Chapter XXIX: What a Stably Organized World Peace Means for Mankind (6)

It was a most curious and attractive phase of the always-interesting conference to have this gray-headed, cultivated gentleman breaking through all the abstract jargon of diplomacy and militarism, all the talk of powers, radii of action, fortifications, spheres of influence, and so forth, in his attempt to make us realize the physical loveliness and intellectual charm of this enormous area of the world’s surface that the four-power treaty may perhaps save now and forevermore from the fear and horrors of war.

The proposed four-power treaty which thus starts upon its uncertain but hopeful journey toward ratification by the Senates, Legislatures and Governments of the world is essentially a departure from the normal tradition of the treaties of the nineteenth century. It is the first attempt to realize—what shall I call it?—the American way or the new way in international affairs. Its distinctive feature is the participation of two possible antagonists, America and Japan. Instead of a war they make a treaty and call in Britain and France to assist. It is a treaty for peace and not against an antagonist.

I think that the difference between “treaties for” and “treaties against” is one that needs to be stressed. The Anglo-Japanese treaty was a “treaty against,” a treaty against first Russia, then Germany and then against some vaguely conceived assailant. It is a great thing to have Japan and England cordially immolating that treaty now that this four-power treaty of the new spirit may be born.

After Senator Lodge came M. Viviani with a very fine, if guarded, speech. M. Viviani is a great speaker but he is not merely eloquent, and I find people here saying little about his wonderful voice or his overtones and undertones or his romantic charm but much about the subtle things he said. In a gathering that is tense with attention one is apt, perhaps, to transfer one’s own thoughts and expectations to the gathering as a whole, but it seems to me that when M. Viviani rose to welcome this great beginning on the Pacific, we were all thinking: “And how much further and to what other regions of the world are you prepared to extend this spirit and method of this Pacific bond? There is another rather threadbare ‘treaty against’ or at least an ‘understanding against,’ known as the Anglo-French entente. Is the time due yet for the merger of that also in another and greater bond of peace?”

I do not know how far the question that was in his mind was in the mind of the meeting, but I think that M. Viviani made it very plain that it was in the background of his own mind. His speech was designed to bring the simplicity, the easiness of the Pacific problem into sharp contrast with the tortured complexity of the Atlantic—the Afro-European problem. He spoke of the freedom of the Pacific from long established hate traditions. He reminded us of the twenty centuries of war and trampled frontiers and outrages and counter-outrages that had left Europe and North Africa scarred and festering.

He conjured up no bogies; he had nothing to say about those 7,000,000 phantom Germans ready to extract their hidden rifles from 7,000,000 mattresses and haylofts and rush upon France; but he reminded the conference, gravely and wisely, of the relative complexity of the European problem, of the new untried nationalities that had been liberated, of the vast heritage of tradition and suspicion that had to be overcome. He addressed not only the conference but the impatient liberal aspirations of the world. “I ask you for forbearance,” he said, and repeated that—“I ask for forbearance.”

Now that was a great speech, and M. Viviani is manifestly the sort of Frenchman with whom the new spirit can deal. “Forbearance” might well serve now as the watchword of Europe. And I wish that Mr. Balfour could have shown a fuller recognition of what M. Viviani had said. Mr. Balfour had been so fine on several occasions at this conference that I felt it is a little ungracious to him to confess, as I must do, that twice in this day of the fourth plenary session, once in the conference and also in the evening when he replied for the Allies at the Gridiron Club, he seemed to be missing an opportunity—the opportunity of holding out a hand of friendship to liberal France.

For the reactionary France, for the France of submarines and Senegalese and inflated army and navy estimates, neither Britain nor America nor any other part of the world has any use, and the more often we say that and the more distinctly we say it the better for every one; but toward a France that can teach and practice forbearance and come into great associations for the common welfare of mankind we ought to hold out both hands. Most of the bitterness that has been directed towards France of late is not the bitterness of any natural hatred; it is the bitterness of acute disappointment that France, the generous leader of freedom upon both the American and European Continents, no longer leads, seems to care no longer for either freedom or generosity. And twice I have seen opportunities lost for an appropriate gesture of reconciliation.

Sooner or later France and England have to say to each other: “We have been sore and sick and exasperated and suspicious and narrow. Let us take a lesson from this American plan and set about discussing an Atlantic treaty, an Afro-European treaty, worthy to put beside this Pacific treaty.”

And since this has to be said, it was a pity that Mr. Balfour could not take up M. Viviani’s half lead and begin to say it at the fourth plenary session of the Washington Conference.

XXVII
ABOUT THE WAR DEBTS

Washington, Dec. 13.

In the official proceedings of the Washington Conference the war debts are never mentioned. It is an improper subject.

In the talks and discussions and the journalistic writings round and about the Washington Conference the war debts are perpetually debated. The nature of the discussion is so curious and interesting, it throws so strong a light upon the difficulties that impede our path to any settlement of the world’s affairs upon the sound democratic basis of a world-wide will, that some brief analysis of it is necessary if this outline of the peace situation is to be complete.

In private talk almost universally, in the weekly and monthly publications that are here called “highbrow,” I find a very general agreement that the bulk of these war debts and war preparation debts as between Russia and France, and between the European allies and Britain, and between Britain and America, and the bulk of the indemnity and reparation debt of Germany to the Allies, cannot be paid and ought not to be paid, and that the sooner that this legend of indebtedness is swept out of men’s imaginations the sooner we shall get on to the work of world reconstruction.

Only one of these debts is even remotely payable and that is the British debt to America. But with regard to that debt the situation rises to a high level of absurdity. The British authorities—it is an open secret—have been offering to begin the liquidation of their debt now. They cannot pay in gold, because most of the gold in the world is already sleeping uselessly in American vaults; but they offer what gold they have and, in addition, they are willing to get their factories to work and supply manufactured goods to the American creditor—clothes, boots, automobiles, ships, agricultural and other machinery, crockery, and so on, and so on.

Nothing could be fairer. Britain is full of unemployed—they must be fed anyhow—and if America insists upon her industries being buried under a pyramid of gold and manufactured articles, the British bankers and manufacturers believe they can, with an effort, manage the job and pull through. The exchange may take some strange flights and dives in the process, the British system may collapse even as the German system seems to be collapsing, but it is a strained situation anyhow. The British think the effort worth trying and the risk worth taking. And so behind the scenes it is Washington rather than London that wants at present to hold up the payment of the British debt.

Only one other of the outstanding debts looks at all payable at the present time, and that is so much of the reparation debts of Germany to France as can be paid in kind, in building material and manufactured goods not produced in France. The idea of any other European debt payments in full is just nonsense. The gold is not there and the stuff is not there, and there is no ability to produce anything like sufficient stuff under present conditions.

Now the interesting thing about the situation here is that the understanding people in America do not seem to be explaining this very simple situation as frankly as they might do to the mass of American people or at least that this explanation has not got through to the American people. There is a widespread conviction, which is sedulously sustained by the less intelligent or less scrupulous organs of the American press, that the wicked old European countries, and particularly Britain, that arch deceiver, are trying very meanly and cunningly to evade the payment of a righteous obligation.

Every effort to present the financial and economic disorder of the world as a world task in which the prosperous and fortunate American people may reasonably play a leading, intelligent and helpful part is misrepresented in this fashion. There is a vast vague clamor for repayment—aimed at Britain. Dealers in the old Irish hate business and the German hate business, now a little out of their original stock of grievances, join with shrill but syndicated Hindus in warning the simple citizen against counsels of financial sanity as though they were insidious propaganda. Until at last an Englishman is sorely tempted to an exasperated, “Well, _take_ your debt!”—which does no justice to the patience and intelligence of either England or America.

Let us be clear upon one point. So far as the British debt goes, the Americans can have it if they prefer to take that line. The British here in Washington and the British writers here are here because the Americans invited them to come to discuss the world situation and the possibilities of world peace. They are not here to beg. The time is not likely to arrive when one English speaking community will beg from another. It certainly has not arrived now.

However, I am an obstinate believer in the common sense and good will of the American people, and I do not believe that a press campaign, designed to make a great people behave after the fashion of some hysterical back-street Oriental usurer who has struck a bad debt, is likely to do anything but recoil severely on the heads of those who have set it going. And I am not a believer in that sort of “tact” which would avoid reminding the American public of the circumstances under which these war debts were incurred.

The Russian debt to France was spent largely upon war and war preparations while Russia was the ally and helper of France; the war debts of the European Allies to Britain and America and the British debt to America were spent upon war material. All these debts are for efforts spent upon a common cause. Each country spent according to its resources, as good allies should. Russia gave life and blood—and blood. She gave 4,000,000 men; she smashed up her own social fabric. France and Britain gave the lives of men beyond the million mark. Also they gave much material, an enormous industrial effort. So also did Italy, according to her power.

The British developed a vast production of munitions as the war went on, using great supplies of material from America, for which they paid high prices and on which great profits were made in America. At last America joined the war, with her enormous reserves and strength, and gave not only great stores of material but the lives of between 50,000 and 75,000 men. And so, altogether, America and the Allied Powers, giving their lives and substance as they could, saved civilization from imperialism.

The British do not grudge the contribution they have made and all that they have still to contribute for their share in that colossal victory, but some of us English here are growing a little irritated at being dunned as defaulters when we are not going to default, and at having our attempts to work in co-operation with the Americans for the rehabilitation of a strained and collapsing civilization explained as the interested approaches of a cadging poor relation.

I wish that Americans would think of the Europeans more frequently as people like themselves. The boys who came to Europe saw the European armies in ranks like their own, good stuff and kindred stuff. They were their comrades in arms; they fought and died beside them. They saw countries and a common life very like the American country life; they discovered that the French and British and Italians were also “just folk.”

But these American papers of the hostile sort write of France or Britain as if they were wicked old spiders. They write of Britain as a monster with a crown and an eyeglass and such like concomitants loathsome to all sound democratic instincts. They write of the “designs” of France and Italy and Britain as if these horrid monsters were all playing a fearsome game with each other for the soul and body of America. It is easy enough then to clamor for repayments of war debts. It is easy then to excite people by a clamor for a war bonus for the veterans of the Great War to be saddled upon the European debtor.

But let me remind the American soldier that the real European debtor, the fellow on whom it will fall, the fellow who will have to toil and pay and want, if you can realize that dream of pitiless exaction, is no legendary monster France or Britain; it is that other fellow over there you fought beside, it is the wounded man in blue or khaki you passed by as you went into action, it is the man who smiled his courage at you as you blundered against him in the din and confusion of battle.

If you listen to these stay-at-home patriots and these exotic advisers of yours, it is he who will pay, he and his wife and his child; they will all pay in toil and privation and worry and stunted lives. It is they who will pay—but you will not receive. You too will pay in disorganized business, in restricted production, in underemployment. You will get nothing else out of it except whatever satisfaction you may feel in having made those other fellows over there in Europe pay—and pay bitterly.

XXVIII
THE FOUNDATION STONE AND THE BUILDING

Washington, Dec. 14.

Beginning with the fourth plenary session of the Washington Conference, the registration of “results” in the Pacific, in disarmament, in China, has begun. They are good results, assembled on a basis of broad principles, that may sustain at last an organized permanent peace for the whole world. If there is one thing to be noted more than another about the work that has led up to this settlement it is the adaptability, the intelligent and sympathetic understanding shown by Japan in these transactions. The Japanese seem to be the most flexible minded of peoples. They win my respect more and more.

In the days of imperialistic competition they stiffened to a conscientious selfishness and a splendid fighting energy. Now that a new spirit of discussion, compromise and the desire for brotherhood spreads about the world, they catch the new note and they sound it with obvious sincerity and good will. No people has been under such keen and suspicious observation here as the Japanese. The idea of them as of a people insanely patriotic, patriotically subtle and treacherous, mysterious and mentally inaccessible has been largely dispelled. I myself have tried that view over in my mind and dismissed it, and multitudes of the commonplace men have gone through the same experience here. Our Western world, I am convinced, can work with the Japanese and understand and trust them.

It will be for other and abler pens to record the detailed working out of the results of this great conference, this new experiment in human reasonableness, as far as it affects Shantung and Yap and Hongkong and Port Arthur and so forth. My time in Washington is drawing to an end, and I will confine myself now rather to that broader and vaguer question in which I am more interested—the question of what lies behind and beyond this most successful and hopeful beginning in open international co-operation.

Great and important as the conference is, the growth of a real and understandable project for the steady, systematic development of an effective international world peace, which has been going on in men’s minds here and in the world generally in the last two months is a much greater thing. It is a quite amazing mental growth; something very quiet and simple and yet astonishing, like a clear crystallization out of a turbid solution. Before the conference gathered, civilized people throughout the world were, I think, quite confused about how the peace of the world could ever be organized and rather hopeless about its being done.

Now I think there is a widespread and spreading unanimity that there is a way, a practicable way and a hopeful way, by successive conferences, by widening peace agreements, by the establishment of permanent joint commissions, by systematic education and the sedulous cultivation of confidence, along which humanity may struggle and will struggle out of its present miseries and dangers toward the dawn of a new life.

The next conferences that are indicated will gather in a mood of hopefulness and experience that will be the most precious legacy of the present conference. One that must follow very soon must deal with the economic rehabilitation of Europe. Here, it seems to me, America, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia at least must meet. And soon. In the Christmas mood, in the phase of relief that radiates from Washington and Ireland now, we must not let our elation blind us to the fact that, for all the light that breaks in upon us, we are not yet out of the woods. Millions are starving today, great masses of men degenerate physically and morally in unemployment, European industrialism crawls and staggers still.

We have laid the foundations of a new era, but the building has scarcely begun. And in addition to the world economic conference there is also need of another conference to face the still more difficult task of military disarmament and the re-examination of the factors of conflict in the Afro-European area. Personally, I want to see America in that conference also, because I do recognize that the freshness of mind, the deliberate diplomatic inexperience of America, is a factor of priceless value in these discussions. I would like to see that conference also held in an American atmosphere and before an American audience—if only for the sake of Europe. And if America can be interested in Kwangtung, I don’t see why America should not also be interested in Silesia, or Cilicia, or Senegal, or the Congo, which are all very much nearer.

The appetite for conferences, the belief in conferences, will grow with what it feeds upon. One sees these gatherings, with their accessory commissions, permanent secretariats and increasing world services, becoming a customary and necessary peace control of the earth.

And the peace control, growing in this natural fashion, will consist always and solely of the efficient and willing nations of the world. There will be no forced conclusions and no premature admission of incompetent and feeble peoples. The pedantry that would give every sovereign power, however little or rotten, a vote, a nice, saleable vote, in the management of the world’s affairs will play no part in this evolution.

The Association of Nations will be a growing brotherhood of strong and healthy and understanding peoples, bound only by a bond of self-denial and mutual restraint toward the weaker folk of the earth. The co-operation of the English speaking peoples, and particularly the American will for peace, must needs play a very conspicuous part in the crystallization of this Association, and so it is inevitable that a certain sort of international “expert” will be screaming that the world is threatened by an Anglo-American imperialism. It may be worth while to say a word or so to dispel this idea.

Let us bear in mind that the Washington Conference, whose results may be the cornerstone of the organized peace of the world, is a conference of withdrawal and abstinence, self-restraint and mutual restraint, with regard to China and the Pacific; its key idea is the cessation of aggressions upon weaker or less advantageously circumstanced people. If America and her kindred nations are most active in pressing for such results, it is not that they are moved by any thoughts of world predominance but by liberal ideas that are the monopoly of no race and people. It is their fortunate lot to have been most accessible to such ideas and to be able now to play the leading, most powerful part in establishing them in the world. But these ideas have a broader basis and claim a wider allegiance than merely that of the English speaking peoples.

Liberalism, the idea of great nations of free citizens held together by bonds of mutual confidence, roots very wide and deep in humanity. It derives from the great traditions of the Greek and Roman Republics and from the traditions of freedom of the Scandinavian and Teutonic peoples. The America of today did not grow from American seed. Let America bear that in mind. The American idea is the embodiment particularly of the liberal thought of England and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. France cannot destroy the greatness of her past or the greatness of her future by a phase of momentary folly with her submarines and Senegalese, her Polish ally and all the rest of it.

All peoples have such lapses. A few years ago Britain was disgusting with her jingoistic imperialism. Let us forget our lapses and get back to our more enduring selves. Latin America, quite as much as English speaking America, belongs to that great tradition of Franco-British liberalism. Liberal Germany in 1848 and again today struggles to take its fitting place among the emancipated peoples, as Italy did half a century ago. These are the peoples who can best understand now and help now. They are all in our system of ideas; they can be brought together into one purpose.

It is natural and necessary that the peoples most saturated in that great tradition of European liberalism should be the first full members of the coming Association and should be prepared to lead the rest of the world toward the new order. All peoples are not equally prepared. It is not a question of ascendancy; it is a question of those who are able doing the task that they alone are prepared to perform.

When I think of an Association of Nations I think, therefore, of a sort of club or brotherhood, not of every state in the world but of the peoples who speak English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, as the big brotherhood of the world, with such states as Holland and Norway and Bohemia, and so forth, great in quality if not great in power and entirely sympathetic by training and tradition, associated with them in a great bond for two ends; for peace among themselves and for restraint and patience toward the rest of mankind. I think of such a brotherhood as the brain and backbone of the organized peace of the world, and I cannot see how it is possible to take in the other peoples of the world as helpers until they respond to the same ideals.

I think first of a recovered Russia and then of a unified and educated China and a freed and reconstructed India and of many other states which can claim to be of a civilized quality, such as Egypt, gradually winning their way from a non-participating to a participating level. The relationship of China to Japan in a developing Association of Nations will be something rather analogous to the relationship of a Territory to a State in the Constitution of the United States of America.

Unless there is a strong, well organized collective mentality in a nation or state, I do not see how there can be anything but a sham representation of it upon an Association of Nations, nor how it can be anything but a responsibility and weakness to such an Association.

And outside the system of participating states, and non-participating states, there are great regions of the earth—tropical Africa is the most typical case—which must necessarily have a sort of order imposed upon them from without and for which a joint control by interested associated nations is probably the best method of government at the present time.

That, I think, is the vision of the political future of mankind that is opening out before us; a great system of associated states, locked and interlocked together by fourfold and sixfold and tenfold treaties, open treaties, of peace and co-operation, ruling jointly the still barbaric regions of the earth and pledged to respect and to keep and at last to welcome to their own ranks the now politically enfeebled regions of old civilization. Such an Association must necessarily supersede the “empires” of the nineteenth century and put an end forever to the imperialistic idea. Of such an Association the fourfold treaty may be the foundation stone. And within the security of such an edifice of peace mankind will be able to go on to achievements such as we at present can scarcely imagine.

XXIX
WHAT A STABLY ORGANIZED WORLD PEACE MEANS FOR MANKIND

I have now come to the last paper I shall write about the Washington Conference. I have tried to give the reader some idea of the nature of that gathering and a broad view of the issues involved. I have tried to prevent the sharp discussions of the foreground, the dramatic moments and eloquent passages, from blinding us to the dark and darkening background of Old World affairs. I have tried to show that even the horrors of war are not the whole or the main disaster which results from human disunion and disorder in the presence of increasing mechanical power. I have stressed the theme of economic and social dissolution. Necessarily, I have had to write much of dangers impending and miseries which gather and increase, and of hates, suspicions and failures to comprehend. And on the other hand, when one has turned to the possibilities and methods of escape from the present conflicts and apprehensions, necessarily one has been very largely in the thin and unattractive atmosphere of unrealized projects. I have written of the defects of the League of Nations scheme, its premature explicitness, its thinly theoretical and imitative forms, its frequent mere camouflage, as in the mandatory system, of existing wrongs, and I have brought into contrast with it this newer and I think more natural and hopeful project of successive Conferences, throwing off Committees, embodying their results in treaties and Standing Commissions, and growing at last not so much into a World Parliament, which I perceive more and more clearly is an improbable dream, as into a living, growing, organic network of World Government.

But now in conclusion I will ask the reader to turn his mind from this necessary discussion of political devices and administrative contrivances, these bleak inventions that may form the ladder of escape from the divisions and bitterness of the present time, and to join in an attempt to realize what the world may become if men do struggle through these tiresome and perplexing problems to a working solution, if our race really does get from these wearisome yet hopeful wranglings and dealings to an organized world peace, to a disarmed world, to a steady reduction of racial and national antipathies and distrusts, to a growing confidence in the permanence of peace and the prevalence of good will throughout our planet, to a comprehensive system of world controls of the common interests of mankind. Suppose that after these present darknesses of famine and almost universal insecurity, these confused and often conflicting efforts we are making; suppose that in ten, or twenty, or thirty years we shall begin to realize that the thing is, after all, getting done, that we are indeed pushing through, moving towards the light, that human affairs are on the up-grade again and on new and greater and safer lines; let us suppose that and then let us ask what sort of world it will be for our kind that we shall be moving towards?

Let us go back to one fundamental fact in the present break-up in human affairs. That break-up is not a result of debility; _it is a result of ill-regulated power_. It is important to bear that in mind. Disproportionate development of energy and overstrain are the immediate causes of our present troubles; the scale of modern economic enterprise has outgrown the little boundaries of the European States; science and invention have made war so monstrously destructive and disintegrative that victory is swallowed up in disaster; we are in a world of little nations wielding world-wide powers to the general destruction. And it follows that if, after all, we do struggle out of our old-fashioned and now altogether disastrous rivalries and hatreds before they destroy us, we shall still have all this science and power, which are things that seem now to increase by a sort of inner necessity, on our hands. So that getting through to an organized world peace does not mean simply avoiding death and destruction and getting back to “as you were.” It means getting hold of power by the right end instead of the wrong end and going right ahead. We are not struggling simply to escape, we are struggling for the opportunity to achieve.

Personally, I do not think I would have bothered to come to Washington or to interest myself in this peace business, and to work and blunder and feel incompetent and be worried and distressed here, if it meant working for just peace, flat, empty, simple peace. I do not see why the killing of a few score millions of human beings a few years before they would naturally and ingloriously die, or the smashing up of a lot of ordinary, rather ugly, rather uncomfortable towns, or, if it comes to that sort of thing, the complete depopulation of the earth, or the prospect of being killed myself presently by a bomb or a shot or a pestilence, should move me to any great exertions. Why bother to exchange suffering for flatness? The worst, least endurable of miseries is boredom. One must die somewhere; few deaths are as painful as a first-class toothache or as depressing as a severe fit of indigestion; you can suffer more on a comfortable death bed than on a battlefield; and meanwhile, there is a very good chance of sunshine and snatched happiness here or there. But what does stir me is my invincible belief that the life I lead and the human life about me are not anything like the good thing that could be and might be. I am not so much frightened and distressed by these wars and national clashes and all the rest of this silly flag-wagging, bragging, shoving business as bored and irritated by these things. I have had some vision of what science and education can do for life and I am haunted by the fine uses that might be made of men and of our splendid possibilities. I do not think of war as a tragic necessity but as a blood-stained mess. When I think of my Europe now, I do not feel like a weakling whose world has been invaded by stupendous and cruel powers; I feel like a man whose promising garden has been invaded by hogs. There is the pacificism of love, the pacificism of pity, the pacificism of commercialism, but also there is the pacificism of utter contempt. This is not a doomed world we live in or anything so tragically dignified; it is a world idiotically spoilt.

Do any of us fully realize the promise of that garden, the promise that can still be rescued from the trampling dullness of old animosities and rivalries which is wrecking it? Given unity of purpose throughout the world, given a surcease of mutual thwarting and destruction, do we realize what science has made possible now and here for mankind?

I shall not indulge in any imaginative anticipations of things still undiscovered in the scientific realm, I will only suppose that things already known and tested are systematically used all over the world, that the good knowledge we have already stored in our laboratories and libraries is really applied with some thoroughness and with some community of purpose to the needs and enlargement of life.

And first let us deal with the commoner material aspects of life in which there have been great changes and improvements in recent times and in which, therefore, it is easiest to imagine still further betterment, given only an assuagement of strife and blind struggle and a spreading out of generosity and the feeling of community from international to social affairs.

Take transport, that very fundamental social concern. It is ripe for great advances. There is all the labor needed in the world, all the skill and knowledge needed, and all the material needed, for these advances. There is everything needed but peace and the recognition of a common purpose. At present, there are railways only over a part of the inhabited world; there are vast areas of Asia and Africa and South America with no railway nor road communication at all and with enormous natural resources scarcely tapped, in consequence. Roads are as yet not nearly so widespread as railways, abundant good roads are founded indeed only in Western Europe and the better developed regions of the United States; there are a few good main roads in such countries as India, South Africa, and so forth. And in many parts of Europe now, and especially in Russia roads and railways are going out of use. Large parts of the world are still only to be reached by a specially equipped expedition; they are as inaccessible to ordinary travelling people as the other side of the moon. And if you will probe into the reasons why road and rail transport fails to develop and is even over wide areas undergoing degradation, you will come in nearly every case upon a political bar, a national or an imperial rivalry. These are the things that close half our world to us and may presently close most of the world to us. And consider even the railroads and roads we have; even those of America or Britain, how poor and uncomfortable they are in comparison with what we know they might be.

And then take housing. I have been motoring about a little in Maryland and Virginia and I am astounded at the many miserable wood houses I see, hovels rather than houses, the abodes very often of white men. I am astounded at the wretched fences about the ill-kept patches of cultivation and by the extreme illiteracy of many of the poorer folk, white as well as colored, with whom I have had a chance of talking. I have to remind myself that I am in what is now the greatest, richest, most powerful country in the world. But with this country now as with every country, army, navy, contentious service, war debt charges and the rest of the legacy of past wars consume the national revenue. America is not spending a tithe of what she ought to be spending upon schools, upon the maintenance of a housing standard and upon roads and transport. She improves in all these things, but at no great pace, because of the disunion of the world and the threat of war. England and France, which were once far ahead of her in these respects of housing, transport and popular education, are now on the whole declining, through the excessive fiscal burthens they are under to pay for the late war and prepare for fresh ones. But I ask you to think what would happen to a world from which that burthen of preparedness was lifted. The first result of that relief would be a diversion of the huge maintenance allowance of the war-God to just these starved and neglected things.

Stanch that waste throughout the earth, and the saved wealth and energy will begin at once to flow in the direction of better houses, towards a steady increase in the order and graciousness of our unkempt and slovenly countrysides, to making better roads throughout the globe, until the globe is accessible, and to a huge enrichment and invigoration of education.

How fair and lovely such countries as France and Germany and Italy might be today if the dark threat of war that keeps them so gaunt and poverty-struck could be lifted from them. Think of the abundant and various loveliness of France and the wit and charm of its varied peoples, now turned sour by the toil and trouble, the fears and bitter suspicions the threat of further war holds over them. Think of France, fearless and at last showing the world what France can do and be. And Italy at last Italy, and Japan, Japan. Think of the green hills of Virginia, covered with stately homes and cheerful houses. Think of a world in which travel is once more free and in which every country in absolute security has been able to resume its own peace-time development of its architecture, its music and all its arts in its own atmosphere upon the foundations of its own past. Because world unity does not mean uniformity; it means security to be different. It is war that forces all men into the same khaki and iron-clad moulds.

But all this recovery of the visible idiosyncracies of nations, all this confident activity and progressive enrichment which will inevitably ensue upon the diversion of human attention from war and death and conflict and mutual thwarting to peace and development, will be but the outer indication of much profounder changes. Relieved of our war burthens, it will be possible to take hold of education as educationists have been longing to do for many years.

They tell us now that every one could be educated up to sixteen or seventeen and that most people may be kept learning and growing mentally all their lives, that no country in the world has enough schools, or properly equipped schools, nor enough properly educated teachers in the schools we have. The supply of university resources is still more meager. There is hardly anyone alive who has not a sense of things that he could know but cannot attain and of powers he can never develop. The number of fully educated and properly nurtured people in the world, people who can be said to have come reasonably near to realizing their full birth possibilities, is almost infinitesimal. The rest of mankind are either physically or mentally stunted, or both. This insolvent, slovenly old world has begotten them, and starved them. Our lives, in strength, in realized capacity, in achievement and happiness are perhaps 20% or 30% of what they ought to be. But if only we could sweep aside these everlasting contentions, these hates and disputes that waste our earth, and get to work upon this educational proposition as a big business man gets to work upon a mineral deposit or the development of an invention, instead of a 20% result we might clamber to an 80% or a 90% result in educated efficiency. I ask you to go through the crowded streets of a town and note the many under-grown and ill-grown, the under-sized, the ill-behaved; to note the appeals to childish, prejudiced and misshapen minds in the shop windows, in the advertisements, in the newspaper headlines at the street corners, and then to try and think of what might be there even now in the place of that street and that crowd.

The wealth and energy were there to make schools and give physical and mental training to all these people, and they have gone to burst shells and smash up the work of men, the organizing power has been wasted upon barren disputes; the science was there and it has been cramped and misused; even the will was there, but it was not organized to effective application. And scarcely a man in the crowd who begets a child, or a woman who bears one, but will dream of its growing to something better than the thwarted hope it will become.

Have you ever examined an aeroplane or a submarine, and realized the thousand beautiful adjustments and devices that have produced its wonderful perfection? Have you ever looked at a street corner loafer and thought of the ten thousand opportunities that have been cast away of saving him from what he has become?

When we follow this line of thought, it becomes clear that our first vision of a world-wide net of fine roads, great steady trains on renewed and broader tracks, long distance aeroplane flights of the securest sort, splendid and beautiful towns, a parklike countryside, studded with delightful homes, was merely the scene and frame for a population of well-grown, well-trained, fully adult human beings. All the world will be accessible to them, mountains to climb, deserts to be alone in, tropics to explore in wonder, beautiful places for rest. And they will be healthy, and happy in the way that only health makes possible. For surely it is no news to any one that a score of horrible tints and diseases that weaken and cripple us, a number of infections, a multitude of ill-nourished and under-nourished states of body, can be completely controlled and banished from life, they and all the misery they entail—given only a common effort, given only human co-operation instead of discussion. The largest visible material harvest of peace is the least harvest of peace. The great harvest will be health and human vigor.

And happiness! Think of the mornings that will some day come, when men will wake to read in the papers of something better than the great 5–5–3 wrangle, of the starvation and disorder of half the world, of the stupid sexual crimes and greedy dishonesties committed by the adults with the undeveloped intelligence of vicious children, of suggestions of horrible plots and designs against our threadbare security, of the dreary necessity for “preparedness.” Think of a morning when the newspaper has mainly _good_ news, of things discovered, of fine things done; think of the common day of a common citizen in a world where debt is no longer a universal burthen, where there is constant progress and no retrogression, where it is the normal thing to walk out of a beautiful house into a clean and splendid street, to pass and meet happy and interesting adults instead of aged children obsessed by neglected spites and jealousies and mean anxieties, to go to some honorable occupation that helps the world forward to a still greater and finer life. You may say that a world may be prosperous and men and women healthy and free and yet there will still be spites and jealousies and all the bitterness of disputation, but that is no more true than that there will still be toothache. A mind educated and cared for, quite as well as a body, can be healed and kept clean and sweet and free from these maddening humiliations and suppressions that now fester in so many souls. There is no real necessity about either physical or mental miserableness in human life. Given, that is, a sufficient release of human energy to bring a proper care within the reach of all. And consider the quality of interest in such a world. Think of the mental quality of a world in which each day the thought and research of a great host of intelligences turns more and more the opaque and confused riddles of yesteryear into transparent lucidity. Think of the forces of personal and national idiosyncracy, of patriotic and racial assertion, seeking and finding their expression not in vile mutual thwarting and a brutish destructiveness, but in the distinctive architecture of cities, in the cultivated and intensified beauty of the countryside, in a hundred forms of art, in costume and custom. Think of the freedom, the abundance, the harmonious differences of such a world!

This is not idle prophecy, this is no dream. Such a world is ours today—if we could but turn the minds of men to realize that it is here for the having. These things can be done, this finer world is within reach. I can write that as confidently today as I wrote in 1900 that men could fly. But whether we are to stop this foolery of international struggle, this moral and mental childishness of patriotic aggressions, this continual bloodshed and squalor, and start out for a world of adult sanity in ten years, or in twenty years, or a hundred years, or never, is more than I can say. In Washington, I have met and seen hopes that seemed invincible, and stupidities and habits and prejudices that seemed insurmountable; I have lived for six weeks in a tangled conflict of great phrases, mean ends, inspiration, illogicality, forgetfulness, flashes of greatness and flashes of grossness. I am no moral accountant to cast a balance and estimate a date. My moods have fluctuated between hope and despair.

But I know that I believe so firmly in this great World at Peace that lies so close to our own, ready to come into being as our wills turn towards it, that I must needs go about this present world of disorder and darkness like an exile doing such feeble things as I can towards the world of my desire, now hopefully, now bitterly, as the moods may happen, until I die.

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¶ Mr. WELLS has also written the following novels:

LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM
KIPPS
MR. POLLY
THE WHEELS OF CHANCE
THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
ANN VERONICA
TONO BUNGAY
MARRIAGE
BEALBY
THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMON
THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH
THE SOUL OF A BISHOP
JOAN AND PETER
THE UNDYING FIRE

¶ The following fantastic and imaginative romances:

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
THE TIME MACHINE
THE WONDERFUL VISIT
THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU
THE SEA LADY
THE SLEEPER AWAKES
THE FOOD OF THE GODS
THE WAR IN THE AIR
THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET
THE WORLD SET FREE

And numerous Short Stories now collected in One Volume under the
title of
THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND

¶ A Series of books on Social, Religious, and Political questions:

ANTICIPATIONS (1900)
MANKIND IN THE MAKING
FIRST AND LAST THINGS
NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
A MODERN UTOPIA
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD
WHAT IS COMING?
WAR AND THE FUTURE
IN THE FOURTH YEAR
GOD THE INVISIBLE KING

¶ And two little books about children’s play, called:

FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. Added table of Contents. 2. Moved ads from before the title page to the end. 3. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling. 4. Retained anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed. 5. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.