New Age 1.7 (June 13, 1907): 105-106.<br />--. "That Mosley Money!" Socialist and New Leader July 6, 1946: 7.<br />--. This Misery of Boots. London: Independent Labour Party, 1925.<br />--. The Time Machine: An Invention. London: Heinemann, 1895.<br />--. A Walk along the Thames Embankment. London: Independent Labour Party, 1923.<br />--. War and the Future: Italy, France and Britain at War. London: Cassell, 1917.<br />--. The War in the Air, and Particularly How Mr Bert Smallways Fared While It Lasted. London: Bell, 1908.<br />--. The War of the Worlds. London: Heinemann, 1898.<br />--. The War That Will End War. New York: Duffield, 1914.<br />--. The Way the World Is Going: Guesses & Forecasts of the Years Ahead. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1929.<br />--. Wells' Social Anticipations. Ed. Harry W. Laidler. New York: Vanguard, 1927.<br />--. What is Coming? A Forecast of Things After the War. London: Cassell, 1916.<br />--. When the Sleeper Wakes: A Story of the Years to Come. London: Harper, 1899.<br />--. The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind. London: Heinemann, 1932.<br />--. World Brain. London: Methuen, 1938.<br />--. The World, Its Debts, and the Rich Man. London: Finer, 1922.<br />--. The World Set Free: A Story of Mankind. London: Macmillan, 1914.<br />--. A Year of Prophesying. London: Fisher Unwin, 1924.<br />Wild, J. "A Socialist Party." Letter to the Editor. New Age 1.12 (July 18, 1907): 191.<br />--. http://phinnweb.blogspot.com/2005/03/mind-at-end-of-its-tether.html<br /><br />COPYRIGHT 2008 Society for Utopian Studies<br />COPYRIGHT 2009 Gale, Cengage Learning<br /><br />-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-<br /><br />http://books.google.com.ar/books?id=HExGaHDhVbUC&pg=PA147&lpg=PA147&dq=Wells+%22War+That+Will+End+War%22&source=bl&ots=AWwRrxUUrg&sig=LdsFSU7OrJAUPjndw41J7LhXctU&hl=es&ei=sH6-SurhL4_g8Qa62PikAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5#v=onepage&q=Wells%20%22War%20That%20Will%20End%20War%22&f=false<br /><a href="http://books.google.com.ar/books?id=HExGaHDhVbUC&pg=PA147&lpg=PA147&dq=Wells+%22War+That+Will+End+War%22&source=bl&ots=AWwRrxUUrg&sig=LdsFSU7OrJAUPjndw41J7LhXctU&hl=es&ei=sH6-SurhL4_g8Qa62PikAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5#v=onepage&q=Wells%20%22War%20That%20Will%20End%20War%22&f=false">Enlace</a>.<br /><br />Traversing Time por W. Warren Wagar.<br /><br />"Speaking to the Residencia des Estudiantes in Madrid in May 1932, Wells began his address with a few personal remarks about the impact of thje World War First: "I am one of those who were violently roused by the Great War. I feel that i have been coming awake and finding out things even ever since tremendous shock of August 1914. I had what I may call a <span style="font-style: italic;">sense of change</span> before,but my sense of change was enormously quickened by that iluminating catastrophe and its desolating consequences. And it turned to me away from imaginative literature into a new direction.""<br /><br />* * * * *<br /><br />http://www.readprint.com/author-88/H-G-Wells-booksdevorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-37885254437623105722009-09-07T13:55:00.000-07:002009-09-07T15:45:22.889-07:00Pánico en las calles - La guerra de los mundos<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqKW6gN_tUuwzJmg088tCQy7BLFf_jzsyYWHSOBzf0mW_sYlLNZEfroEmVL-vLPFW2tL8U0aBLt_hRYxhIkwJc2rQpzJ0HFyVaIG6BzzpHSuZA2lKwncGLsJ3lVzYopPd0ldCejUMMCuv-/s1600-h/welles1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 253px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqKW6gN_tUuwzJmg088tCQy7BLFf_jzsyYWHSOBzf0mW_sYlLNZEfroEmVL-vLPFW2tL8U0aBLt_hRYxhIkwJc2rQpzJ0HFyVaIG6BzzpHSuZA2lKwncGLsJ3lVzYopPd0ldCejUMMCuv-/s320/welles1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5378833693668866018" border="0" /></a><br />INTRODUCCIÓN<br /><br />La guerra de los mundos fue un episodio de drama radial o radiado (esto es, una emisión radial realizada con voces, música y efectos de sonidos especiales) incluida dentro de una serie del “Teatro Mercury en el aire”. Dicho radioteatro fue emitido el 30 de octubre de 1938, es decir, la víspera de Halloween, emitida por la cadena de emisoras de radio Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). Dirigida y narrada por Orson Welles, el radioteatro fue una adaptación libre de la novela de H. G. Welles, La guerra de los mundos.<br /><br />Los primeros dos tercios de los 60 minutos de emisión fue presentado como una serie de simulados boletines de noticias, lo que sugirió para muchos oyentes de que realmente una invasión marciana se estaba realizando. Para agravar el problema, está el hecho de que el Teatro Mercurio en el Aire fue un sustaining show, esto es , sin publicidad ni espónsores publicitarios, lo que añadió un efecto dramático mayor. Aunque hubo muchos cálculos en la prensa acerca del supuesto pánico provocado por la emisión radial, el número exacto de radioyentes afectados fue un asunto muy debatido. En los días siguientes a la emisión, hubo una indignación generalizada. El formato del programa en forma de boletín de noticias fue denostado por algunos periódicos y personalidades públicas, dando lugar a una protesta contra los responsables de la emisión, pero el episodio lanzó a Orson Wells a la fama.<br /><br />La adaptación de La guerra de los mundos fue la última de las adaptaciones realizadas realizadas y emitidas por Orson Wells y su equipo.<br /><br />Como el radio teatro fue emitido en la víspera de Halloween, cuando los niños van de casa en casa pidiendo golosinas o pequeñas cantidades de dinero con la pregunta “Trick or Treat?”, “¿Broma o Regalito?”, esta emisión radial es considerada, por algunos, como la broma de Halloween más grande jamás realizada. También es considerada como el engaño o timo (hoax en inglés) más grande del mundo.<br /><br />Un pequeño monumento fue erigido en octubre de 1998 en el lugar donde los marcianos “aterrizaron” en Van Nest Park, Grover's Mill. Desde entonces este lugar es conocido como el “Ground Zero”, o “Zona Cero” de la invasión marciana.<br /><br /><hr style="font-size: 130%;" width="400" noshade="noshade"><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">PREVIO A LA EMISIÓN<br /></div><br />Cuando me siento a escribir este artículo, la televisión muestra una columna de tanques corriendo a través del desierto de Iraq en dirección a Bagdad. Es marzo de 2003 y hace apenas unos días nos metimos en la Segunda Guerra del Golfo, pero como ningún otro conflicto anterior, esta se ha convertido en una guerra de información, tanto como de balas y bombas. La transmisión es en vivo y en directo, transmitida al confort de mi hogar vía satélite, y si quisiera, podría cambiar a una docena de otros canales, o conectar a Internet para buscar perspectivas nuevas. En este mundo de alta tecnología y canales de noticias que cubren las 24 horas del día, nosotros tomamos como regalada la velocidad y la inmediatez de la información, al tiempo que mantenemos un buen engrasado sentido del escepticismo. Lo hemos oído y escuchado todo y la revolución ha sido televisada tantas veces que no pensamos más en ello como una experiencia nueva o aterradora. Este es el mundo en que vivimos ahora, pero no siempre fue así.<br /><br />Más de 70 años atrás la televisión estaba apenas en un estadio experimental y en los EEUU, la radio era el rey indiscutible de las ondas. Tres de cada cuatro familias ya disponían de una (ocho millones fueron vendidas sólo en 1936), pero como muchos estaban por descubrir brutalmente, muchos norteamericanos no estaban totalmente sintonizados con el poder de este nuevo y excitante medio de comunicación. El despertar vino en la noche de Halloween de octubre de 1938 cuando un cineasta joven y brillante con el nombre de Orson Welles aprovechó el temor subconsciente de una nación y convenció a miles de personas (tal vez muchos más) que los marcianos estaban invadiendo los EEUU.<br /><br />Increíblemente, la causa de estos disturbios fue una dramática presentación de La guerra de los mundos, una fecunda novela escrita 40 años antes por H. G. Wells. ¿Como y por qué esto pasó? Hay un número de razones, pero la primera y la más importante es cuan reciente era la radio todavía en 1938. Las grandes cadenas de radio como la CBS y la NBC sólo tenían una década de edad y participaron en un frenesí de experimentación, llenando las ondas con una gran cantidad de material original como comedias, dramas, culebrones radiofónicos y una clase nueva de periodismo que abrió el público estadounidense a una nueva conciencia de un mundo conflictivo y político.<br /><br />Los estadounidenses eran ahora capaces de conectar con los sucesos del mundo y escuchar a sus creadores de opinión y de leyes. Un pionero notable en este sentido fue Franklin D. Roosvelt, cuyas “charlas” (que comenzaron en 1933) llevó la voz del gobierno y de la autoridad al hogar como nunca antes sucedió. Algunas noticias importantes conmocionaron a la nación. Los boletines informativos a la caza del bebé secuestrado de Charles Lindbergh mantuvo a los oyentes en una agonía de suspense durante varios meses en 1932, y en 1936, el corresponsal de guerra estadounidense Hans Von Kaltenborn se convirtió en 1936 en el primer periodista en transmitir en vivo desde una zona de guerra cuando acercó los sonidos reales de una batalla de la guerra civil española a los hogares. Igualmente de dramático fue el fatal accidente del dirigible Hinderburg, registrado el 6 de marzo de 1937 por Herbert Morrison, de la estación de radio WLS de Chicago, un suceso que redujo al impotente reportero en un montón de lágrimas de frustración y horror. El episodio que sin duda más impactó a los estadounidenses fue el pacto de Munich del 12 al 30 de septiembre de 1938 (un pacto celebrado en Munich en el que se reunieron Hitler, Mussolini, Dadalier y Chamberlain y accedieron a que Alemania se anexionase los Sudetes de Checoslovaquia, una zona de habla alemana) se vendieron más radios a los ansiosos estadounidenses que en cualquier período previo de tres semanas, al tiempo que Hitler reunió sus ejércitos y el mundo se deslizó inexorablemente hacia la guerra.<br /><br />En esa atmósfera de tensión, Orson Welles y su staff estaban preparando la última presentación del Teatro Mercury, un show que previamente había dramatizado novelas como El conde de Monte Cristo y Drácula. A la vista de lo anterior, La guerra de los mundos no debería haber tenido mayor efecto que las emisiones anteriores, es decir, ninguna en absoluto. Pero Welles y su coguionista Howard Koch estaban planeando algo especial para esa noche en particular, y aunque este asunto fue objeto de un particular debate considerablemente prolongado, si ellos realmente tenían la intención de crear el subsiguiente pánico, fue sin duda la cuestión central de la polémica durante años.<br /><br /><hr style="font-size: 130%;" width="400" noshade="noshade"><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">LA EMISIÓN<br /></div><br />En lugar de estar establecida en la Inglaterra victoriana tal como fue escrita por H. G. Wells, la acción fue trasplantada inesperadamente a los EEUU de la época, pero mucho más importante, Welles y Koch redactaron la historia como una serie de flashes informativos que se introdujeron sin previo aviso en lo que parecía un programa perfectamente rutinario. Este radical punto de partida de formatos dramáticos probó tener un efecto devastador y combinado con numerosos nombres de lugares reales, calles, avenidas, carreteras y poblaciones, contribuyó de modo significativo a la profundización del pánico. Otro factor que contribuyó al pánico fue que más del 50% de la gente sintonizó un poco tarde la emisión. Ello fue debido a que mucha gente sintonizaron un programa rival, que estaba retransmitiendo el popular show de Charly McCarthy: Chase and Sanborn Hour. Para agravar el pánico, la mayoría de la gente que entró en pánico no siguió la emisión, y por lo tanto, no escucharon el aviso que se dio en el minuto 40:30. La narración siguió en tercera persona, pero demasiado tarde: la alarma ya circulaba por el país desde 15 minutos antes.<br /><br />Pasados 10 minutos del inicio del show de Charly McCarthy, se inició la actuación de un cantante, y ese fue el punto en el que una gran cantidad de oyentes se pusieron a jugar con el dial de sus receptores mientras esperaban a que la estrella del show volviera. Sintonizando el Mercury Theater unos minutos tarde y habiéndose perdido la sonora introducción de Orson Wells, y se encontraron escuchando los inocentes sonidos de Ramón Raquello y su orquesta, solo para que la música fuese interrumpida por el primero de una serie de cada vez más alarmantes noticiarios.<br /><br />Al principio vinieron los informes de explosiones de gas incandescente observadas en el planeta Marte, después, tras un breve interludio de música, una conexión con el observatorio de Princeton, con una breve entrevista con el profesor y famoso astrónomo (de ficción) Richard Pierson. Pierson, interpretado por Welles, aseguraba a los oyentes que no había nada de que alarmarse, que no hay vida en Marte, pero al mismo tiempo llegó la noticia del impacto de un meteoro. Es en este punto en que un lugar sin pretensiones llamado Molino de Grover (Grover's Mill) entró en la narración. Más exactamente, los marcianos aterrizaron en la granja de Willmuth. Todavía hoy Grover's Mill es una pequeña aldea somnolienta, pero esa noche iba a convertirse en el centro del universo para un número considerable de personas. El destino quiso que Edward Koch escogiera el Grover's Mill como cabeza de playa de la invasión marciana por el método de pinchar un lápiz en un mapa comprado en una estación de servicio de carretera.<br /><br />Se narra que un meteoro cilíndrico se estrella contra la tierra. Los hechos son narrados por el periodista “Carl Phillips” (interpretado por Frank Readick). Una multitud se agolpa en torno al cráter. El meteorito se abre desenroscándose, y aparecen unos tentáculos, y una máquina lanzadora de cohetes, que el marciano usó para abrasar a la multitud que le rodeaba con sus rayos caloríficos. Carl grita desesperadamente hasta que los rayos le cortan en mitad de una frase. Las encuestas posteriores indicaron que en este punto muchos radioyentes escucharon sólo esta parte de la emisión antes de ponerse en contacto con sus vecinos y amigos. Todo esto aumentó los errores y la confusión, ya que no escucharon el anuncio del minuto 40.<br /><br />Luego traza el avance de los marcianos hacia la ciudad de Nueva York, aniquilando a los defensores de los EEUU mediante rayos calóricos y gases venenosos, y la destrucción de decenas de nombres de lugares conocidos en el camino. Un tembloroso Pierson especula en antena sobre la posible tecnología marciana. La Guardia Nacional de New Jersey declara la ley marcial y ataca a la nave marciana. Un anuncio de un gobierno de emergencia parecía dar crédito a la historia, y los oyentes se amontonaban alrededor de sus radios y ciudadanos presas del pánico empezaron a bombardear las comisarías de policías locales con llamadas telefónicas.<br /><br />En la emisión radial se intercalan boletines de daños con instrucciones de evacuación, mientras que miles de norteamericanos invaden las carreteras y autopistas camino de no se sabe donde. Se informa que tres trípodes marcianos destruyen centrales eléctricas, puentes y vías férreas. Un Secretario del Interior sin identificar aconseja a la nación por la radio. Welles pretendió que ese Secretario del Interior fuese el entonces Presidente Franklin D. Roosvelt, interpretado por el actor Kenny Delmar bajo la dirección actoral del Welles. La voz de Delmar sonaba sospechosamente como la del Presidente, voz que era conocida por los oyentes por sus charlas radiales.<br /><br />Una conexión en vivo es establecida con un cuartel de artillería ligera. Se informa de que con sus cañones han logrado dañar a una de las naves marcianas, pero tras el sonido de una explosión y los sonidos de toses incontrolables, la emisión se corta. Se informa que una cuadrilla de bombarderos ha desaparecido después de que sus motores son incinerados por los rayos caloríficos. Otros aviones logran destruir una máquina marciana, pero se informa de que más cilindros están cayendo por todo el país.<br /><br />Un nuevo periodista (papel representado por Ray Collins) transmite desde la azotea del edificio de la CBS, y describe la invasión marciana de la ciudad de Nueva York con expresiones como “5 grandes máquinas” vadean el río Hudson, el humo tóxico va a la deriva por la ciudad, la gente corre a zambullirse en el East River “como ratas”, otros “caían como moscas” hasta que también sucumben a los gases tóxicos. Por último, un desesperado radioaficionado escuchan como le llaman, “2X2L llamando CQ... ¿no hay nadie en el aire?... ¿no hay nadie?”<br /><br />Después de un intermedio de identificación de la estación de radio en el que el locutor Dan Seymour menciona el carácter de ficción de la serie, el último tercio es un monólogo y un diálogo, con Welles como Profesor Pierson, que describe las secuelas de los ataques. El teatro radiado termina como la novela: con los antipáticos marcianos víctimas de los gérmenes , virus y bacterias terrestres.<br /><br />¿Fue hecho a propósito? La poco atractiva respuesta probablemente es, no. Con los años, Welles dio versiones contradictorias de los hechos, e incluso trató de reclamar para sí el mérito de la planificación de los hechos, pero como los noticieros cinematográficos de la época muestran claramente, Welles estuvo bastante agitado por los hechos. También dijo en alguna entrevista que “el setenta y cinco por ciento de lo que se dijo en las entrevistas es falso”, por lo que nunca sabremos la verdad. Esto, ciertamente, no disminuye nada la importancia de la emisión y claramente se presenta como un testimonio de su talento como showman y la habilidad y la dedicación de su elenco y su equipo.<br /><br />Por lo tanto, consigue una copia de la emisión, baja las luces, reúne a tus seres queridos a tu alrededor y prepárense para ser transportados de vuelta a octubre del 38, no a una época más simple, porque la vida era tan compleja e incierta como lo es hoy en día, sino a un momento en que la gente estaba dispuesta a creer que lo que escuchaba de una fuente de confianza era toda la verdad y nada más que la verdad.<br /><br />Interrumpimos este programa para llevar...”<br /><br /><hr style="font-size: 130%;" width="400" noshade="noshade"><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">EFECTOS DE LA EMISIÓN<br /></div><br />Después de la emisión, Welles rompe el carácter informal para recordar a los oyentes que la emisión de La guerra de los mundos fue una emisión especial por el día de Halloween, el equivalente a vestirse con una sábana y decir “Booo” como un fantasma. La mitología popular sostiene que esa advertencia fue un añadido a la emisión impuesta por los ejecutivos de la CBS, ya que se dieron cuenta del pánico generado por el programa.<br /><br />Se podría escribir un libro si alguien hurgara en los archivos de periódicos locales, de emisoras, de revistas por todo lo ancho y largo de los EEUU.<br /><br />¿Y que pasaba durante la emisión en Grover's Mill? Se cuentan algunas grandes historias sobre la defensa de la ciudad, sobre todo que los residentes informaron de que abrieron fuego contra una torre de agua, pensando que era un Trípode (una nave marciana), pero extrañamente, los habitantes del epicentro de toda la acción parece que durmieron durante toda la noche sin ser molestados. Al igual que el ojo proverbial de la tienda, la aldea fue, según parece, felizmente ignorante de la importancia fundamental que tenía en la historia, tal como descubrió por la tarde Judson Sheldon. Él, que estaba en camino de convertirse en profesor emérito en Geología en la Universidad de Princeton, en aquel momento era un simple estudiante miembro del Club de Prensa de la Universidad. Alertado de la posible caída de un meteoro por el Philadelphia Inquirer, prestó su ayuda a Arthur Buddington, presidente del Departamento de Geología de Pinceton, y junto con otro profesor, partieron para Grover's Mill. Allí la encontraron totalmente ajena a los acontecimientos. Aunque, como atestiguan numerosos testimonios y documentos, se produjo un pánico considerable en el curso de la noche en todo el país, la única alteración que produjeron los hechos narrados en el lugar de aterrizaje de los marcianos es un monumento erigido en la humilde población para conmemorar los hechos narrados.<br /><br />De Trenton llegó la narración de la Sra. Thomas. “Nos quedamos petrificados. Nos miramos los unos a los otros. Alguien estaba golpeando la puerta principal. Era nuestro vecino de enfrente. Había empaquetado a sus siete hijos en el coche junto al equipaje y estaba continuamente gritando, “vamos, salgamos de aquí”. También un adolescente local de 13 años de edad, Henry Sears, estaba haciendo sus deberes cuando oyó el primer flash de noticias de la invasión. Tomando la radio bajó a la taberna de la planta baja que regentaba su madre, y una docenas de clientes escucharon con creciente temor la emisión, hasta que los hombres se levantaron y anunciaron que iban a conseguir armas para sumarse a la defensa civil de Gorver's Mill.<br /><br />Hay miles de anécdotas como estas. Pero, ¿a cuantas persona afectó el pánico? Richard J. Hand, quien cita a numerosos historiadores sin dar sus nombres calculó que “alrededor de 6 millones de personas oyeron la emisión de la CBS; 1,7 millones creyeron que los hechos narrados eran ciertos y 1,2 millones estaban verdaderamente asustados. Aunque Wells y la compañía CBS eran escuchados cada noche por un número relativamente pequeño de oyentes (la audiencia estimada de la NBC era en aquella época de 30 millones), el ruido que hicieron fue cualquier cosa menos “inadvertido”. En un mes se habían escrito 12.500 artículos en periódicos y revistas sobre la emisión o sobre su impacto, al tiempo que Adolf Hitler califica la emisión como “evidencia de la decadencia y la condición corrupta de la democracia”.<br /><br />En esta propagación de la emisión por parte de la prensa escrita intervienen intereses comerciales. Posteriores estudios sugieren que el pánico fue menos difundido de lo que los medios escritos sugirieron. Durante ese período, numerosos periódicos temían que las radios, un nuevo medio de comunicación masivo, les llevara a la bancarrota. Ahora y gracias a la ayuda inesperada de Wells y Welles, los periodistas tenían la oportunidad de “demostrar” que el nuevo medio no era fiable, de los peligros de la emisión radiofónica.<br /><br />Robert E. Bartholomew sugirió que cientos de miles de personas se asustaron, pero que la mayoría no hicieron otra cosa que llamar a las comisarías de policía. De ahí los informes de las numerosas llamadas a la policía. Pero de ahí a que numerosos ciudadanos agarraran sus bártulos y su familia y se echaran carretera y manta a la aventura, hay un trecho. En los días siguientes, muchos periódicos publicaron informes y estadísticas sobre numerosos ataques al corazón y suicidios, pero estas noticias sólo han servido para formar parte del folklore estadounidense. Y en cuanto al incremento en el número de llamadas, no todos llamaron asustados a las comisarias de policías. Algunos llamaron al programa, bien para denigrarlo, bien para felicitarles por lo realistíco de show, muchos llamaron para donar sangre, muchos para averiguar que unidades de la Guardia Nacional estaban siendo movilizadas para saber si debían integrarse o no, etc. Pero sobre todos, muchos llamaron a sus amigos y familiares para comentar que bueno y real había sido el show radiofónico. No podemos saber cuantas llamadas correspondían a cada caso. Aunque el número de llamadas aumentó un 40% con respecto al tráfico telefónico normal en Nueva Jersey, tampoco este dato podemos considerarlo como un dato fiable de cuanta gente se asustó.<br /><br />El programa de Welles tenía que competir con shows muy consolidados en la audiencia como el de Chase & Sanborn, conducido por Charly McCarthy, líder en aquella franja horaria. Muchos sugirieron que Welles programó la emisión para que la primera “conexión en directo” desde Grpver's Mill coincidiera con la primera pausa del citado show, a los 12 minutos de iniciada dicha emisión. Fue a partir de ese momento en que el radio teatro planificado por Welles empezó a jugar fuerte. ¿Esta coincidencia fue casualidad o planificada?<br /><br />-.-<br /><br />FUENTES<br /><br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_%28radio%29">Wikipedia en inglés</a>, War of the Worlds <a href="http://www.war-ofthe-worlds.co.uk/">1</a> y <a href="http://www.war-ofthe-worlds.co.uk/war_worlds_orson_welles_mercury.htm">2</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_Mill,_New_Jersey">Grover's Mill en Wikipedia</a>, <a href="http://www.csicop.org/si/show/the_martian_panic_sixty_years_later_what_have_we_learned/">CSIcop</a> y <a href="http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_guerra_de_los_mundos_%28radio%29">Wikipedia en español</a>.devorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175001807049106448.post-1990181014738220452009-09-02T19:45:00.000-07:002009-09-02T19:46:53.411-07:00The Chronic Argonauts - Los argonautas chrónicos<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAL_-g1tQz0XCeSapMN82gVHup46Qz70neiJM5sP33rZDh45b72zaLkPFUWECoFr7bgBHNL5s2f8JSj4oW9bt_vjqutdl1tBSda0xE4Me1ch72Y7JJipB1oyDdIWjBeqRpYyqaYZlZnyPo/s1600-h/TheChronicArgonauts.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 180px; height: 231px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAL_-g1tQz0XCeSapMN82gVHup46Qz70neiJM5sP33rZDh45b72zaLkPFUWECoFr7bgBHNL5s2f8JSj4oW9bt_vjqutdl1tBSda0xE4Me1ch72Y7JJipB1oyDdIWjBeqRpYyqaYZlZnyPo/s320/TheChronicArgonauts.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5377067119964668946" /></a><br />La historia comienza con una narración en tercera persona de un inventor a la tranquila pequeña ciudad galesa de impronunciable nombre Llyddwdd. El doctor Moses Nebogipfel se aloja en una casa muy descuidada después de la muerte de sus antiguos habitantes. La mayor parte de la historia se refiere al temor que causa a las gentes simples del entorno rural quienes echan pestes del diabólico trabajo del inventor en un intento de devolver una supuesta brujería del inventor. El inventor escapa junto a otra persona - el simpático reverendo Elijah Ulisses Cook - en lo que es más tarde revelada como una máquina del tiempo.<br /><br />La segunda parte es escrita por un "innombrado" Autor que descibre en primera persona el descubrimiento del aturdido reverendo Cook que ha regresado de increíbles hazañas después de haber estado desaparecido durante tres semanas.<br /><br />La tercera y última parte (de nuevo en tercera persona) es el relato del reverendo que descibre los eventos que tuvieron lugar aquella noche y la revelación que el profesor Negogipfel es un "Anachronic Man" "Hombre Anacrónico" cuyo genio le lleva a buscar un tiempo más apropiado para sus habilidades. Hasta aquí la traducción de este párrafo, que no dice nada más, pero es de suponer que, si viajó en el tiempo para buscar un tiempo má apropiado para sus habilidades, debió viajar hacia el futuro y no hacia el pasado.<br /><br />Por supuesto, la obra ya no tiene copyright, y se puede leer en inglés en 1 y 2.devorador de literaturahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10176064154656288652noreply@blogger.com0