After Democracy, by H. G. Wells (1932). A collection of speeches and essays in which Wells presents his vision for a communist Cosmopolitan world.

Transcription and bold emphasis by Peter Gerard Myers.

{...} denotes comments, e.g. page#s.

AFTER DEMOCRACYAddresses and Papers on the Present World Situation

BY H. G. WELLS

LONDON: WATTS & CO., 1932

{p. v}

INTRODUCTION

THE essays (for they are all essays, whether they take the form of address, radio talk, or written contribution) upon the changing aspect of the human adventure, which are included in this volume, have been made on various occasions during the last three years. They are intensely practical essays; they are intended to produce effects upon conduct by suggesting and elucidating ideas. They are almost all attempts to seize the broad lines upon which world changes are going, so as to determine the relative value of different types of educational, social, and political activity. The latest has been put first because it gives the broadest and boldest statement of the fundamental conception of revolution that underlies them all. There has been very little editing done to these articles; they overlap, and they restate the same thing with variations according to the character of the audience addressed. This repetition is not altogether a disadvantage. It gives the reader the opportunity to walk round these ideas, to see them at different angles, to get them in the solid, and not solely from one point of view.

H. G. WELLS.

Chiltern Court,

London.

{p. 1} CHAPTER I

LIBERALISM AND THE REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT

Address to the Liberal Summer School at Oxford, July, 1932

IT is with great trepidation that I face you now. I am notoriously an extremely incompetent speaker; I am indeed unable to speak at all without elaborate previous preparation, and as you see now I am not so much addressing you as reading a paper to you, with, you will note, intermittent attempts to make it sound off-hand and colloquial. The state of funk which makes naturally talkative and opinionated persons bad public speakers is highly discreditable to them. It is a blend of funk pure and simple and a disagreeable self-consciousness. 1 wish 1 did not display it, but I do. As f h funk 1 have a feeling 1 have always had a feeling, that my fellow-men are dangerous. I lack complete confidence in them. I believe they are capable of very unpleasant mass action. When I find a whole audience of them concentrated on me, my instinctive terror rises to such a level, my desire to be propitiatory, evasive and to leave Off as soon as possible, becomes so powerful, that I can neither speak consecutiVely, intelligibly, frankly, nor to a suitable length. I crumple up.

{p. 2} So I have to write it down beforehand.

And then, you see, I am obliged to read straight ahead. Because otherwise I should be left wordless and gibbering. No eleventh-hour after-thoughts must stop me. In this way I bring the courage of the study to the exposure of the arena. That must be my apology in advance if at times you find me a little more aggressive and personal than, as your guest, I might reasonably have been expected to be.

A written address has other disadvantages. It is hard to anticipate the nature of an audience, and the mood in which it will assemble. You cannot tell with any certainty what its composition, spirit, and quality are likely to be. I have made enquiries of Mr. Ramsay Muir and others., I have studied the prospectus of your meetings, but even at the moment of writing I am still not perfectly clear as to what e:--actly the Liberal Summer School is-what it is seeking and what it is proposing to do.

Let me give you my general impression of the idea which has brought us together here : It is that what I may call the Liberal political movement, or Liberal political activities and organizations, are inspired by the idea of being born again--an excellent idea introduced into the world 2.ooo years ago and all too little acted upon. So people like Lord Cecil, Sir Norman Angell, and myself, people not formally associated with the Liberal Party

hitherto and not now guaranteed as being in sympathy with it, have been invited to take a torch, so to speak, and assist in a kind of "Phoenix

{p. 3} 'Rebirth " of Liberalism. I hope I am right in this supposition. Personally I am delighted to bring my torch.

There are one or two elements in the present situation that recall, with a mixture of regret and amusement, a phase of disputes, arguments, maladroit efforts comings and goings-in my life-twenty and more years ago. Then it was not Liberalism but Fabian Socialism that was in a phase of self-distrust. It had the same feeling that it was not somehow catching on as it ought to have caught on, that it was propounding the most obvious, reasonable things and the mass of people were not paying any attention to what it said, that the young found no magic in it and took their beautiful ambitions, their enthusiasms, and their prospective canvassing services and votes elsewhere. I was very unwisely entrusted with the task of preparing a diagnosis of the situation, and I produced a rude and rambling sort of indictment called The Faults of the Fabian. To-day it is practically unobtainable, and so I can tell you just as much and just as little about it as I think proper. When I look back I am impressed by the soundness of my diagnosis of the general political drive of the time-1 am greatly impressed-and equally am I impressed by the impatience, bad-temper, tactlessness, and all-round incapacity with which I attempted to shove my remedial measures upon my fellow Fabians. Never mind the failure now. Let it remain an affair between myself and the recording angel. But the diagnosis of the political position of

{p. 4} Fabianism is worth recalling, because, with certain necessary adaptations, it is much the same as the diagnosis of Liberal perplexities I have to offer now. In effect it was this :

You are proposing to take hold of human lif e and do something considerable with it. You propose to steer England and the Empire, and through them the world, in a certain course that you think is right, and to steer away from a number of possible courses that you think harmful and wrong. You are proposing to make very considerable changes in human circumstances. At least I suppose you mean that much-or if not then I cannot understand what the devil you imagine you are up to here. (Thus I spoke to the Fabian Society, and thus I speak to the Liberal Summer School.) Do you realize how deep down the business of politics, if it is to be a really honest business, goes? I will admit for the sake of argument that you are excellent on the informative and administrative side, and just the brilliant people we want to have making laws and holding office, but do you realize that every step you take to alter the human situation is a step that you must sustain on a foundation of new ideas and new expectations? Are you creating these new expectations, and are you doing the necessary things to establish your new constructive ideas, or are you attempting to build these new in~ stitutions you project on old foundations originally made to carry quite other arrangements? Are you hoping to trade upon and pervert old ideas to new uses, or do you look to other people, outside your

{p. 5} political administrative game, who will carry on a propaganda of new ideas by which you will profit? And from that I went on to urge upon the Fabian Society the need of a vigorous clarification of their ideas, which were still in many respects very untidy and muddled, a propaganda to establish their clarified ideas widely in the community, and an organization to hold the movement together and keep it together for effective educationaland political action.

Now the essential conception of these clarified ideas which I Urged upon the Fabian Society twenty years ago has lost nothing of its validity by the passage of time. I have learnt a lot in the interim, and 1 can put the case much more plainly to you to-day, but the outline of the situation is the same. Let me put my thesis before you as compactly as I can.

The game, if I may call it that, of public affairs has changed_ in its nature. It can no longer be played according to time-honoured rules and precedents. The rules have become unsettled and operate no longer. There are no precedents for most of our modern situations.

What do I mean by this change in the rules? Let me put my hand on one. Human affairs are at present in a phase of exceptional and exceptionally dangerous confusion due to a change m scale in human operations. Because of this change of scale our parochial, municipal, regional, and national government are misfits. They are all too small. They are narrow geographically and mentally. They intensify the local and traditional

{p. 6} interests, and they are unable to express general interests. Vast general interests are becoming more and more important to mankind, and they find no organ to serve them. They go about like souls seeking bodies. They go about like ideas seeking voices and hands. Their proper service is being burked by the small-scale governing and controlling bodies that are in possession of the field.

That was and that is my primary proposition.

In the Fabian days this proposition wag not applied to international affairs. But I did apply it to local government affairs, and we had a great row on that issue. This (and here the fat was in the fire with the Webbs and what was called the old Fabian gang generally)-this consideration of areas, I said, has been overlooked by your Gas, Water, and School-Board socialization. You are, I argued, trying to socialize and nationalize public services and industrial organizations before you have created combetent receivers on a modern scale to handle the interests concerned. I did not use the phrase combetent receiver in these disputes. I wish I had. But I only thought of it later as a phrase to express what I was after. Socialism has been in need of that phrase for a quarter of a century. The exaggeration of your doctrine of the inevitability of gradualness, I urged, and your disregard of the need for prior political revolutions to embody and give effective expression to the new social

and economic life of mankind, are taking you into a blind alley of frustration. You have to reorganize your social and economic

{p. 7} proposals, after a revolution in your ideas about administrative areas.

Now so far indeed as the geographical point of view went, these ideas made some headway in the Fabian Society. A series of tracts was produced under the picturesque, silly, and misleading general heading of The Restoration of the Heptarchy. None of us(I sharedthe general stupidity of the society in full measure) applied the principle of the change of scale to international problems. It needed the Great War to wake us up to that. The Fabian Society could still think exclusively of internal affairs. The Liberal Summer School, on the other hand, has to apply not merely an internal but a general theory of change of scale; it has to apply it to internal and external problems alike.

But the geographical aspect of the change of scale is only its first and most obvious aspect. Beyond that unhappily, the Fabian Society could not be carried. The heat of those now-forgotten disputes centred upon another and to my mind, even then, a much more important issue.

To change administrative areas is to change not merely the range but the nature and quality of governing bodies. It is a revolutionary project, I insisted, that You have in mind, and you cannot avoid the quality of revolution if you are to succeed. But your tendency, 1 told them, is a legal one, because you are mostly politicians and civil servants. You are too deferential. You ask established institutions to change, amalgamate, or abolish themselves. You want the voting machine

{p. 8} which elects certain types of people to alter itself suddenly so as to elect different types of people. And it cannot be done like that. You are evading the revolutionary part of your work. Chief of your faults is the feebleness and a sort of disingenuousness in your propaganda of ideas. You have to organize an appeal beyond, the range of existing legislative directive and administrative forms, and you do not like the job. I prayed the Fabian Society to conquer that aversion. You have, I argued, to go to the studentsto the young generally. You have to appeal also to the detached adult mind which at present is not entangled in public affairs. You have to create a power of belief and devotion for Socialism in the community generally, and an antagonism at least sufficiently menacing to be stimulating to the people at present in control. Have the energy and patience for ten, fifteen, twenty years of educational preparation on these lines, I said to the Fabian Society, and the world is yours. Preach the New World now in the minds of the Old World. Evoke a generation inspired by a realization of human possibility. Make the. conception of an organized big scale community the mental basis of that new generation. Then and then only can we hope to enter the promised land of a planned and socialized world of freedom and abundance.

That was the gist of my exhortations to the Fabian Society twenty years ago.

The Fabian Society brushed aside these exhortations. It was too busy about its contemporary nothingness.

{p. 9} It would not search its heart and explain itself and appeal to the general intelligence by a propaganda. So it muddled along in undertones and ended at last

in the complete inaudibility of Lord Passfield in the House of Lords.

Now do not imagine that I am claiming to have been the one single clear-headed person in the Fabian Society at that time. Nothing of the sort. I displayed no outstanding lucidity. The doubts and questions I set going were troubling a lot of these people. But they did not want to be troubled by them. They fought against them. I didn't. I was the most detached and irresponsible person in the society, and therefore the one most free to express and urge these difficulties. And, as I confess, I don't think I did it nearly as well as I ought to have done it. Nevertheless, I was right,- extremely right about certain things. I hate to recall how right I was about certain things because when I do so I have also to realize how ineffective -how almost criminally indolent-I was about them and how petulantly I threw up a game in which I held all the winning cards.

I have just used the words competent receiver as the missing idea in our Socialism of thirty years ago. We wanted to socialize and nationalize this that and the other general interest, and we had not made the slightest examination of the administrative problems they were creating.

Well, I would like to say a little more here and now about that idea of the competent receiver. By com-

{p. 10} petent receiver I mean an organization, a responsible organization, able to guide and rule the new scale human community that is struggling to exist to-day among the entanglements of the old. I think that for the new realist politics that must replace old traditional politics in your minds if your Liberalism is ever to produce any fruit for mankind-this idea of the creation of a competent receiver is absolutely the central idea. It is a vitally important idea, and it is flatly opposed to those conceptions of parliamentary democracy in which my generation was born and brought up. To grasp it we had mentally to be born again.

As I look back upon my own reflections of life during the last third of a century, I am interested to note how that idea of the need of a competent receiver has always troubled me and how slow I have been in escaping from

my inherited preconceptions and giving it its proper value in my scheme of things. But it has always been cropping Up in my mind. I have never been able to escape altogether from its relentless logic. It appears first in Anticipations in 1900, when I made a criticism of "Modern Democracy " which I have been repeating at intervals ever since-and which is always received (I don't know why), every time I repeat it, as a novel abandonment of Some imaginary earlier opinions of mine.

Well, in that book of a third of a century ago I projected a special class of people, which I called The New Republic, who would supply just that coherence of ideas and will that unorganized democracy cannot give.

{p. 11} The same stuff cropped up again in the Modern Utopia somewhen about 1904. That Modern Utopia was a World State run by a special organization which I called rather absurdly The Samurai. In those days no organization of the sort existed or had ever existed. The only previous adumbration of the idea is to be found in the Guardian of Plato's Republic. But I have to point out that since that book-not as any sort of consequence of that book, but simply because the drive of constructive forces has been in precisely the. direction that book indicated-there has been a series of concrete expressions of this same idea, this same plain need. We have seen The Fascisti in Italy and a number of clumsy imitations elsewhere, and we have seen the Russian Communist Party coming into existence to reinforce this idea, which was at first nothing more than a deduction from contemporary difficulties. Parallel riddles produced a very remarkable parallelism at certain points between those Samurai and Lenin's reorganization of the Communist Movement.

Let me state this new idea in politics as I conceive it.

There must be a systematic organization of the will and ideas of public-minded, masterful people to handle the problems of the modern state, and a modernized state cannot come into complete existence, much less get along, without the directive and sustaining control of such an organization.

That is the cardinal idea for the sake of which I have come to Oxford.

Undeterred by half a lifetime of ineffectiveness, I

{p. 12} still keep on turning over that idea, and republishing it as a new idea, with very slight variations. Recently I have been presenting it under the name of The Open Conspiracy. I shall keep on turning over that idea and trying out its possibilities under fresh labels until I die. I look to see a militant organization coming into existence to do for scientific social and political Liberalism throughout the world what the Communist Party has done for the Communist idea in Russia. I want to see a gathering body of people turning their faces resolutely towards the release of the human community from the entanglements of the past-release from the tradition of national sovereignty, release from strangulation of inelastic debts, release from the economic brigandage of private enterprise, release from ignorance and bad habits of relationship. Plainly I do not convey my message very attractively or compellingly. I do what I can. Other people will presently do it better. I believe such a forward-looking organization is fundamental to a progressive civilization. I believe that a progressive civilization can be no better than a run of good luck, with no essential continuity, until such a sustaining organization is attained.

Now this thesis of the necessity of replacing crude democracy by a control organization of people interested in government has in various forms been before the world now for a third of a century. It has taken material form in a number of countries. 'Why has it not caught on yet in the big English-speaking communities ?

{p. 13} Incompetence of its advocates no doubt explains this to some extent-more heroic and persistent men might have done much with these ideas, which, in such hands as mine, have been rather like a bunch of flowers picked by a hot-fisted child. But there were stronger reasons than that.

The times in these communities were not ripe for it.

There was, in particular, no supply of the sort of youth, the sort of people who would take up that enterprise.

There seemed to be no need for it. The world looked like a going concern in which there might be a job for everybody for an indefinite time. Why worry?

What happened in that Fabian Society twenty odd years ago.? We did make the society sit up. We did attract all sorts of bright and hopeful people to the society. But the society could not be induced to look beyond the Britain that was then. It never believed in its revolution. The parliamentary system and the current business system had an air of invincible finality. Imperialism also was fashionable, and some of the members wanted an Imperialist Socialism, -so as to get a bit of push for their self-advancement from Kipling as well as Karl Marx. They saw everything in terms of the existing system and themselves. They would not look at the idea of a new world. They wanted careers. They wanted to go into Parliament and shine, as Cobden and Gladstone and Palmerston and Disraeli had shone.

{p. 14} They wanted to do brilliant things in current political life. They did not want to bother about a guiding system of ideas, or the strategy of world reconstruction, or any tosh of that sort. They saw in Socialism not so much a sincere scheme of social reconstruction as an attractive system of promises. They wanted the label of

Socialism, and not the reality, in order to get down to the hard tacks of personal advancement. They were, in fact, as human as mo st politicians. Whether you here in this Summer School are any better I do not know.

So the Renascence of Fabianism petered out in hasty politics and intellectual confusion. We got no great propaganda of organization going. A number of the members laid the foundations of political careers in these discussions. Lots of them got into Parliament, and a lot of them have since got out again.

Let us recall very briefly the story of the rise, decline, and fall of the Labour Party since it developed a kind of self-consciousness under the Fabian stimulus. It may throw a very helpful light on the outlook of the party whose prospects we have met to consider.

The history of Labour politics in Great Britain is the history of a party too impatient and individually too self-seeking, too miscellaneous in its origins and too shallow and emotional in its mental processes, to work out and abide by any consistent ideas. It was unableto develop either a detailed creed or a discipline. Vague promises of social reform were considered to be safer vote-catchers than studied proposals. When at last

{p. 15} those people who had used the hope and prestige of the Socialist movement to get into public affairsMacDonald of course made his own quite characteristic ladder out of the I.L.P.-when they came into power they found themselves without a common answer ready for any single real issue that confronted them.

They were really hardly better than a sentimental gang, and they were rotten with those private animosities inevitable in an assembly of untrained, ambitious, loose-minded men of various culture. The country expected much of them, new initiatives-something better than what they called the " faded formulze " of Liberalism, and so on. It found they had neither the internal nor the external disciplines needed to make their promises of well-being good. In the face of every test they revealed empty minds and lax principles. We have now been able to judge Labour in office on two occasions. Among its ranks, I must admit', are some extremely able, amiable, and well-meaning figureE. But as a party it is plainly feeble-minded. Feeble in thought and feeble in will. As a party.

It is amazing what it failed to do. We discovered that it had not even a conception of a new education for the new time. I will not say it had never thought that out. It had never thou iht about it at all. It had 9

a weak feeling that education had to be carried on for a year or so more, but where it had to be carried on to it had not the ghost of an idea. It is less surprising that it had no distinctive foreign policy beyond a mawkish field-preacher's sentimentality in relation to Geneva.

{p. 16} It showed no courage with the private armament firms. No courage with the man in uniform. No sense of the need for scientific research. No protection of life and enterprise from the strangulating grip of the landlordno ideas about the land that Mr. Lloyd George had not already advocated with far more vigour and consistency. And at last, when the crisis of the gold standard rushed upon it, when an almost luminously plain issue arose between the creditor, privilege, tradition, and possessions, on the one hand, and the general welfare of the community, on the other, it went completely to pieces.

The leading politicians of this party, in spite of all its pretensions to care distinctively for the disinherited, turned at once to sustain the rule of gold over human life. They turned-partly, I think, because of a miserly instinct in the case of Snowden, whose psycho-analysis would be very interesting, but also through sheer fright and ignorance in the case of MacDonald and one or two others-to the side of gold, to the side of the progressive strangulation of human welfare in the interests of a creditor minority.

The King was so badly advised as to depart from his proper political and social neutrality and lead the movement for cheese-paring and for grinding the faces of the needy in the interests of the debt-collector. And not a soul in the Labour Party said what ought to have been said about this use of the King or about all that miserable campaign of unintelligent economy which cast its dismal shadow over the closing months of 1931.

{p. 17} So much for the Labour Party" In its present form it has failed. It is a wreck. Its complete moral and mental default demonstrates the futility of any movement under modern conditions that is not based upon and sustained by a vigorous mental organization, but which relies instead upon what are called " leaders " and party labels and grouping and conspiracies of persons. That was all very well in the small-scale democracies of Greece, or the small nations of the eighteenth century; it is no good now. Put to the test of opportunity, the Labour Party proved itself all spouting mouth and clutching hands, and no brain or backbone-and whether the wreck will ever be got afloat again is a matter about which I cannot get sufficiently excited to speculate.

Well, well, there it is. Let us talk now of Liberalism. The Liberal Summer School of 1932 !

What is going to happen to this little flutter of Renascence in Liberalism, here and now? What are you after, my dear audience? Is it the same old story over again-Parliament, jobs, brilliant careers, tinpot electioneering-or has it occurred to you that the World State which seemed perhaps still very far off to your Fabian predecessors twenty-five years ago is now an urgent necessity for mankind, and that unless we get a real body of creative will into action to evoke and sustain it, very soon indeed, this tottering civilization of ours is going to stagger down past redemption to chaotic violence and decadence? Then it will be a world for the gangster type-and not for you.

{p. 18} Let me ask now, What is Liberalism? in whose name we are taking counsel together to-day.

Well, I have tried over a great number of definitions of this word. Freedom comes into most of them, but it is always associated with law and order. That distinguishes Liberalism from Anarchism. And, after a considerable period of selection, I have ventured to propound a new definition of my own, which I think -assembles under one head everything that anyone at any time has defined as Liberal.

I think it is possible to maintain that Liberalism is this: it is the implicit recognition of the possibility of one Prosperous and Progressive world community of just, kindly, free-spirited, freely-thinking, and freely-speaking human beings, and it is a struggle to release humanity from all that impedes our Present realization of that Possibility.

I know that is a rather unorthodox definition. But I ask you to bring to the test of that definition any other definition or statement of what is Liberal and Liberalism, and you will, I think, find that it is covered by that conception of an implicit world community.

We talk, for instance, of freedom of speech and thought-freedom of criticism-as characteristically Liberal. Why? Why should we insist upon free speech? If everything is rightly ordered now, if everything is known, why insist that fundamentals are to be criticized? The only justification for this emphasis upon free speech is that accepted opinion is provisional

{p. 19} -that there are longer views and broader truths yet to be stated. And that-unless we believe that nothing can be right or righter than anything else-implies a belief in a potential comprehensive order which the acids of enquiry must bite out of the confusions of the present. There can be no Liberalism that is not freely critical, because there can be no Liberalism that is not progressive. Progress must have an objective, and the only rational obj e'ctive that I can see is world civilization.

Still more plainly does this definition cover the characteristic Liberal objections to privilege, to fixed class distinctions, to distinctions between creeds and races-to all intolerance, to all those things we associate with the word " tyranny. " Underlying all these Liberal repudiations is the same implication that our present human arrangements are Provisional, merely temporary arrangements, with which we put up while we get on towards our goal of a world commonweal, which itself will not be provisional, but continually creative.

And, on the other hand, if you consider anything and everything you regard as typically anti-Liberal, you will find that essentially it always comes down to something in the future of a hold-up on the way to the human commonweal-absolute monarchy, hereditary aristocracy, dogma, prejudice, rigid organization, rule by conquest, oppression of inferior races, restraint upon knowledge. Your immediate recognition of these things as essentially anti-Liberal verifies this conclusion I have drawn from the positive aspects of Liberalism : that Liberalism is the belief in and attempt to evoke the one

{p. 20} human commonweal, one common citizenship, upon this earth.

Liberalism, then, means the progressive, world State; that is its spirit and objective, even if Liberalism has not always realized the full implication of its thoughts and feelings.

And so the good Liberal is necessarily a radical reformer, attempting continually to release the world State from its entanglement in non-progressive and strangulating institutions, laws, debts, and prejudices. And this is not because Liberalism is anarchistic, not because it repudiates law and discipline, but because it seeks to create world-wide flexible and progressive directions and institutions in the place of the restrictive legacies from the past in which human life is still entangled.

It is natural and proper therefore, that the opposite term to Liberalism should be Conservatism : the Preservation of the thing that was and still is. True Liberalism never conserves. Continually it reconstructs.

In Liberalism and Conservatism we have two fundamental opposites in human affairs as we know them

creation and tradition. It is entirely consistent with this that Liberalism, whenever it has been honest, has been against rents and rack rents, against inherited and accumulating advantages and privileges, and against the creditor. While, on the other hand, Conservatism has been always on the side of established property, the creditor, the fellow in the saddle, the lord in possession, the active king.

{p. 21} Liberalism has been the friend of the debtor, the downtrodden, the masses. It is. the spirit of release and enlargement. It expresses needs. Conservatism has been for the strong and even violent hand, for claims and impositions, and for all established and authoritative things. It is the spirit of obligation and restriction. It expresses claims.

The conflict of Conservatism and Liberalism is the conflict between past claims and future achievement. It can be nothing else.

Liberalism is surely the mental quality of all intelligent men throughout the world; it is the forwardlooking anticipation of the greater civilization which lies ahead. By contrast, Conservatism is natioUal, local, various, entrenched in a multitude of different forms and frontiers-a smaller thing and a smallerspirited thing than Liberalism. Liberalism ought to be a greater thing than Conservatism. And it is a greater thing. It is a giant who should dominate an earth ruled by dwarfs.

But at present it does not dominate the earth. Need I tell the Liberal Summer School how little it dominates the earth ? At present one has to remark that if Liberalism is a giant it is an extraordinarily feeble giant. And that it fares ill among a multitude of extremely fierce and vigorous dwarfs.

Consider its patent feebleness at the present time. It has no grip on education. It has never_ established a grip on education. It lifts a piping reasonableness that is almost completely drowned amidst a clamour of

{p. 22} violent short views in the Press. It is continually being kicked hard by gangsters, lawbreakers, Mussolini, Stalin, Japan, the Catholic Church, Kipling, Shaw, and so forth and so on. Need I remind a Liberal Summer School of that peculiar kicked feeling?

In the United States Liberalism has been completely suppressed for over a hundred years. That is due to its own blundering. In its days of opportunity it devised a Constitution of incredible pedantry, and that Constitution was studied very carefully, and then jumped by two powerful gangs, the Republican and the Democratic Parties, which have ever since ruled the country with much violence and disingenuousness, a clqse association with gangsters, and an extremely efficient suppression of radical and socially constructive ideas. In Great Britain and France, Liberalism is made practically inaudible to the mass of people by a more and more reactionary Press. In Italy what is left of Liberalism languishes in the Islands. In Ireland it sits between the priest and the gangster, awaiting its quietus. In Russia it is in blinkers and under suspicion. And so on throughout the world-the Sturdy Dwarfs have it.

Yet there never was such a need for Liberalism and direct Liberal political activity as there is now. There has never been a time when the giant might make so compelling an appeal as he could now.

First, there is the appalling collapse of the world monetary and credit system. I will not dilate here on the broad lines of that collapse. It is essentially a strangulation of human life by two main processes

{p. 23} namely, the restriction of any monetary expansion to keep pace with production, so that the world is handed over to the killing claims of Shylock, and with that such a sustained restriction upon, public enterprises and public expenditure-and public control of working hours and so forth-as would take up the continually increasing slack of unemployment that increasipg productive efficiency causes. The world is so plainly in need of these two things-Monetary ease andincreased collective enterprise-that I will not insult and delay you by stating the case for them now. Strangulation by debts twisted up by tighter and,tighter money, and starvation through the continual restriction of employment, are the two things that are destroying the economic life of the world. It is a world-wide disaster -going on under our silly eyes. The dwarfs cannot handle it. They complicate it more and more. The dwarfish nationalist mind cannot deal with this because it is incapable of the necessary breadth and simplicity. The Liberal giant might. It is his opportunity.

If Liberalism had a voice (and a backbone), and went out now to proclaim liberty-liberation from debt, from shabby economies, from poverty and fear, from the military slavery caused by nationalism, from old and entangling institutions, and from ignorance-Liberalism could sweep up the conquered hearts of seven-eighths of mankind.

But the fact is that Liberalism has no voice worth speaking about, and so the call never gets to mankindand as for a backbone !

{p. 24} With that mention of a backbone, I come back again to the consideration I have already advanced-that the conditions of political life have changed fundamentally, and that parliamentary events can no longer be regarded as of primary importance in collective affairs. Liberalism, of all things, cannot afford to be conservative in its methods and instruments. It has to move with the times, and alter its strategy and tactics to meet the demands of changed conditions. The sentimental casualness of nineteenth-century Liberalism is no good in this harder and more exacting age. It never was much good. When I speak of Liberalism developing a backbone, I mean hard conviction and hard effort; I mean nothing less than the deliberate organization of an education, a definite Liberal education, and a discipline, a definite Liberal discipline, and a programme, a definite guiding programme, for human liberation and the attainment of the world State. I mean the reorientation of the objectives, and indeed of the whole lives, of those who would call themselves Liberals, to a world plan and to the discipline and education needed to carry it out. I am asking that we Liberals shall bring together all our dispersed good intentions and aspirations into an effective phalanx to enforce the stated principles that we hold in common. I suggest you study the reinvigoration of Catholicism by Loyola.

For Catholicism also was once a feeble giant. I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis; I am proposing that you consider the formation of a greater Communist Party, a Western response to Russia.

{p. 25} We shall get no further towards the Liberal world-state that has been the implicit background of Liberal thought for a century, we shall recede from it, we shall cease even to play an arresting role in the present degringolade of civilization, unless we give our wills that much of ordered definition. And the first movement of this new-banded Liberalism, this league of Liberal action, this world-renascence, must be, not a return towards the dreary corridors of Westminster, but an advance on the points where activities will be most effective, an attack to liberalizate and release the Press and to inaugurate agigantic Liberal educational movement, a great movement in the general mind leading to irresistible political action.

And do not let me leave you in the slightest doubt as to the scope and ambition of what I am putting before you. These new organizations are not merely organizations for the spread of defined opinions; they are not ancillary, not sub-parliamentary-the days for that sort of amateurism are over-they are organizations to refilace the dilatory indecisiveness of parliamentary control. The world is sick of parliamentary politics. Each aspired to become a competent receiver within the limits of its range. The Fascist Party, to the best of its ability, is Italy now. The Communist Party, to the best of its ability, is Russia. Obviously the Fascists of Liberalism must carry out a parallel ambition on a still vaster scale. They must Prepare, they must set themselves to build up, from now onward, a competent receiver for all the present disorders of our bankrupt

{p. 26} world. They must begin as a disciplined sect, but they must end as the sustaining organization of a reconstituted mankind.

That, you may say, is grandiose. It is not more grandiose than the Communist conception. At times recently I have asked myself, Are we really as much the intellectual and moral inferiors of that band of Russian Jews as we seem to be? Are we indeed, by comparison, nit-wits, feeble wills, and shysters? Some answer may appear in the subsequent debate. But if Western Liberalism cannot rise to organization and planning on a world scale, then, since we must have some comprehensive plan on which we must work, it is to Communism we shall have to turn-we outsiders, that is, the young people with foresight, everybody in the world who still holds to hope and enterprise and is boredoh ! how bored-by want, anxiety, and danger in the midst of Potential peace and plenty. Communism, let me remind you, has now for certain types of mind the same attractive quality as Catholicism has for others. It is an organization in being. It is ready to receive us.

Let me make a confession:

As I utter these trumpet notes, I have at the back of my mind a memory of a particularly deadly caricature of Max Beerbohm's. It represented Walt Whitman inciting the American Eagle to soar; and it was. a manifestly very sick and apathetic American Eagle. Some of You may recall it.

Well, am I not providing material for a parallel caricature in these proposals of mine to ginger up the

{p. 27} feeble giant of modern Liberalism to his mighty opportunities ?

Can he be gingered up?

The attempt, I admit, is hedged with difficulty and danger on every side. Difficully because the very nature of the Liberal mind makes it more impatient of discipline and associated subordination than every other type. Danger because at every stage in such a development there will be a constant temptation to barter Liberal principles for strategic advantages. So far there has been nothing to encourage hope that Liberalism will ever achieve the tone and spirit of a militant body-nothing at all.

The Liberalism of the nineteenth century, we must remember, never even laid hands on the education of the public mind. It never mastered the Press. It never faced up to our quietly but obstinately reactionary monarchy. It allowed that loquacious old Tory, Gladstone, with his Garvinesque e erudition about Homer and his appalling ignorance of science, to burke the modernization of the universities. So that there is practically no Liberal education in the British Empire at the present time because of these defaults.

There is no nucleus of educated youth, therefore, available now for a Movement of Regeneration on Liberal lines, so far as I can see-and no means of disseminating this idea of constructive organization through the general social body. There is no perceptible body of will to remedy this. . . .

Well, what do you think of all this ? Have I pro-

{p. 28} vided you with material for a fundamental discussion ? which has been my sole motive in coming here. Do you think there is a possibility of Western Liberalism producing anything to compare with the creative courage and energy of Russian Communism? Or are the Sturdy Dwarfs to be left in possession of our Western world?

You may decide that such an effort as I have put before you is hopeless, that our feeble giant cannot be gingered up to fight and rule. I shall listen with interest to what you have to say about that.

Some of you will be inclined perhaps to say that I have not been talking practical politics. So much the worse for practical politics. From the point of view of your immediate careers, I will admit, you may be right in discounting what I have said as extravagances. But then let us be clear in our minds that, if what I have said is extravagant

and impossible, the outlook for Liberalism-real Liberalism, I mean, as distinguished from a doubtfully useful parliamentary label-is hopeless; that the outlook for all that we, as Liberals, profess to value in human life is hopeless-unless we turn our faces eastward and accept that as a sunrise. The dance of the Dwarfs will proceed.

If Liberalism cannot produce an adequate effort, let us at least face realities. Let us eat, drink, and see Oxford; for to-morrow, politically speaking, we die.

{p. 29} CHAPTER II

PROJECT OF A LIBERAL WORLD ORGANIZATION

A Footnote to the Preceding Address

THIs address was a failure so far as any public recognition of our urgent need for organizing a competent receiver in human affairs was concerned. The Press seized upon the " attack " on the King and the " attack " on the Labour Party and so forth; prominent people were waylaid by journalists with scraps from the lecture, and induced to display loyalty and say rude things about it for publication, while its broad and serious propositions were practically ignored. Probably most of the reviewers of this book will do very much the same with it. They will present it as a series of haphazard personal onslaughts, and ignore the ideas with which I pursue them. Yet it is a clear and sound argument, which should be of very great interest to many people-if I could only get it to them-and there is not a single personal allusion in it from start to finish which is not strictly illustrative of the political and social processes I am criticizing.

This difficulty with the Press is always cropping up in dealing with questions of this kind. If the discussion is not made to touch persons, the reporters remain

{p. 30} inattentive; the treatment is " academic," they realize and is therefore not " news "; but if it is brought to bear upon sensitive actualities, then a sort of attention is drawn to it, because of the chance of arousing resentment and hastv re-prisals. This particular address, as an address, had a loud , silly "press"; it was pointed out by a number of People, including Mr. Bernard Shaw, that Liberalism is different in many respects from Italian Fascism, which I was assumed, God knows why, to have advocated, and then, so far as the general public was concerned, it dropped into oblivion.

But in and about the Liberal Summer School to which the paper was read there was a more intelligent response. A number of young men and women did find something very congenial to what was working in their own minds in the idea of an organization which should begin with propaganda and politics and end as the competent receiver of social, economic, and political controls. They came along to me, and proposed a talk which I found very illuminating and helpful. Their action imposed a certain wholesome definiteness of detail upon me, and it may be of some interest to make a note here of the outcome of that conversation. The main question in their minds was this-that, granting the need of a constructive revolution in the economic, monetary, and political controls of the world, and granting also their own wish to play a r6le in it, how were they to set about it ? -

I have hitherto left such projecting for someone else to do. For reasons obscure even to myself, I shirked

{p. 31} it, although it followed necessarily upon the thesis of The Open Conspiracy and its predecessors. I have little or no organizing power, and I am deficient in

most of the qualities of a leader of men; but now I felt that, having come so far in the way of foreshadowing a competent receiver, I was bound to do what I could to put my conception of a general plan of action before them in as concrete a form as possible. And it is the sketch of a possible revolutionary organization I gave them in that Oxford conversation that I am now setting down here in a very slightly modified and amplified form.

The basic structure of such an organization must be, I submitted, a series of local groups of anything between from six to two or three hundred members, each planned primarily as a society for self-education research, and propaganda. I laid great stress upon the educational element. It has been the weakness of most political movements of the past century that they did not insist upon mental homogeneity. They have traded upon whatever ideas were about. But there is a considerable body of new knowledge and new ideas which every member of a really efficient revolutionary organization should possess. There should be a common vision of the world, a common conception of history and morals and political conditions, and a clear and definite idea of the common objective of the movement. So with that I start.

At any cost in restraint upon immediate growth, this mental common-stock must be attained. The ideas,

{p. 32} the knowledge, must be insisted upon. There must be some board or committee in relation to each group, competent to judge the qualification of candidates for full membership, and an associate of the movement should not be admitted to participation in its proceedings and work until that much proficiency is assured. People who understand only vaguely, or who have gaps of fundamental ignorance about the framework in which they live, are of no use to the movement we have in mind. They must have a - broad knowledge of general history, some apprehension of the principles of biological science, and a clear knowledge of the working principles of the industrial, economic, and financial life of mankind. The primary duty of our organization, therefore, must be to see that that is so. At present only the Communist Party troubles to establish such a basic general mentality, and a large part of its success in the world is indubitably due to the persistent

teaching and training that still go on. Most Labour Parties, on the contrary, meet to debate, but none meets to learn. The relative incoherence of Labour politics is largely owing to this neglect.

As a basis, then, of our projected revolution, there must be these primary societies for a continuing educational work. Naturally the individual associations, as they arise, will have to be grouped into regions and countries, and will need to elect some sort of central educational council to keep the teaching and study as uniform as possible throughout the entire world. There will have to be an extensive network for book

{p. 33} distribution, for translations, for the revision of the syllabus of knowledge, and suchlike purposes. In some lands a large part of the actual teaching (of history, for example) may have been done already in the existing common schools available for the public; but for a time, until it can actually control the schools itself, the new movement will have to supplement extensively, or even contradict, correct, and replace, the misleading history, biology, and economics, such as they are, of contemporary education. This persistent educational work must be the daily life of the general organization; every member, every associate, must engage and continue to engage in it. It will take the place of the ritual services and teaching of the militant religions that have controlled and guided the life of the community in the past. The movement will be better without people who will not bring in their minds to this extent. We do not want those to meddle with the affairs of the world who have neither the patience nor the humility to learn.

Having thus assured a working uniformity of attitude throughout the revolutionary body, the next function of our movement is to give it the means of effective assariated action.

All its members may not be either willin or able or necessary to do the aggressive and expanding work at which the movement aims. For many types of activity, ordered co-operation and discipline are inevitable; and so I proposed a distinction between ordinary and militant members, and that it should be open to ordinary members to become

{p. 34} militant members or, after due notice, to resign their militancy. The militant members will be the acting section of the movement, and from them will be drawn all its officials, directors, and responsible workers. Such a distinction is already made in Russia between the Communist who is a member of the Party and the Communist who is not, and the Samurai in my Modern Utopia had the same in-and-out arrangement.

The militant members will all be drawn from the local societies; they will all be members of those societies; but it may be found advisable in practice to group them for action in a different fashion, and the general direction of their activities may well be quite different from that of the primary educational organization.

Beyond these broad principles of organization, I will offer nothing about the form of the new movement. I will indulge in no speculations about the various " arms," the infantry, air forces, " shock troops," and so forth, under which it may be found advisable to organize the militant members. I will turn rather to the general principles which the new movement will embody. There will have to be some sort of declaration of these, binding upon every member and associate -something after the fashion of the " Basis of the Fabian Society. The exact drafting of such a Basis " is a task for the organizing body, but I can conceive it as running in something like the following fashion. (I have deliberately sounded the modern note in what follows, and avoided the rhetorical quality of such a

{p. 35} primary document as, for example, the Communist Manifesto. And I leave the name of the organization blank; it might be "the 1932 Society," "the New Radical Party," " the Communist Revision," " the Modern Socialist Party," " the Open Conspiracy," " the New World," " Civilization," or endless other names. I call it here the Z society.)

The Z society exists for the discussion, study, research, and propaganda of the sciences of social biology, and for the effective application of their principles to the reorganization and enlargement of human life.

It directs its energies to : (i) the defence in every possible way of free speech and free publication; (ii) the enforcement of honest government and its protection from the legal or illegal pressure of individual and group interests; (iii) the maintenance of social order, the suppression of the traffic in and the carriage and use of private weapons, and (iv) the progressive socialization of the collective economic affairs of mankind, as swiftly as competent administrative organizations can be evolved to take them over from their present chaotic direction by private, over-localized, and quasi-public owners.

The Z society recognizes that in a progressive phase of humanity such as we live in to-day, in which the efficiency of production is steadily increasing, the former methods of distributing purchasing power through wages under a profit-seeking system are breaking down very rapidly, and that collective enterprise on a larger scale-the

{p. 36} rebuilding of entire cities, for example, and the replan-. ning of the whole world-becomes the necessary form of human social activity. The Z society recognizes also that contemporary methods and conventions about money and credit have grown up in a planless fashion, and need now to be revised, controlled, and simplified, for the adequate restraint of the creditor, the proper stimulation of initiative, and the common welfare of mankind. But in both these matters, the development of collective enterprise and the rationalization of money, progress is at present enormously impeded, and in some directions arrested, by the division of the control of human affairs among about six dozen sovereign governments, all acting independently of each other and often

in immediate or prospective antagonism to each other. The Z society declares itself to be in absolute opposition to the continued existence of separate sovereign governments in the world. It repudiates any but a provisional loyalty to all such governments. It directs its activities towards all practicable internationalizations that will lead at last to a Federal Cosmopolitan Supervision and Control by a special responsible body or bodies, of at least:-

(a) Money and Credit-involving one world banking organization and a world money.

(b) The world production of staples.

(c) Transport and population movements.

(d) Labour conditions (including naturally an entire suppression of slavery), and

(e) The manufacture and trade in weapons, a

{p. 37} trade which it is now urgently necessary to take out of the region of private profit altogether.

And, furthermore, the Z society will set itself to the maintenance by continual enquiry, advice, assistance, and if necessary intervention, of

(f) A minimum standard of education everywhere; (g) The universal accessibility of a necessary minimum of current information about life and the world's affairs, and

(h) Such elementary social rights as the pursuit of happiness and free movement, protection from wanton' imprisonment, from organized or unorganized violence, from robbery and avoidable infection. In all such matters the ultimate control can now be, and should be, a world-Wide affair.

The Z society limits its activities

only with the limits of its powers. It acknowledges no more than a conditional loyalty to any established government or authority. It repudiates the belief that majority decisions, whether embodied in parliamentary or suchlike institutions or expressed by mass or mob action, are necessarily right, or necessarily to be respected. It seeks its ends irrespective of the numbers of its supporters. Governments must be judged and dealt with according to their respect for the broad ends of the Z society. They are products of human association, and so is the Z society. There is no magic sacredness, no essential superiority, about governments. Governments

{p. 38} which act according to the standards of the Z society are to be supported and served, and those which do not do so are to be opposed with all the energy the society can bring to the task and in every possible way that the situation renders advisable. The support of honest governments, and a strict regard for law and order, which have been put in the forefront of the duties of the members of the Z society, are subject to the condition that the acts of governments be themselves reasonable and legal, and that the law respect the prior claims of the common welfare of humanity and the elementary rights of the individual. When it does not do so, a government is just as much a criminal and an outlaw as an outrageous gang or an outrageous individual. This denial to governments of any absolute rights is a fundamental article with the Z society.

With that my proposed Basis concludes. That, to the best of my ability, is the sort of association, party, movement, creed, religion, devotion (call it what you will) which is needed at the present time to pull human affairs together. Anyone anywhere, subject to local tyrannies and obstacles, is free to begin to get together with other people upon such a basis. You can start the New World in any village. You can start it in a railway carriage or on a ship. There is no need to wait for " leaders." If men were meant to hang on to leaders and rulers, they would have had hooks instead of brains at the top of them. The educational work and some elementary political activi-

{p. 39} ties can begin forthwith. Wherever there are two or three gathered together, there is the New World begun. Efforts can then be made to get into touch with other similar and sympathetic beginnings. Large strong groups may attempt publications and the organization of their feebler, more scattered brethren. In quite a brief time the union of Z societies might become a formidable power throughout the entire world, and the foundations of a Liberal world order would be laid. The feeble giant would have found a backbone, and would be finding a voice and willing hands at his disposal. He would begin to tackle the Sturdy Dwarfs with some hope of success.

{p. 40} CHAPTER III

THE COMMON-SENSE OF WORLD PEACELecture delivered in the Reichstag to a Liteyary Society in April 1929

You have done me an enormous honour in your invitation to come and talk to you. I will not waste your time in expressing my very acute sense of my unworthiness for this opportunity of speaking to you. I have accepted it very gladly.

For some time my mind has been greatly concerned with the question of the Peace of the World. I am not exceptional in that. I am one of those people who would like to see the ages of warfare brought to an end and a new volume of human history begun. I am firmly convinced of the possibility of such a fresh beginning. I believe that mankind can and will some day live without making war at all-and that a world commonweal is attainable-but I believe it can be attained only after a long and complicated struggle. It is about the nature of that struggle that I propose to talk this evening.

Will you forgive me one word of personal explanation ? I believe that in 1914 1 was responsible for the phrase, The War to End War. In August 1914 it

{p. 41} seemed to me that the culminating explosion of the age of armament had arrived, that the essential futility of the prevailing ideas of militant nationalism was to be demonstrated beyond dispute. And I believed it could be demonstrated in no other manner. I believed that amidst the thunder of the guns the search for Pax Mundi must begin. Nothing that has happened since has altered that essential conviction. It did begin. It has begun. Our wounded and tormented but by no means exhausted world is now struggling away from the traditions of militant nationalism towards the great but still imperfectly apprehended possibilities of a World Pax.

I do not propose to-night to waste your time in any abstract discussion between Peace and War. To-day our world abounds in the literature of pacificism, demanding peace, even though it demands a vague and featureless peace, and denouncing every sort of armed struggle, conflict, and systematic warfare. The literature exposing the vileness of war grows to great proportions. On my way here I was reading one of the latest contributions to that literature, Im Westen Nichts Neues by Remarque, an altogether magnificent piece of plain, clear writing. The night before, I had seen in London an English play of the greatest force and power which I hope may some day be played in Berlin -journey's End , which told the same dreadful story with an altogether kindred sincerity. Never before have there been such books and such plays. Never before D have the waste, the cruelty, and the tragic

{p. 42} futility of war, as we have known it, been so plainly discovered or so eloquently and copiously stated and understood, as they are being stated and understood to~day. Never before has the will for peace been so plainly formulated or found such sustained and enthusiastic expression. 1 will assume that here we are all practically of one mind upon this general issue. We all think of World Peace as a thing lovely and desirable-and of war as something terrible and disastrous, wasteful and irrational. We are all seeking Peace. Even those who are doubtful whether perfect peace is ever attainable, still seek as much peace as they can. We are all desirous of erecting barriers that will endure, if possible for ever, against any return of war-war as we have known it, as it has demonstrated itself to us.

And being so unanimous, what good would there be in adding anything to-night to the vast volume of pacificist exhortation that now beats upon mankind? Let us give ourselves here to more definite questions: What precisely is this peace, this something we call peace, for which all the world appears to be clamouring, and what, in the broadest terms, are the inevitable conditions for bringing it about ? How are we pro~ gressing-and are we progressing as fast as we should be progressing-towards this world-peace which is so much in our hearts ? Are we really getting on towards it? Are we even on the right road? Or are there obstacles and difficulties which were not at first fully apprehended checking and delaying us ?

{p. 43} These are less moving and more troublesome enquiries than mere general proposals to abolish war. It is quite easy to ask for peace, like a client sitting at a restaurant table, and declare we will have nothing else but peace. It is quite easy to say, "Take that horrible war away and bring me perpetual peace.". It is quite a different job to bring that perpetual peace. We who write and think and talk have to remember, and remind the rest of the world continually, that the desire for peace will no more give us peace by itself than the concentration of the mind upon hunger will nourish the body. The demand has been created and made clear and emphatic. Good. But now for criticism and impatience. Are we doing the right things for this great end? . And are we doing enough of the right things ? Or is much that is essential to the abolition of war being left undone ? Have we still to open out new fields of pacificist activity and seek to pour fresh energy from sources hitherto neglected, into the task of world pacification ?

Let us consider in the most general terms what is being done in the name of peace at the present time. I want to put it to you, firstly, that a great number of things that are being done and displayed and glorified as peace-seeking efforts are in actual fact rather steplike gestures than actual steps, and are taking us very little nearer, or no nearer at all, to our goal. A -large part of our peace advocates are marking time-with great enthusiasm and pride and dignity, I admit-but marking time.

{p. 44} And, secondly, I want to stress the fact that the true road to World Peace is a complex and toilsome road, with harsh and disagreeable comers, and many living and sensitive and possibly resentful obstructions that may have to be removed. Many things may need to be done that will offend influential people and that will win uncommonly little popular applause. We are facing a task vast and difficult enough to tax all the gifts and resources of mankind, a task whose magnitude the majority of us-even among the most devotedare only beginning to apprehend, and the very prevalent persuasion that a few amiable declarations, a few amiable conferences, a Pact or so and a picnic or so, _will suffice to lay the foundations of a permanent World Peace

is a pure delusion. A permanent World Peace implies a profound revolution in the nature of every existing government upon earth, and in the fundamental ideas upon which that government is based.

Did we realize that sufficiently ? And is it sufficiently realized to-day ? It is the hard verity towards which a number of reluctant minds are being forced at the present time.

I say "reluctant minds," and you see very plainly that I am suggesting that something very fundamental, something very difficult, important, and formidable, is being shirked and evaded in all this peace discussion and all these permanent-peace proposals. This difficulty is the sovereign independence of states. That is the cardinal difficulty before us, and until we tackle it, instead of walking round it and round it, we shall not

{p. 45} make much further progress towards the organized peace of the world. We shall go on wasting our virtuous emotions upon peace pacts and our substance upon war preparation, j ust as we are doing at the present time. We shall go on accumulating explosives on the distinct understanding, of course, that never, never, never, do we intend them to explode. Until at last they will explode, and this peace-making task will have to be suppressed for a time, and then begun over again from the beginning.

I will take the Kellogg Pact of ir928, and the many happy and pleasing encounters that occurred during its materialization; I will take it as typical of these popular perambulations about our central difficulty. The Pact is the present culmination of a long series of proceedings on the part of citizens of the United States, since the refusal of the Senate to join the League of Nations, by which they have relieved their consciences in the matter of world affairs, without the slightest interference with their ordinary way of carrying on in life. Through that Pact all the great nations of the earth have renounced war as a method of national policy, and agreed-how does it go ?-that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts, of whatever origins they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means. By this simple treaty, war, we are assured, has been not simply outlawed, but abolished in the world.

How far this has actually been achieved can be measured by two very simple addition sums, one giving

{p. 46} the sum of the war expenditure for 1928 of all the nations concerned before the Pact, and the other the estimate for the equivalent expenditure in 1929. That is the real index to the value of this network of peace pacts and agreements. In most' countries, you will discover, the value is a negative one. A concrete experience of the quality of this pacificist American activity blew in through my letter-box a few weeks ago. By the same postal delivery I received one, an eloquent sermon from a religious minister in Kalamazoo, Michigan, hailing the Kellogg Pact as the dawn of a new age for mankind; and two, a letter from a religious minister also, an old friend who is now the pastor of an Episcopalian congregation in Texas, telling me that both the little boys I remembered when he was my neighbour in Essex were now grown up and doing very well; one was in the artillery and the other in the Gas Warfare Department at Washington.

Amidst the olive branches the bayonets still gleam, thorns more abundant than ever.

The Kellogg Pact has been signed by France, and yet if any young Frenchman thinks that will excuse him from the ardours of military service, the authorities teach him better. We British have signed the Kellogg Pact, but nobody has told the Air Service, and every week or so the lives of two or three very carefully chosen and exceptionally sound young men are offered up by the chiefs of the Air Arm to the God of Battles. Our government keeps up an intensive propaganda of militarism. Some of our war films have produced a

{p. 47} marked effect on recruiting, and nothing could stir the blood of an imaginative boy more than our air-shows and military tattoos. In America, 1 learn, the prospects for an intelligent youngster are better in the Gas Warfare Department than in school teaching or medical work. And the Germans, who have been restricted to battleships of io,ooo tons, have succeeded, they say, in producing a perfect gem of a battleship, a little perfect io,ooo-ton miniature, which is going to put all our navy out of date.

Russia, some of my friends tell me, has had a revolution and a change of heart; but did you see the photograph in the newspapers the other day of the Moscow crowds clamouring for war against China? All Russia is being trained at present for war against " British Imperialism," because all Russia believes that we intend to attack her sooner or later. And we have done our best by Arcos raids and similar barbarities to sustain that belief.

At present we have in the world enough of the most beautiful and powerful apparatus you can imagine to crush, smash, drown, suffocate, poison, blister, scald, rip up, and tear to pieces thirty or forty million people -in which thirty or forty millions quite a number of my present hearers may confidently count themselves. And every day men of the highest intelligence and the greatest energy are adding to that equipment. It can be replaced as it is used up. It can be extended.

Such considerations as these throw ever so faint a shadow, even in the most optimistic minds, upon the I

{p. 48} perfect confidence we would all like to feel about that Kellogg Pact. I hate to suzzest a doubt of my fellow creatures, but Did the governments that signed the Kellogg Pact really mean it when they signed it ?

Perhaps they did. The human mind is complex. But if they did it was a temporary exaltation of their minds. The growing armaments are the dominant fact of the situation.

I should be sorry if I seemed ungrateful to Mr. Kellogg and the American people for what they have done in keeping talk and aspiration about peace alive in the world. But until we recognize, and the world recognizes and admits, the enormous mental vacuum that remains unfilled in such quasi-peacemaking as this Kellogg Pact, we cannot hope for any effectual beginnings of the real working organization of a World Peace. This Pact was contrived by men who either do not realize at all, or who find it advisable at present not to admit that they realize, the possibility of the world being arranged in any other way than as a sort of patchwork quilt of independent sovereign states with their boundaries fixed for ever. Consequently their conception of peace is entirely controlled by that idea of integral and unassailable sovereignty. Each of these self-determining sovereign powers into which the world has been parcelled by God - assisted by the treaties of settlement now operative - is, it would seem, to go on doing what it pleases for make itself a hotbed a bursting charge of ever: build itself in with tariffs, make itself a of epidemic diseases, cultivate a bursting charge of

{p. 49} population or reduce its population to nothing, block interstate traffic across its territories, prohibit immigration or emigration, isolate itself from all foreign intercourse, and so on and so on-only now the difference is that it has promised not to make any more war. There are to be no more readjustments of boundaries, no more coalescences of sympathetic and kindred peoples-at least, none is provided for. The Pact is evidently sensible of the possibility of " disputes or conflicts " among these eternally defined sovereign states-and who could avoid seeing that?-but it sets up no authoritative means whatever for what it calls the "settlement or solution " of these " disputes or conflicts " in the place of the war decision which it renounces. We are, I understand, to entrust vital questions-questions like outlets for surplus population, the control of tropical raw materials, the strangulation of the industrial development of one power by another-to some miraculous type of arbitration.

The alternative possibility that these disputes or conflicts can be anticipated and prevented altogether in quite another fashion was manifestly outside the imaginative range of the generous-spirited but most uncreative and unhelpful men who have-with the best intentions in the world-put this handsome nothingness, The Outlawry of War, so conspicuously upon the page of history.

And yet in the early experiences of the United States of America, in the spectacle of the unification of the German-speaking peoples, in the earlier consolidation

{p. 50} of France, in the union of England, Scotland, and Wales to form the British state, and in various other historical instances, we have had a variety of indications and demonstrations of just that fundamental principle which must be observed if a permanent Pax is to be set up in the world. It is not as though there are no precedents to show us the futility of merely interstate agreements to avoid conflict.

The now United States bickered for years before the main lines of their federal constitution were wrought out. And if anything is plainer than another in that chapter of American history, it is that an enduring Pax is to be attained only by Pooling sovereignty in relation to the main causes of stress between the originally separate communities. Every step you make towards peace, therefore, means a loss of separateness, a loss of independence. Peace and national independence are incompatible-and our world is refusing to see it. The United States found it necessary to erect a Federal government to which the control-or at least the over-riding power-in matters of interstate trade, foreign trade, taxation, postal communication, money, bankruptcy, the admission of aliens to citizenship, warfare, and sundry other matters, was entrusted. This arrangement secured a Pax in America for half a century. It carried the American peoples through the most dangerous years of their consolidation, without war. But it left one important matter to fester: the question of the conditions under which men might be induced to labour. Over a number of states money

{p. 51} wages were the only incentive to work permitted, and in -others slavery existed. The economic and social stresses produced by this omission led at last to a decisive civil war, enlarging further the amount of sovereignty allotted to the federal government. There had to be the civil war, there was no way out of that civil war, because the federal constitution provided no other workable means of decision.

It is difficult to-day to imagine any possible stresses or conflicts in North America which the federal government of the United States of America will not be able to control and remove. But it is inconceivable that North America would not have fallen apart into a number of fragments if the original states had insisted upon remaining as they were at first, distinct sovereign countries, building up tariff walls against each other, retaining separate coinages, and conducting separate dealings with the outside world.

In a nearly parallel way, all of America that lies to the north of the United States-a vast region with profound racial and religious differences, speaking two languages and with the traditions of wars and conquests acute in the popular memory; a land, indeed, of smouldering conflicts-has achieved the secure and effective Pax known as the Dominion of Canada. The key to that peace, the only possible key to that peace, was the creation of a federal government to which even more powers were ceded than were given to the federal government of the United States.

In both cases the attempt to arbitrate and make

{p. 52} deals between separate states and provinces did not work. That sort of thing never has worked. I venture to say it never will. There is too much possibility of friction upon each issue, too easy a way to a quarrel. In both these cases the outstanding stresses and conflicts were not litigated and adjudicated upon, but abolished, by the creation of common interests that replaced the separate interests.

These precedents, and every precedent in which an enduring Pax has been set up, demonstrate the fact, which one might also infer from a general experience of the nature of man, that completely independent sovereignty is an expression of militancy, and that all non-federated sovereign states are by their very independence in a condition of smouldering and accumulating contentiousness-of which war is simply the culminating outbreak. If I am right in saying that, then I am right in saying that we may sign Kellogg Pacts and Kelloggesque Pacts in Europe until there is a shortage of parchment and gold pens, and we shall have done nothing real for the peace of the world. Such things may at first propagate and encourage the peace feeling, they may have their educational value for a certain period, and that is as much as one can say for them. They do nothing to materialize and fix peace. Too much of them, too protracted a period of formal goodwilll may destroy the general belief in the honesty and good intentions of the governments that make them.

On the other hand, a zollverein spreading out until, by including the whole world, it passed out of existence,

{p. 53} or a federation of world banking and monetary controls, or a consolidation of the control of world shipping and overland transport by a federal bond, would take the world half-way towards an everlasting peace. On the day when a man-with a ton of goods-can travel from Cardiff to Vladivostok, or from Moscow to San Francisco, as he can travel now from San Francisco to New York, without a passport and without a customs examination, and without seeing a single battleship on the sea, a single soldier in uniform, or a single war plane in the air, the chief structures of a World Pax will exist. And until he can do that, the Great Peace will still be unachieved.

But some of you will be protesting already that I am talking not common-sense, but the most remote Utopianism. I am, you will say, foreshadowing a federal world State. That, I admit, is what I am doing. You may say, This is not practical politics. May I dispute that? I am protesting against this flimsy Utopianism about peace which is now so current. I admit that to get Europe out of the tariff pits in which it has buried itself and its economic prosperity, to ,induce all these interlocking and entangled semiparochial national governments that divide us up to-day, to induce them to give way to broader and saner controls and to efface the memory and tradition of ancient rivalries, means a vastly more complex effort than does getting eminent statesmen to sign peace declarations that they have not the slightest intention of observing. I admit it means indeed a propaganda and a struggle such as the world has never

{p. 54} known before. I admit the existence of a mountainrange of difficulties, and the prospect of complications and set-backs beyond number on the way to a federated World Peace. But that is the only real peace that is conceivable among men. Over that mountain-range of difficulties lies the way-the only way. If it is not practical politics to face difficulties, then let us give up this pretence of ours about World Peace. Let us at least drift to the next war with our eyes open. Life always has been difficult, and it always will be difficult. If we do not mean to push our world over these difficulties and through these jungles, if we are not prepared to fight, and to fight not only mentally but physically, against such opponents as we shall encounter, then our peace talk is no more than talk-and we had better make our private provision for gas-masks and hiding-places and fortitude, in the disputes and conflicts that lie ahead. Is this idea of a world, federated for the control of the common interests of mankind, Utopian? Then I declare all peace-aspiration is Utopian. I have yet to learn that it is Utopian to look one's difficulties in the face instead of turning one's back on them. My reply to anyone who charges me with visionary Utopianism in my demand for the world federation of the common interests of mankind is that it is he who dreams. He is sleeping in a cramped position called patriotism, which can produce nothing for him but a series of more and more violent and exhausting and altogether fruitless nightmares.

There are in the world at the present time two pro-

{p. 55} foundly different schools of pacificist effort. They are so different that I would rather describe them as opposed to each other than as being in any sort of co-operation. They may be distinguished as the international school and the cosmopolitan school. The former school I. call international because it rests fundamentally on the belief that the states and nationalities that are recognized to-day are permanent and essential human things. Consequently it seeks World Peace through treaties between what it regards as the real, the innate, and incurable divisions of our species. This is the prevailing school of pacificist effort to-day, the most popular, the easiest to join without any social or mental friction or distress-you can join it and abandon nothing of your habits, your position, and your political associations-and to it we owe all these beautiful and purely sentimental Pacts, Treaties, Declarations, and final outlawries of war with which we entertain ourselves until the next great war is ready to engulf us. In flat contrast to this international school of pacificism is the cosmopolitan school to which I draw your attention to-night, and of which I declare myself entirely a disciple. This school thinks not in terms of states and nations, but in terms of cosmopolis, the city of mankind. Cosmopolitanism is something entirely different from internationalism; it is

antagonistic to internationalism. It does not see World Peace as an arrangement between states, but as a greater human solidarity over-riding states. And it is not nearly so soft and comfortable a line of thought,

{p. 56} and it indicates far less popular and safe and easy activities, than the sentimental internationalist school. It arouses the charge of anti-patriotism at once-that charge which plays the part to-day that denunciation for heresy did in the ages of faith. To become a cosmopolitan you must be born again. You must break away from the self-satisfied movement of the majority mind in the community from which you have arisen. You must take upon yourself the dangersand they are great dangers-as well as the discomforts of unconventional minority thinking. And in the face of the general disapproval you have to keep hold of your conviction that this hard and even lonely road is the right way, the path to the desired reality.

The cosmopolitan may do much to sustain the faith that is in him and nerve his energies for the tasks his faith demands of him, by considering the history and nature of this nationalist patriotism which now obsesses the earth, which seems now like a second nature to the greater part of mankind. And first let him reflect that it has not always been like this. Predominant as nationalism is to-day, men have not always been nationalist. I come to lecture here in a country that I find very patriotic; I come from a country deep in the same sinful condition; I spend my winters in a third country, France, more patriotic if possible even than we are. I acknowledge and confess that I myself have this leprosy in my constitution, and find it not always easy to control. And yet quite a brief time ago there were none of these patriotisms. Where was German

{p. 57} patriotism a century and a half ago? Where was British imperial patriotism a hundred years ago? Where was English patriotism before the days of Queen Elizabeth, or French before the days of Joan of Arc? There was a time, hardly more generations ago than I could count on the fingers of both hands, when our ancestors knew nothing of these tremendous demands on our loyalties, these monstrous obsessions. Men were loyal, but they were loyal to quite other things. The modern nation had yet to be discovered. We have all been so taught and trained to patriotic attitudes, they have been drummed into us from our earliest childhood, they have so impressed themselves upon us at home, at school, in book, in drama, in the common idioms of thought, they have been so built into the substance of our minds, that it is only by a considerable intellectual effort that any of us can liberate ourselves from theseforms of thought to which we have been moulded. But we have been moulded to them; they are not essential things. It is possible to struggle away from them and out of them, and it is still more possible to relieve the coming generations from the immense and now monstrously dangerous and evil pressure of their suggestions.

Let us recognize frankly that there is something very fundamental in man's response to patriotism. We find it very easy to fall into patriotic attitudes, and very difficult to keep out of them. Children and young people tumble to patriotism very readily. Man is an adhesive beast. To stick to our group against the other

{p. 58} group is certainly in the nature of the creature. But in a few score centuries we have seen the application of thig impulse to be loyal and militant change in the most unrestricted fashion. The group may be any sort of group. Loyalties don't care. Loyalty to the tribe has replaced loyalty to the family, loyalty to the chief has given way to loyalty to the prince; we have had men passionately loyal to hordes, to cities, to religions; the boundaries of loyalties vary enormously and can be varied enormously. There lies our hope. Early association, interest, suggestion, and authority have shaped loyalty into a thousand various forms, and may yet shape it into a thousand others. Our national loyalties to-day are so artificial that they have to be sustained by an immense conspiracy of education, suggestion, propaganda, browbeating, bullying, and positive violence. The desire to protect and preserve dynastic interests and political institutions, the exaggerated fear of foreign powers, and the bitter practical necessities of war preparation, have crystallized and organized human loyalty about the nationalist idea to-day-and crush us all to its mould; but what man has made man can remake, and if the real way to World Peace is to be opened out, if we are indeed to go on towards human federation, this vast complexity of patriotic teaching, emotional appeal, social and police pressure, cultivated hostility and distrust, flag-waving, flag-saluting, and everlastingly reiterated patriotic sentiment which now divides man from man so implacably throughout the world, has to be faced and fought and overcome.

{p. 59} There lies the essential criticism of the present structure of the League of Nations and of all these ineffective sentimental peace treaties on the part of national governments and national statesmen. Before they begin, they assume nationality as an incurable fact of human life. That is not so. And they begin by accepting the principle of intact sovereignty, and that is just what we have to begin by rejecting. President Wilson, and with him the group of American nationalist Pacificists, who continue to play variations of his tune, will some day become the subject of a penetrating study of intellectual limitation. His upbringing, his early studies, his social and intellectual atmosphere, his professorial work and teaching, will be examined in relation to his crowning exploits during and after the war. Apparently he could not think at all about world issues except in terms of organized nationality and organized political party. To that his mind had been shaped inflexibly. He thought only of nations struggling to be free. He never thought of man struggling to be free of nationality. He thought-and to-day his school of effort is still thinking---of international law, when they ought to be thinking of world law. They think that war can be outlawed and abolished, and they think it can be replaced as a means of decision by litigation at some international court at which nations are to be represented as litigants. They never seem to grasp the idea that the disputes of governments may be altogether opposed to the unrepresented common interests of the peoples concerned.

{p. 60} Their nationalism is ingrained. They have lost all sense of the forest of mankind among the nationalist trees. And yet it was in that very America that the lesson had to be learnt that it was not the people of Connecticut or the people of New York or New Jersey that had to be thought about, but the people of the United States. And to-day it is not the Germans or the French or the British we have to think about, but mankind.

The way in which internationalism may war against human unity, the entire difference of the international from the cosmopolitan idea, has been shown in the last few years at those great gatherings of national athletes, the Olympic Games. Instead of becoming a sort of love-feast of all the people, these meetings, with their displays of national symbols and national partizanship, seem to intensify a vicious patriotism in both participants and spectators. They are recurrent demonstrations of the absolute unsoundness and harmfulness of the international as distinguished from the cosmopolitan idea. They exacerbate comparison and competition between nations.

Now what forms should a real and rational movement towards the Peace of the World take? First, what must its objectives be? Neither renunciations of war, nor the setting up of international leagues and associa~ tions, nor the establishment of an international court will suffice. Such things do not even serve the purpose of preludes to the real organization of peace. All such things flatter and fix and confirm the sovereign-state

{p. 61} delusion. The true objective of a sincere and intelligent peace movement must be the creation of federal controls - of world-wide controls, that is to say - of at least the broad economic processes of this planet, and controls of migration and transport, and health, and order. To set up such world-wide controls is a complex and gigantic task. It is the task before our race. It is a very interesting and indeed exciting question, into which I will not enter now, how far it can be made through existing governments, or how far it may have to be made in spite of existing governments. How far is this conception of a Federal world-state evolutionary and how far revolutionary? Impossible now to attempt any forecast of its forms and method of action. I will not even pretend to estimate how far statesmen, how far the progressive development of financial and business organizations outside political life, and how far popular idealism and popular passion might contribute towards the reconstruction of human affairs in the shape of that federated world control which is the only possible and rational form of World Peace. Immense forces-for example, all the forces that represent man's intelligent realization of the changing scale of economic processes, fight on the side of this cosmopolitan idea. In nearly every one of us, in spite of training and suppression, the cosmopolitan lurks. If politics remain nationalist still, business is being continually driven by the conditions of its development to become world business. Many businesses now are world-wide. Consider the Kodak

{p. 62} camera. Consider the film industry. I can imagine that there may arise a growing realization in the world, and a more and more unembarrassed recognition that

the sovereignty of existing governments and the loyalty we show them are provisional in their nature, and destined to give way before a federation that will abolish frontiers and make every man free of his world. In that fashion existing political activities could be turned in the direction of genuine peace, and revolutionary stresses avoided. But if governments here and there take it into their heads to resist the trend in things and the drift of necessity towards world federation, if they insist upon an intense nationalism in school and Press and talk, then I do not see how the attitude of sane men subjected to such governments can be anything but insurrectionary and revolutionary. I will not discuss here, because I do not find any clear light in my own mind, how far attempts to form federations, not yet world-wide in scale, but wider than any existing sovereign governments in Europe, may or may not serve as half-way houses towards world federation. Such ideas as the United States of Europe, Pan Europa and so forth, I will mention without any comment at all. They are extremely interesting suggestions.

Well, you will probably agree with me at once that the world is not prepared as yet for any such process of world federation as an honest interpretation of the words World Peace involves. Many people, when they say that we are not so prepared, seem to think the

{p. 63} whole matter is disposed-of for evermore. It is not. The unpreparedness of the world merely carries us on to the next question, which is to ask, Why is the world unprepared for the rational readjustment of its political and economic life? We have already given the answer to that. School, university, popular literature, the current thought of the time, the habits and convenience of politicians, the weight of the military tradition, combine to resist any such preparation. And the first campaign on behalf of World Peace must necessarily be a Kultur-kampf, a fight for a new education which will supply the necessary preliminary preparation.

Now here I am going to take a liberty with a German word, and I am going to restore it to its primordial meaning. I have to use it because in English we have no word at all by which to translate Kultur-kampf. But when I use it I am not thinking at all of the struggle for the minds of the young that went on in Germany between Bismarck and the Catholic Church. I am using it simply to express a struggle, any struggle, to control the education of the ordinary people. I am using it in particular to express a campaign to replace any set of fundamental social and political ideas by another set. I am using it for the effort to replace current education by a new education.

For the last century, history has been taught to larger and larger masses of the people of the world in an intensely nationalistic form. Few of us have escaped some mental distortion in consequence. The results of that prolonged subjection to an intensive misrepre-

{p. 64} sentation of human history have to be washed out of the minds of men. That can be done only by the teaching of a different history-the history of social evolution, the story of the growth of the great human society of to-day-and by the education of the imagination through a realization of man's steady conquest of power and freedom. We need a history teaching that, instead of training us to dwell upon and carry on the conflicts and resentments of yesterday and to-day, points and leads us on to the great possibilities of the collective human future. We need an education that will turn mankind from tradition to hope. That is the difficult and necessary foundation for any World Peace.

There is no way to World Peace except through these preliminary battles in the mind.

At the present time these preliminary operations in the War to end War have still barely commenced. I see nothing developing yet upon the needful scale. On the contrary, the old mischief is still going on.

At the present time the British government is giving every facility possible to the manufacturers of films that glorify warfare. The Army is being lent to make lying recruiting propaganda films. Military tattoos, air-warfare displays, under the most exalted patronage, and regardless of the "economy" cant that serves so well to cripple education and scientific service, are being held to excite the next generation of young Englishmen for fresh international killings. And a cursory examination of the school-books in use in the British, German, French, Italian, and American schools

{p. 65} will reveal that the majority of our successors, the postwar generation, are being trained even more sedulously than we were for intenser national rivalries, intenser aggressions, and intenser fears. An exaggerated partisan pride is cultivated everywhere in the all-tooreceptive mind of the young. You may find some mention of the League of Nations in these schoolbooks; in Great Britain we learn that the League is an excellent thing for the British Empire; but you will find not the slightest intimation of the idea of a possible world from which nationalism has been exorcised. You get not a glimpse of any suggestion of a possible time when Germany and France and England will be as much apart and have as much in common as Westphalia and Brandenburg and Pomerania have to-day; may be as much one fatherland as are Wales and England, or as Normandy and Provence and Bretagne. I suppose a schoolmaster who talked anything of the sort in any one of these three countries to-day would run a very good chance of disgrace and dismissal. Well, if we are to hope for peace in the world, all this must be changed. Until that sort of schoolmaster whom to-day we cowardly pacificists abandon almost without a protest to the patriotic wolves, is at the head of things, until these poisonous nationalist school-books have been pulped and got rid of altogether, the first step towards World Peace has not been made. It is not merely a New Teaching needed; it is the suppression of an old and deadly Teaching. We have to get rid of nationalist teaching and teachers everywhere. In the

{p. 66} cause of World Peace the tolerance of the wrong kind of teaching, the failure to defend the right kind of teaching, is a crime.

But this new Kultur-kampf, which is the necessary preliminary to the effective organization of a World Pax, must go a long way beyond a mere campaign about history teachers and history text-books. Its scope is very wide : it concerns the whole spectacle and conduct of human life. It must come to a reckoning with all forms of religious profession and activity. Are the religious organizations of the world working honestly to forward World Peace ? I do not think so. The existing Christian organizations must show a far livelier sense than they do at present of the unity of mankind, and exert a greater pressure upon men to subordinate their patriotism to a wider loyalty, or else the new movement towards world federation will have to seek new forms in which to embody its sustaining faith. I shall not venture upon the question of what powers of renewal and adaptation may reside in Christianity and- in Islam and in the other great religions established in the world. In its most generalized professions Christianity claims to be a uniting religion for all mankind, over-riding all races and kingdoms, but in practice it is closely associated with an antiquated cosmogony, a limited and partial teaching of history, and also with a supple acquiescence in existing institutions and in existing governments and dictatorships, which is no doubt ascribable to its preoccupation with spiritual things. The recent agree-

{p. 67} ment between the Vatican and the intensely nationalist dictatorship of Italy deepens one's doubt whether Christian statecraft has now either the will or the capacity to help very materially in the great task of world federation which lies before mankind. (This was written and read in 1929. Since then the Catholic Church has given many signs of a lively conscience and a sense of world respcnsibility.-H. G. W.) But can it stand out of the struggle? All the possibilities of religious concentration and devotion will be demanded of men if the immense reconstruction we contemplate is to be anything more than a dream.

The great religious organizations of the world may be neutral in the coming struggle, may be more or less obstructive or more or less helpful in the attempt to re-make the mental background and the political methods of mankind; but at any rate I see no signs at present of their taking the lead in any effort to set that re-making going. Nor do I see any hope of isolated and unco-ordinated individuals setting that re-making going. It follows that if our mental backgrounds and our political methods are to be made over from a competitive nationalism to

a World Pax, there must be a world-wide organized movement to bring it about,

essentially religious and essentially new, existing primarily to bring it about, and distracted by no other interests from this devotion. This means a transference of the peace movement from the casual patronage and sentimental adhesions of eminent and popular persons, to men and women who are prepared quite

{p. 68} desperately to make it the form and direction of their lives.

But where are these people and where is that movement?

Where, in the confused social and intellectual life of to-day, is the movement for World Peace to find its leaders, its saints and martyrs, its banded supporters, its disciplines, and concentrations of effort ? To ask that question is to discover the flimsiness, the entire insincerity, of a large part of this voluminous pacificism that figures so conspicuously in the limelight of world affairs at the present time. The true movement for World Peace has, indeed , still to begin. We are taking no effective political steps to achieve it because we have yet to make that educational revolution which must precede it. The very foundations have still to appear, and they are not appearing. Nowhere can I see any energetic and hopeful work being done upon a sufficient scale to establish these foundations.

I note this without undue despondency. The establishment of the peace of the world will be a huge, difficult, and tortuous task for all mankind. It was inevitable that before it could be begun, in a world obsessed by nationalist delusions and prone to violent nationalist emotions, these plausible sham peace movements based on nationalist and international ideas, should have their fling and flourish abundantly and expose themselves completely for what they were. Now it is possible to begin in earnest upon realistic lines.

The possibility of an organization, or a system of

{p. 69} organizations, which may divert loyalty and devotion from patriotism to world order, and lead the way to and control a World Pax, has always played a great part in my imaginations. More than five and twenty years ago I imagined a Utopia, which was a world State, controlled by such an organization. It owed something to Plato's guardians. It owed something to our traditions of such bodies as the Knights Templars. In the days in which I wrote nothing of the kind existed in our Western world, and I compared this order of self-devoted people to the Japanese Samurai, which order had in those days taken a strong hold upon the European imagination . But since that book was written there have been at least two demonstrations of the political effectiveness of self-devoted people banded together so as to achieve a common moral habit and discipline and concentrate upon a common purpose. We have seen all that the Communist Party has been able to do in the world, an organization'based essentially upon the natural resentments of a state of economic inferiority, and we have seen Italy fall under the sway of the Fascisti, a banded host inspired by patriotic revolt against an exaggerated sense of national inferiority. These instances show clearly the possibility, and the effectiveness of, and the need for organized societies in human affairs at the present time; they indicate the laws upon which a real movement for a World Pax must develop. The immediate progress of the world towards ultimate peace and unity waits now very largely, I believe, upon the appearance of vigorous personalities

{p. 70} and groups of personalities, capable of transmuting the immense desire for World Peace and world development which is now so widely diffused, into a lucid, organized, and militant cosmopolitan will. To get rid of nationalism does not require us to abolish mans innate disposition towards struggle, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. The peace of cosmopolis will be a new sort of conflict and a greater campaign. When I at any rate talk of a World Pax, J am not asking men to cease from warfare to lapse into vacuous indolence. I am asking them merely not to waste the beautiful powers of conflict within them upon such petty things as flags and patriotic legends, but instead to battle for mighty ends and the liberation of our common earth.

I repeat, I do not see any such system of organizations appearing. I feel it is in the air and in the spirit of man that such movements should appear and gather force. So I launch my poor little prophecy to that effect. For a quarter of a century I have hoped to see such movements developing-and I still hope. But I myself am no leader nor organizer. I observe and try to spell out the writing on a page that has still to be turned in the book of history. I am addressing you without a word of appeal-much less a word of exhortation. " Let us do it " will follow surely enough in endless energetic minds so soon as it is perfectly clear what it is, in sum and nature., that has to be done.

You have listened very patiently to this discourse. The gist of it is that the price of World Peace in human effort, in intellectual struggle, in passion and stress,

{p. 71} is enormously greater than is yet recognized. Commonsense requires that we should consider that price. Common-sense obliges us to recognize that it is quite possible that mankind may have neither the wish nor the will to scrape together that price and buy a new phase of existence for itself. And meanwhile, for all our Pacts and promises, the world moves plainly forward towards fresh wars. The obduracy and stupidity of my own government-in which other governments I am less free to criticize have sharedhave gradually forced back Russia in her isolation upon the traditions of the old nationalistic imperialism that fell in 1917. Russia, through isolation, is becoming once more a land of self-centred patriotism, and a vast struggle in Asia between Russia

and the West, on the old exhausting, fruitless lines, is manifestly in preparation. Russia may still call it a struggle against Western imperialism, but it becomes more and more plainly a struggle for the mental and physical ascendancy of Russia. Nothing effective is being done anywhere in the world to avert that collision. It can begin in Asia almost anywhere now and involve the whole world-needlessly, monstrously, and fruitlessly. China is a festering half-continent of war possibilities; and from Italy, throughout the re-nationalized fragment of the Austrian and Turkish Empires and so to the near East, a score of promising war occasions are rapidly developing. It wants -no toilsome peace organizations, no strenuous Kultur-kampf, no change in our political methods, to reap the outcome of these possibilities. A

{p. 72} little sooner or a little later-upon our existing international basis-these latent wars will come. They will come of themselves. All we have to do for that to happen is what we are all doing now-let these things drift, sign our declarations, enjoy our sentimental occasions; and presently the guns will go off by themselves, the war censorships will stop any further talk, and the drill sergeant will kick us back into the drill yard. If this new cycle of wars once breaks loose this new cycle of wars which is so plainly possible-it may waste the world for a thousand years. There may be ten centuries of drill yard before mankind. Ending, perhaps, in the complete destruction of the drill yard.

That need not be. I do not despair of the world. We may yet win in our War to end War. It is going to be-as the sporting people say-a near thing. But our primary duty, if the War to end War is to be won and we have a mind to win it, is to clear our minds of cant and delusion, and face the immense complexities and difficulties and labours of the task before us frankly and simply-as a good surgeon faces a difficult operation or an engineer faces the wilderness. Ten years of faithhealing for the sickness of the world are enough. It is time that real work for World Peace was begun.

{p. 73} CHAPTER IV

MONEY AND MANKIND

Address to the Residencia des Estudiantes in Madrid delivered in May 1932.

I HAD been contemplating a visit to Republican Spain for some time when your very flattering invitation to come and talk to you reached me. It fell in very delightfully with my wishes, since it offered me the prospect of meeting and exchanging ideas with a representative gathering of active-minded people, such as I should have small chance of meeting if I wandered about merely as a tourist. So I accepted very gladly and gratefully.

You must forgive me if to begin with I talk a little about myself. After all, you have brought it upon yourselves by asking me here. And I find a little autobiography very useful in putting what I have to say in its proper light.

I am one of those people who were violently roused by the Great War. I feel that I have been coming awake and finding out things ever since that tremendous shock of August 1914. 1 had what I may call a sense of change before, but my sense of change was enormously quickened by that illuminating catastrophe and its desolating consequences. And it turned me away

{p. 74} from imaginative literature into a new direction. This war, I said, is the first swing forward in a profound revolution in human life. The things that are happening are stupendous and confused. What we need above all things amidst this storm of events is to get an idea of what is really happening. I said that in 1917. And I am still saying it. Most of my time since has been spent in trying to make as simple and yet as complete a picture of what is, of what is happening, as an ordinary intelligent man or woman will read, so that it may be of service to those who have to go on living through this present storm of changes. I have tried to summarize and simplify things so that they can be seen as one whole. I have produced a sort of trilogy, twothirds of which is already in Spanish-Esquema de la Historia and La Ciencia de la Vida-and the concluding third of which, an Outline of Economics, will appear this year. " For a new world a new education." That has been my guiding principle. People do not know enough, and what they know is not well enough arranged; they are uninformed or misinformed (with the possibility of disastrous consequences) of the broad facts and forces of our time. They want a common body of knowledge and they want general ideas in common.

You may have heard, some of you, that I pretend to be a historian. That is not true. I do not pretend that. But I. have tried to get together the broad facts that men of science and historians give us about the history of mankind, into one Esquema, that anyone of general intelligence can grasp. If I am not a historian,

{p. 75} I am a sort of collector and shepherd dog among historians. I try to show where the flock of them is going. Similarly, I have tried to-make a summary of human knowledge about life. And now in the past three or four years I have been doing what I can to get the facts of political, social, and economic science into one picture, so that ordinary mq, and women may understand a little better perhaps than they do at present how they are related to each other and what holds them all together. My r6le throughout has been that of a pr6cis-writer; I do my best to extract the elements and join them up; I am a simplifier and a popularizer; I want to make the achievements of science and learning available as rapidly and as clearly as possible for everyday use. My object is to clear the broad lines of big masses of fact and set them out plainly. I think that such simplification is the most urgent need of our time-the most urgent need. I do not think that the world can get through its present troubles without such a wide diffusion of general knowledge.

So much by way of preface.

It is about certain broad facts of our social and economic life that I am going to discourse to-night. I am going to put before you what I conceive to be the essential facts about the history and working of money.

Now I doubt if I shall tell anyone in this assembly any facts he or she does not already know. But perhaps I may be able to call your attention to certain very broad relationships and possibilities that are not so widely apprehended, that you may not have thought

{p. 76} very much about. Upon their general and speedy recognition, I believe, depend the welfare and happiness of the main masses of mankind. We live in a time of great stresses, that have found us unprepared. But no question has become so pressing now as this question of money. In the minds of clear-headed men and women it is rapidly pushing all other political and social issues into a secondary rank. Where there was one book, or article, or speech delivered upon the subject of money fifteen years ago, there are now a score. No human concern is more in need of intelligent control, and therefore of general understanding, than this, and a constantly increasing number of minds is becoming alert to this fact.

Let me attempt to recall to you some cardinal facts in the history of money.

There was a long phase in human civilization when the world did without any sort of coined money at all. Four thousand years ago there already existed a number of highly civilized communities with flourishing arts, many comforts, material prosperity, and trade. We are so accustomed to working our affairs by means of money payments that it requires a certain effort of the imagination now to put ourselves back among those early conditions. Labour was servile, the labour of slaves or serfs; it was paid for in keep and kind; trade was barter, business was run on various productsharing arrangements; a trinket of metal was probably useful for buying things long before the convenience of weighed and measured bits of metal began to be

{p. 77} recognized. It was by our modern standards a very slow-going and limited world. It was a world of comparatively small communities and tribes, with little travel and few experiences beyond the daily and yearly round. And almost imperceptibly, age by age, money developed, and began to quicken and broaden the transactions of mankind. Money was not a thing specially invented. It grew up-it crept into-human life.

Perhaps what we call money of account came into use before actual stamped metal. The Homeric Greeks, for instance, reckoned the value of this and that in cattle. You priced things in cattle; you imposed fines and blood penalties in cattle. Often in trading no actual transfer of cattle occurred. With other peoples the weighed bars of silver or gold or iron became also a price-fixing standard. Metal bars were more convenient to employ because you could lock them up and put them awayl and they did not want food and drink or fall ill and die. But I won't bother you by telling you over again what everybody knows about the evolution of coined money. My interest to-night lies in the effects this new trading device was to have upon the whole social body. By the sixth or seventh century B.C. there was an increasing amount of coined money in the world, and its effects were already traceable in a new freedom and a new breadth of movement among men.

What did coined money do?

It inserted a new kind of wealth into human affairs, and that new sort of wealth had very novel and peculiar

{p. 78} properties. Hitherto wealth had consisted of lands and visible tangible chattels, slaves, beasts, implements, furnishings, and so forth. It could not be hid. It could not be shifted very easily from one place to another. It was difficult to trade off. Wealth was always attainable and controllable ' therefore, by the strong ruler. You could not conceal it from Pharaoh (or whatever master you were under) or from the priests of the gods. But, speaking comparatively, this new wealth stuff was portable, hideable, and extraordinarily negotiable. Getting money was not like getting land or cattle, or even a precious stone. It carried with it a power of command, a freedom of choice over a thousand commodities, a power that might be hidden until its possessors chose to reveal it. It gave, as we call it, generalized purchasing power. Because of these properties it evoked a new class of people in the community, beyond all precedent difficult to get at, and beyond all precedent free to do this an4 that. With money, the independent private person, not tied either to his lands or his buildings, also began to appear. The number of private travellers increased.

Gradually, steadily, in the five or six centuries before the Christian era, money permeated social life and the money relationship became more and more important. Its unforeseen effects upon human life were very subtle, and they increased continually. Let us try to put them compactly.

In the first place, money was an extraordinary solvent for property. It enabled property to be broken

{p. 79} up and transferred far more easily than had ever been possible before. The rich man was no longer tied to his lands and chattels; he could liquidate them here and go elsewhere and suddenly acquire quite other possessions. You could share. things that were never shareable before. You could sell them and divide the money. You had also a new way of getting the services of other people. You need not get services only from your own slaves and serfs. Money could give you temporary servants. And, conversely, it became possible for those who owed you services to commute them for money. And moreover, on the other side, you had something far more easily stolen and far less identifiable than any previous form of property.

Another invention which was also spreading through the human community came into early association with money-writing. Writing added greatly to the releasing, relaxing, and liquefying effect of money upon human life. The trading Semitic peoples, and especially the Carthaginians, speedily discovered that one need not always carry money about with one from country to country. They invented the bill of exchange. They used the order to pay and also the promise to pay. And very rapidly a new potentiality of money became unpleasantly manifest-a greatly increased facility for running into debt. That has always been the snag with money. To this day it is still the snag about money-the possibility of piling up debts without rational limits.

In the world before money a man might pledge his

{p. 80} tangible possessions up to and including his bodily freedom, but unless he could carry if off that he possessed things that he did not possess, that was about his limit. But a sanguine, reckless, or desperate borrower now could borrow and incur debts beyond all possibility of payment. He could borrow at any rate of interest and pledge the non-existent. And his creditor, again, who trusted in his solvency would find himself launched upon expenditure for which he had nothing forthcoming. Century by century money increased the range of trade and travel-at the price of a diminished social stability.

If I have any criticism of historians to offer, it is this : that they do not use the comparative method sufficiently in their analysis of operating causes. But if we bring the rise and expansion of the Roman Empire into comparison with those of any of the earlier empires of Mesopotamia, the Nile Valley, and the Further East, we see at once that the presence of money makes an enormous difference between the life of the former and these latter. It was not the only difference-but it was one of the primary ones. To speak like a zoologist, the Roman Empire belonged to a distinct type of structure, a distinct type of being, another class of empire. It was larger and looser in its body, and it was much more centralized about its head. It taxed in money and not in kind. Perhaps one vivid instance of how this commutation of services into money worked will show the essence of this difference. Everyone has read descriptions of that vast army which Xerxes brought against Greece. It was an enormous miscellany

{p. 81} From every part of his empire came pressed levies. Every people subject to the Persian rule sent its own contribution of men, armed and provisioned in their own way. But before the. end of the Republic, Rome had done with any such methods. She did not levy men and arms from her provinces, she levied taxes in money. She employed legionaries, professional soldiers, organized to an unprecedented efficiency, and she paid them. She was, indeed, the first Money-Using Empire. The contrast of those Persian levies with the Roman legions is the contrast of the ancient order with the new.

It is unnecessary-it would ' be impossible here and now-to enter upon any analysis of the collapse of this first great money-trading system, the Roman Empire. But there can be no dispute that economic stresses the ever-increasing burthen of taxation, and the accumulation of debt, played a leading r6le in its internal disintegration. If our histories are a little inadequate in their, account of the onset of money in human life, they have a lot to tell of its spreading shadow-Debt. Roman history is punctuated with the revolts of debtors and with attempts to impose and shake off debt, until at last the centralization of power in the Emperor and his legions arrested these wholesome repudiations and left the debt canker free to pervade and disorganize the whole Empire.

With the political collapse and disorders of the fifth and sixth and subsequent centuries, the monetary and credit system of the Roman world went altogether

{p. 82} to pieces. The Early Middle Ages was a period of economic as well as social and political disorder. There must have been an immense decline in population; everywhere the flourishing towns and cities of the Roman period shrank to small proportions. Rome itself was for a time deserted. It is well to bear that period of dwindling vitality in mind to-day. It is well to realize that for every economic system there is a limit to the population it can carry, and that a breakdown means, in necessary sequence, the elimination of multitudes of superfluous people. They have to die-to get out of it somehow-and usually they get out of it in an extremely disagreeable way. Europe in the early Middle Ages was not simply a disorderly world, it was a depopulated world. An intelligent observer in the sixth century might very well have decided that the experience of a money-civilization had been tried out and had failed, and that the whole system was in irrevocable decay. Everywhere trade dwindled to the merest local and incidental exchanges, and money, which had flowed in a widespread arterial flood through the living empire, trickled only in little local puddles after its downfall. The barbarians marched to and fro with impunity because Europe was one devastated area. Whether it was extensively depopulated we do not know, but certainly it was disorganized beyond any possibility of effective resistance to massacre and pillage. In any numismatic collection to-day you can compare the miserable, rare, hoarded coins of these centuries of decadence, with the fair, large money of Imperial

{p. 83} Rome. These coins symbolize and make visible the possibilities there were-and aye--of a material degringolade in a human society animated by money.

Now money and monetary trading and the standard and scope of human life recovered and grew, order and energy came again through the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and subsequent centuries. You can trace the historical record century by century-money coming back, the money system recovering; you can trace the artizans multiplying, goods moving about again, mines reopening, cities becoming larger and more active, cathedrals and other fine buildings rising, people reading and writing and travelling once more. This great body of Western civilization which was once mainly the Roman Empire was coming-to; it was to have another chance; it was growing stronger and more active through all the later Middle Ages. The blood of economic life-that is to say,

money-was flowing again in its healing veins and arteries. One of the earliest currencies to become reputable during this period was, I am happy to say, as an Englishman, the silver coins minted in England. These were marked with a star, and they were known as sterling-apparently from an old English form of the word " star." They were in increasing use during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Another silver coin that played an important r6le in this rehabilitation of currency was the Bezant from Byzantium. More and more silver currency-reasonablY trustworthy currency-was appearing in Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth

{p. 84} centuries. Paper and writing were coming to its help. These centuries and the fifteenth century were, centuries of steady recovery. It was not a headlong advance; but it was a steady growth. The new monetary civilization was not centralized politically, as the Roman system had been, but it was gradually restoring similar conditions with regard to property. People were borrowing and lending money again. They were selling land and franchises for mon6y. The Church was greatly exercised about the morality of Usury and the increasing problem of debts. A circulation was coming into operation, although it was not yet a very generous and abundant circulation. The precious metals were not very abundant. They were a little too precious. They had to be eked out by bills of exchange. An extraordinarily complex system of credit based on the good report of particular houses grew up. Florence and other Italian cities and many Jewish families, which had retained some traditions of the monetary methods of the great Semitic peoples of Carthage, Phcenicia, and Babylon, played a vital part in the international linking of this revival.

And then, as you know, in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries came a stupendous enlargement and expansion of human activities. It was the dawn of that modern period of excited progress in which we are still living. I will not attempt to-night to name all the convergent forces that released the printed book, released the enquiring mind, set the European explorers saiting round the globe. But

{p. 85} coming at once to enhance and establish the new gains came an abundance of the precious metals. That is the important point in this story. Nobody planned it, nobody foresaw it, nobody understood what results would be released; but suddenly new gold and new silver-and particularly silver-poured into the European world. It was like a transfusion of good rich blood---intoan anxmic body. Forthwith there was money to pay off debts, there was money to launch new enterprises, there was money for great expeditions, there was money to pay people and set them to work and give them purchasing power. There was plenty of silver, and as it was needed more silver was forthcoming and more.

That was the work of Spain chiefly. Spanish history for two centuries is a history of silver.

Europe, which at the opening of the fifteenth century had been cowering before the Turk and the Tartar, arose, almost without any conscious intention, to a world predominance which it has retained to this day. Why? There is nothing whatever to explain that change in the relative vigour of Europe and Asia except this liquidation of Western energy from debt and penniless impotence, through monetary abundance. Money was becoming abundant and getting to work. A second great money-trading system was developing.

Our two countries-the Spanish peninsula first, and then in a later phase Britain-responded most of all to this stimulating torrent. When we cease to teach history as a gossip about kings and suchlike persons,

{p. 86} and get down to the broader material realities beneath its flow, Spain and Britain will figure not as antagonists with that everlasting old yarn about the Armada and the storm-but as the two peoples first lifted up, one after the other, by the accident of this new-found abundance of money, to such a material expansion as no other people has ever experienced.

They burst all the boundaries. Look at America to-day. That is only one part of that immense expansion. Compare in material size and energy the little Spain that just managed to conquer Granada and the Spanish-speaking world of the Emperor Charles the Fifth.

Compare the little England of the days of Columbus with the English-speaking world of to-day. The new forces of expansion affected all the world at last; but it was the Atlantic countries that felt them first.

It was first the Spanish silver that went about the world, quickening and broadening the whole life of man. It was the silver dollar or thaler (a name that comes from a valley in Bohemia with silver mines, that happened to be under Hapsburg rule in the fifteenth century) that for a time quite outshone the ancient prestige of sterling. That predominance lasted to the end of the eighteenth century. VVhen the newly detached United States of North America chose a coinage, they turned away from sterling, and preferred the Spanish dollar, because it was better known and more widely used. It was only the extraordinary discoveries of gold at a score of points in the widespread English-speaking realms, and particularly in Australia,

{p. 87} California, and South Africa, that ousted the silver dollar from its monetary importance in favour of the gold pound-the pound sterling, that is to say, as it was up to 1914. That, with of course a number of other circumstances, changed over the world's affairs from silver to gold.

We touch points of interest here from which we might launch out upon an interminable discussion about monetary standards. I will not even mention them here, because they have nothing to do with my present argument. For the better part of the nineteenth century gold poured into the body of world trade and production with the same increasing abundance with which silver came in after the fifteenth century. It carried on the same story. If silver was thrust aside as a standard, there was nevertheless no check in the increase of money. Gold,

new gold in abundance, became in its turn the stimulant of enterprise, the payer of debts, the injection that kept human increase and progress alive.

The points in this short history of the Second Money Period, as I have told it so far, the points upon which I would lay especial stress, are these.

First, that nobody planned this release of energy through an abundance of money. It happened. It was sheer luck for the human race that the flood came and lifted it out of its entanglement to owners and creditors and carried it on.

Secondly, it has to be noted that for a long time nobody realized what was happening and how it was

{p. 88} happening. Nobody connected the material benefits of the new time with monetary release. You will find a thousand inadequate explanations of the European revival, which were made as it was going on; but not one, that I know of, turns to the increasing abundance of money as the dominant factor. Now we are all beginning to realize that it was the dominant factor.

And thirdly, be it noted that there was nothing in what happened to ensure that it would go on happening for an indefinite period. As a matter of fact it should have been fairly plain that there must be a limit to the output of precious metals, and that sooner or later, as that limit was approached, debt would overtake money, and drag again more and more on the expansion of human life. I say it should have been fairly plain. But there is little evidence of anyone foreseeing that debt would overtake us in the end, until we were actually so overtaken.

Now let me weave a few more elementary strands of commonly known fact into this story of the Second Money Age in which we are living to-day.

This flood of new money into our Western world produced, among other phenomena, new systems of credit and ownership. The first great money system, the Roman system, had no such thing as paper and printing. The new money system in which we live to-day had these conveniences at hand from the very beginning. To the help of silver and gold came printed paper, and began indeed to push them into a secondary place. The banking of the Ancient World, such as it

{p. 89} was, was done in temples; it was just hoarding away in sanctuaries. It was money-keeping, not moneylending. Before the fifteenth century European banking was in very much the same phase; but it was not the priest but the goldsmith and silversmith who provided vaults and strong rooms for the rich to keep their treasure in. A link between Old-World and this New Age banking is to be found in the priestly order of the Knights Templars, which before its suppression banked extensively on the old pattern. And then began two new developments, quite beyond the experience and methods of the first Money System, which were destined to carry our present civilization on to a scale of largeness and energy beyond all comparison greater than its predecessors. The goldsmiths and silversmiths began to lend out again at interest the money entrusted to them and to pay interest for its use. Then they began to print bank-notes based on the metallic security they held, and these notes became an effective substitute for the stored metal. And presently they simplified down the promissory note and the bill payable to the familiar bank-cheque of to-day. Our business system began to change over from a system in which every transaction had to be effected by concrete payments in gold and silver coin, or by the tedious transfer of credits for such coin from merchant to merchant, to a continually more rapid and trustworthy system in which only paper representing a certain amount of gold and silver-and latterly only of gold - alleged to be in store somewhere or other, changed

{p. 90} hands. The real money became lazy, so to speak; it stayed in the treasury and let the nimbler printed paper do most of its work. That change has now gone very far. You may travel from end to end of France to-day and never see a payment made except in paper and small token coins of practically no intrinsic value at all.

Now human beings are always changing the essential nature of things, and always fancying that the things they have changed will still go on behaving in exactly the same way as they did in the past. And then they are amazed when novel and unexpected possibilities emerge. It is only by degrees that we have come to realize that this paper stuff can do all sorts of things coined silver and gold could not do, and that it can fail to do things that coins of intrinsic value could do quite easily. It is different, and it works in a different way.

It is not only money that has been changing in its nature from intrinsically valuable coin to paper, and making our economic life more and more different from any way of life our species had followed hitherto. Since the seventeenth century we have also been changing the nature of property. We have been elaborating a system of joint-stock enterprise and stock and shareholding that has made ownership an entirely different thing from what it was, for example, in the later Middle Ages. Before our times you could not own much property unless it was more or less under your own control and in sight or close by. You had to look after it. You had to guard and manage it. Your connection with it was immediate and plain. You were tied to it.

{p. 91} But now consider how things are to-day. I was talking the other day to a prosperous Londoner, and I found that he drew his income from a coal-mine in Japan, a Spanish copper-mine, the Norwegian taxpayer, a street tramway in Buenos Ayres, the taxpayers of Canada, an Australian bank, a Scottish cotton-thread manufactory, the electric supply of Calcutta, and various other widely dispersed sources. Any of this ownership

he could turn into paper money in a couple of weeks. There was never any property of that sort three centuries ago. If anyone had told what I am telling you about this friend of mine to a rich Florentine or Venetian of the sixteenth century, he would have regarded his informant not merely as a liar, but as a very foolish, fantastic liar. For how, he would ask, could one possibly control and protect property at such a distance ? And how could one draw one's gains from its operation ?

You see how the modern money system, the modern credit system, the modern. system of dealing in stocks and shares, has changed not only the scale but the very nature of human relationships. I will not enlarge here upon the r6le that the introduction of power machinery, and particularly of rapid mechanical transport, has played in this Process, which in the course of three centuries has changed the economic reality of human lives from localized to world-wide relationships.

In 1914 we were living-so far as the material realities of our lives were concemed-in a world-wide economic system. I have already shown how the property of

{p. 92} one citizen in London could be spread all over the world. He held the world in fee. And similarly in what you consumed. The food you ate came from all over the world. Your clothes were made in half-a-dozen countries. Your hat came from Italy. Your coat was made of English cloth lined with French silk, buttoned with buttons from Germany, which were sewn on by Scottish thread; you brushed it with a Japanese clothes-brush, and so on and so on. We were living in a cosmopolitan world.

And in 1914 we had got to something very like a cosmopolitan money. Almost all the countries in the world were on the gold standard and referred their money to the gold sovereign. All things considered, that money system was working fairly well. It worked well because the City of London was, in practice, a cosmopolitan financial centre. The gold-mines continued to pour more and more gold into the veins and arteries of commerce, and until rgi4 a large proportion of that gold sustained an active circulation. The new money system, the second great money system in human history, had become world-wide by 1914. It had developed and prospered for a century.

That brings us up to 1914. Let us look at 1914 from the point of view of a short history of money.

Almost without suspecting what was going on, the economic life of mankind had changed from a number of partial systems into a world system. Yes. But there had been no corresponding adjustment of our political arrangements. There had been no change

{p. 93} over of education to make us politically citizens of the world. This new wine of life was still in the old bottles. Old traditions were strong; the vested interests of our national rulers were powerful, and they were in a position of vantage. And one group of industry had got quite out of control-the steel and armament industry-and its vigorous salesmanship was making the old-fashioned patchwork of sovereign states very dangerous to human security. From our point of view to-night, the Great War of 1914 was the smashing of our growing cosmopolitanism by the inherited traditions, the national aggressions and foreign policies, of a past state of affairs. It was the old in revolt, breaking up the new.

And if the War was a disaster, the Peace that followed was a hideous blunder. It is a blunder that is still going on. We are still living in the consequences of that botched-up settlement. It becomes plain enough to all of us now that the task of the conference at Versailles was essentially to clean up and clear away the wreckage of the old nationalist and imperialist system, and to recognize, by new political adjustments, the plain fact that the economic, the financial, the monetary system of the world had become one single system. But Versailles did not do that task. It did not even attempt it.

It is easy to be wise after the event. It is easy to say now what they should have done. But surely we may condemn that settlement without being too hard on the men who made it. We can see so much

{p. 94} more plainly than they could do at the time, that what they had to do was to make the world one; instead of which they cut the world up into smaller bits ' into a closer patchwork, than there had been before.

They had as far as possible to get rid of frontiers, so that the new life of the world money and economic system that had come about should flow more freely. Instead they created a League of Nations chiefly, it would seem, with the idea of preserving for evermore the frontiers they had made. And in Europe they called into being thousands of miles of frontiers that had never existed before. They made no attempt whatever to create any world control of money, or credit, or transport. Even air transport they left alone as though it did not matter-while, with immense ardour and industry, they set about such pettifogging, hole-and-corner settlements as the Danzig corridor and the muddle at Trieste. Their task was to unify, and they divided; that will be the world's final judgment on the Treaty-Makers of Versailles.

I will not make any detailed examination of the efforts that were made-more especially by Britainto get back to the dear old gold standard that had worked practically as a world money system before 1914. And, with the history of twenty-five centuries before their eyes, in which it is written so plainly that the essential danger underlying every money system is the clogging and burthening of the whole system by debt, the victors at Versailles piled up overwhelmingly immense debts upon the defeated Powers and upon

{p. 95} each other. In any case these debts would have been insupportably heavy, but they became enormously heavier because of a process of withdrawal of money from circulation that presently began in the United States of America and France. The City of London could not restore its old ascendancy and recover its former cosmopolitanism. Prices fell. Money became dearer and dearer. It became more and more difficult to pay off debts. It became more and more difficult to get new money to extend enterprise and keep the productive machinery working. And that is where we are to-day. Here the Muse of history ceases to read. And we take up the question, What is to be done aboutit?

It is quite easy to give the answer to that and say what has to be done, and enormously difficult to find any way of doing what has to be done. We want to restore conditions~ of increasing money again, we want more money in circulation, so that we can pay off debts, extend our productive enterprise, employ the un employed, and go on to more work, more wealth, more happiness, carry on this Second Money Age to an era of secure abundance throughout the entire world.

All that is plainly possible. . . .

Only we cannot. Apparently we cannot. Because at present we cannot manage and control currency as one whole throughout the world. Each sovereign government in the world inside its own boundaries does as it pleases with money. We are living in a worldwide economic system, and yet there is no machinery

{p. 96} at all to maintain an effective world-wide currency. It is just as though you had a pool of water and you wanted for some good and sufficient reason to raise the level of the surface. If you could raise the bottom of the whole pool, that would be easy. But if you were not allowed to raise the bottom of the whole pool, but only the bottom here and there-obviously if you raised the bottom -here the water would run there, and if you raised the bottom there it would flow back here. Something parallel happens if you raise or depress the value of currency in any particular country. You upset the equilibrium. Goods pour out of the country which has cheapened its money towards the country that has not done so. One country, therefore, is depleted of its goods, and the other country has its production disorganized by a flood of cheap commodities. We saw that happen to an astounding degree during the German inflation, and we saw it occur again when the French inflated the franc to one fifth of its former value. People talk of the mischief done in Europe by the new and continually rising tariff walls, but these tariff walls are very largely an attempt-a clumsy attempt, if you like-to compensate for the convulsive movements of trade due to these local monetary fluctuations. The two things belong to one thing; they are both aspects of the impossibility of carrying on the life of our present civilization, which has become cosmopolitan, by a system of purely nationalist controls.

Plainly, for everyone who has eyes to see, the civilization to which we were born in hope is breaking up.

{p. 97} It is breaking up rapidly. Don't believe any nonsense about a social revolution which is to save all that. There is no revolution in sight that can save anything. This system in which we live has to save itself or smash. At present it is smashing. Don't be under any illusion about that. Take England, which is said by some foolish optimists to be-what is the phrase?

weathering the storm." Well, since the war crime in England has increased by over ioo per cent., unemployment by about 400 per cent., and the expenditure upon education and scientific research has diminished. All these things indicate a rapidly falling civilization. If you turn to Germany or Central Europe, the degenerative process has gone much further. The United States, again, faces for the first time in its history starving masses of men.

Now none of this was inevitable, and the continuation of this Smash-up is not inevitable. Let only the chief great communities of the world sink this bickering political competition and get together-get together enough to take this really very simple business of money in hand-and the smash-up can be arrested. I will not say that all the present evils of the world are to be cured by that one thing. But it is the most urgent thing, and if our civilization can get together for that, there is hope that it will also be able to deal with other less urgent and less fundamental but equally vital dangers that threaten. This is the urgent issue -so urgent that, for my own part, at present I can think and talk of very little else.

{p. 98} Now it is particularly exciting to have an opportunity of saying these things in Madrid, to put them before Spanish minds, in this released and renascent Republic. I wish I could have said all that I have to say in Spanish. The Spanish mind and Spanish thought have always played a distinctively invigorating part-a male r6lein European thought. Its share in moulding Catholic thought and organization, for example, has been overwhelmingly enormous. Loyola made the Church a new thing. But I will not enlarge on the past vigour of Spanish initiative. What interests me are the Spanish initiatives of to-day and to-morrow. How is this male Spanish intelligence taking up this world problem of world money? What r6le is the Spanish-speaking world going to play in the very strenuous struggle to save the Second Money Civilization that has come upon us ?

(Spain brought that silver into Europe and set the ball rolling.)

And when I think of the necessity of getting a proper realization of what money is, and what has to be done about it, spread about in the world, and of the urgency we are under of getting great masses of the world's population to act upon a concerted scheme to these ends, it leaps to my mind how far this discussion may go, how far this idea of sustaining the flagging power of money might be made powerful in only two languages

Spanish and English.

That would include practically all the New World and great regions of the Old. It is so vast that any con-

{p. 99} certed common action would have an enormous compelling force upon the rest of the world-upon the other great nations, whose experiences have been less worldwide, and whose outlook is in consequence narrower. Am I dreaming when I think of our two worlds of thought coming together for so vast a collaboration?

But I will not embark upon speculations about what might be. I have told my little history as I see it the Story of Money in the World. One great monetary system-the Roman Empire-grew and crashed into centuries of disorder. It crashed because it could not sustain its economic life, so that it became feeble and disorderly and a prey to barbaric dissolution. The cosmopolitan economic life of to-day, the second great monetary system, has grown far beyond the dimensions of its Roman predecessor, and now it too is staggering under an ever-greater burthen of financial perplexity.

Either we are living to-day in the opening phase of a downfall far mightier than the Roman collapse, or we are on the verge of a great effort of salvage and reconstruction, that will end in the complete establishment of one world-wide economic life and the opening out of such a fullness and abundance of life for mankind as the world has never seen before.

{p. 100} CHAPTER V

IMPERIALISM AND THE OPEN CONSPIRACY *

I HAVE recently been reading and thinking a lot about Lord Melchett and his place in the political world, and I find myself under a necessity to write a brief commentary upon our several ideas of the way the world is going. For a great number of people he stands now for a system of views that I believe to be equally attractive and wrong, and I want to explain why I think they are wrong.

For some years now my interest in Lord Melchett has been undisguised. His public energy and his exceptional expressiveness have made him serve for me as the typical modern creative business man. I have written about him here and there before, and it would be stupid to pretend that Romer Steinhart and Co., in The World of William Clissold, would ever have been thought of if the system that centres upon Brunner Mond and Co. had never existed. That is not to say that Romer Steinhart and Co. is a picture or caricature of that reality, or that there is any portraiture about the story or " personalities," as people say, but it is clearly an attempt to deal with the inevitable growth and possible developments of a huge industrial and

* The Realist and The New Republic, August 1929.

{p. 101} financial complex in relation to social and political processes, that could have been made only with the stimulating fact of Brunner Mond and Co. before the writer. In my book, which pretends to be the intimate autobiography of a partner in such a complex, a partner whose activities have been mainly scientific and industrial, the idea is put with as much force as possible, that such great complexes already transcend the boundaries of existing sovereign states, and that they make for a single economic world organization-for Cosmopolis, that is, and not for Empire. Recent political activities and utterances of Lord Melchett have run counter to this view. It may be interesting to try for a definite statement of the issue.

I am moved the more urgently to do this by the recent activities of another very interesting public personality, and that is the creator, or rather the recreator, of the Daily Express and the Evening Standard as they exist to-day, Lord Beaverbrook. He has embarked upon a sort of propaganda for what I may call the " self-sufficient Empire." That is the direction in which I find Lord Melchett pointing also. I think it is not a very hopeful direction, and I want to state as plainly as possible why I would dissuade them if I could from adopting this self-sufficient imperial idea as the frame of their activities.

And to make what I have to say as plain as possible let me lapse for a paragraph or so into intellectual autobiography. It is a craving for clearness rather than for autobiography that makes me do this. It is

{p. 102} the best way of stating my case. I have lived through a lot of Imperialism. I could write a long article on " Imperialisms I have Known." In the days which culminated in the Boer War I was a strong imperialist. I am often charged with instability because I am now an anti-imperialist; but my case is that it is imperialism which has changed, and not I. In those days British imperialism was recovering from Disraeli and it had not yet fallen sick with Joseph Chamberlain. Then as now my ends were cosmopolitan, and my dislike for and opposition to nationalism and nationalist patriotism have never varied. To me these are base, cramping, crippling, unjust, falsifying, and altogether mischievous and degrading forms into which human minds are, compressed. They produce what may prove to be an impossible jungle of intellectual difficulties on the way to the world State and a rationalized conduct of human affairs. But in the days before the Boer War the Empire was not nationalist, and not very patriotic. It was a great free-trading system, extraordinarily open to the rest of mankind, and sustaining the trade and finance of all the world. The City really ran the credit of the world. It was conceivable then that with an intellectual vigour and a frankness, patience,

and generosity it has altogether failed to produce, it might, in co-operation with other liberal powers, or at least with one other great liberal power, have become the precursor and framework of a real world system.

Leisurely people who are curious about such thing

{p. 103} may find my entirely ineffective intimations of these ideas in my Anticipations (1900, "The New Republic") and my Modern Utopia, which followed close upon the former. At that time a quite opposite conception of Empire was being glorified by Mr. Kipling, with a vigour and a splendour beyond all comparison more attractive than such well-meaning gropings as mine; and a whole generation was persuaded that our imperial system, which in reality is based on opportunity, compromise, adaptability, the luck of the steamship, and the obsession of our European rivals with the Rhine, was really a system of high and glittering conquest, to be sustained by the magic of prestige and developed further and higher in a mood of arrogant swagger. We had got our empire by luck and cunning, scarcely aware of what we did, and we were persuaded we had got it by superhuman strength and heroic resolution.

In those days the never very powerful intelligence of the British ruling class was much bedazzled by the tremendous posturings of the young German Emperor. just as now that same class, and especially its womankind, seems to be fascinated by the grandiose absurdities of Mussolini, and just as to-morrow it may be finding its ideal of manhood in the virile exhibitionism of some Emperor of the Sahara or some Cossack or Georgian who has jumped Moscow. In these years from igoo, onward, London, because of our want of critical backbone, aped and feared Berlin-excessive in both its fearand imitation. The Germans had a Zollverein and so we must have a Zollverein, and from the conversion

{p. 104} of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain by the quasi "expert' preachers of Tariff Reform onward, the Empire turned its back upon its possibilities as a world nexus, and faced towards narrowness, patriotism, and inevitable conflict with the rest of mankind.

I had some very vivid and intimate glimpses of this relapse from the partly cosmopolitan, instinctively open-handed British political methods of the closing nineteenth century. I saw it infected step by step with a patriotic, exclusive, monopolizing ideology of the German imperial type. In a little dining and debating club of thirteen members, invented by Mrs. Sidney Webb, people like Mr. Bertrand Russell, the late Lord Haldane, the new Lord Passfield, and myself, met and rubbed minds with people like Mr. Amery, Mr. Leo Maxse, Mr. Mackinder, Lord Milner, and Lord Grey. Our alleged object was to get to a common conception of the Empire.

The voice of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain was, so to speak, "heard without." All the thirteen - except myself - were gravely distracted by immediate political commitments, and we never got to any common conception of the Empire. Little effort indeed was made to do so. But we had some very entertaining discussions, and our average attendance remained remarkably high throughout our collective existence. We all thought each other unreasonable but interesting men. In the now rare and precious documents that record the proceedings of that club, I find myself, even at the opening discussion, appealing to geography against the fascinations of these new German fashions. The German

{p. 105} system, I argued, was geographically like a closed fist, mcidentally involving various Poles, Alsatians, and the like in its grip; it had many elements of economic unity. The British Empire, on the contrary, was like an open hand spread throughout the world. It had and could have no natural economic unity at all. Its different parts had each their distinctive systems of natural relationship. The business of Canada was to trade in the American system; it was our American branch. The business of Australia was to trade in the Pacific system; it was our Pacific branch. It was artificial, and it would be a struggle against natural law to try to draw such an Empire together with any but intellectual and moral bonds. Our imperial diffusion gave us enormous advantages for scientific and educational work, for intellectual variety in uniformity, and for every sort of exchange. The essential task, therefore, of the Empire was to think, teach, intercommunicate, and unify. So we might shadow forth and guide and dominate the greater unification before mankind. The only possible line of development was through the systematic perfection and realization of a liberal ideology, that would unite first the Empire and at last the world in a common world aim.

That was a conceivable ro1e between 1880 and 1900. But since then our imperialists have so maintained their preference for battleships over brains as instruments for the expression of the imperial idea, and they have stuck so steadfastly to that prepossession and to the erection of mean and stupid tariff obstacles to natural

{p. 106} economic development, that to-day it is difficult to imagine any restoration of these former hopes. For me. I live in the Empire as a man who occupies a house with an expiring lease. I can contemplate the disappearance of the last imperial links with equanimity

The Union Jack now signifies neither exceptional efficiency nor exceptional promise. Let us admit that fact. It did, but it does not do so any longer. The world would not wait for the British. We never braced up our slack educational links. I should be glad to see the English-speaking communities throughout the world free now to re-combine in some more progressive unity, unencumbered by any special responsibility for India, most alien of

lands, and freed from our formally snobbish traditions.

That club of Coefficients talked and then ceased to talk nearly twenty years ago. To-day I find little in my mind about imperialism that is not a logical development and amplification of the positions I occupied in those days. To-day the progressive entanglement of the economic and financial affairs of mankind into a world-wide system of reactions is much more impressive than it was in the opening decade of the century. It is going on faster than any of us could possibly have anticipated then. And 1 has escaped altogether from the limit of the Emnire The develonment of aviation and wireless and modern methods of communication has been ten times as rapid as any prophet dared imagine in igoo. It has been a stock principle of mine; it crops up in Anticipations, and I have repeated it

{p. 107} constantly and with increasing distinctness, since my wranglings with Mr. and Mrs. Webb apropos of their work upon Local Government, that the most convenient and therefore the right size of an administrative area is determined by the operative means of communication, and must vary as those means vary.

This seems to me a fundamental political principle that must always rule in human affairs. It applies to sovereign states just as much as to vestries. It is a principle obvious enough, but which still fails to get its full and frank recognition because most of those who discuss the broad lines of political and economic development in an authoritative way occupy positions in which its logical recognition might prove incon- venient. They accept as fundamental the legal areas and boundaries it would efface. - They are prevented from going deeper. It is no particular merit on my part that I do. I am able to think more freely than most of those concerned with politics and statecraft because I am quite unencumbered by any immediate interest in this respect. My diagnosis of the essential nature of the stresses of the present time is that, while everything else has been changing in scale, our emotion- charged traditional concepts of government and loyalty have not expanded to keep pace with that change of scale. There has been a lag in our political apprehen- sions, and a still greater lag in our educational adapta- tions. We are facing the second quarter of the twentieth century with the already lagging political ideology of the third quarter of the nineteenth, and

{p. 108} therein reside most of the distinctive stresses and dangers of our time.

A certain number of readers may say this is a very theoretical " proposition. That is no condemnation. Theory is the most practical thing in the world. " Theory " has given us all the mechanical and chemical developments of modern life. If the world had been left to the " practical " men in immediate everyday charge of the matters concerned, we should still be lighting our streets with oil lamps and our homes with tallow candles. And if I am starting out for a twothousand-mile automobile tour in lonesome country and someone comes along and says that my electric equipment is out-of-date, ripe for inspection and readjustment, and bound to give trouble and break down in a few hundred miles if I don't deal with it now, it may be wise of me to consider these propositions a little before I damn him for a theorizing fool and start up and go off in my usual dashing style, asserting that the vehicle always has gone well, always has muddled through, and therefore always will. And with regard to this self-sufficient imperialism which Lords Melchett and Beaverbrook seem disposed to adopt as the vehicle of their political activities, I am exactly in the r6le of that somebody who comes along and says to them and kindred drivers of the human auto, " This system of ideology you have cannot possibly stand the demands that the journey before you will make upon it."

This diagnosis of what is happening to mankind at the present time may be presented in a rather more

{p. 109} concrete fashion. Up to so late as a century and a half ago the world was really divided into a considerable number of autonomous economic systems, and the sovereign states of that time did generally correspond to these systems. There were regions of weak and uncertain boundaries, and there were ambitious monarchies with a passion for extending themselves and exacting glory and tribute. There were robber raids. There could be phases of unsettlement and disorder. But on the whole that patchwork of sovereign states was a working system with a general stability. Changes were dynastic changes or class revolutions that generally made a country more itself than ever. Climatic fluctuations that set nomadic hordes wandering stirred the world during a few centuries and left it to settle down again upon the established lines. The human animal was fed, clothed, housed, sustained by the resources of the couiftry in which it lived. The whole of the rest of the world might have been depopulated and left a wilderness, and the general life of such lands as seventeenth-century England or France or Sweden or Persia or Abyssinia or Siam would have gone on without any grave interruption. Then national states were the best working pattern of human community, and patriotism and loyalty excellent social cement. As Goldsmith remarked with perfect truth, if every time you fired off a gun in England a man was killed in China you would never have bothered or been bothered about it. The mentality of our great, great, great grandparents was adjusted to these con-

{p. 110} ditions. Man had a localized, patriotic mind because his economic life was definitely local and bounded.

A century of invention and science has altered all that. To-day we eat food from the ends of the earth, and are clothed with the resources of a planet. I will not embark upon a lengthy exposition of the way in which the life of nearly everybody nowadays overlaps the political boundaries that are supposed to confine him. Let a man consider his work and where the ultimate product to which his activities contribute is marketed, let him consider the list of his investments and the securities behind his insurance policy, let him go over the things upon his breakfast or dinner table, the furniture of his home, the appliances about him, the copper with which his house

is wired, the petrol in his car, the paper on which this is Printed, the fibres, rubber, fats, lubricants, and metals out of which the material substance of his daily existence is woven. He will realize that in the short period since the nineteenth century dawned human life has lost touch with locality to an extraordinary extent. Insidiously the average man has ceased to be part of a localized economic system, and has become part of a vaguely developed but profoundly real world economic system.

To which tropical raw materials, exotic mineral supplies, and industrialism in the temperate zone are all essential. And you cannot put him back to the old state of affairs unless you are prepared to shatter this developing thing, civilization, altogether.

It is only slowly that it is dawning upon us to-day

{p. 111} that a change of scale and economic range demands a corresponding change in political forms. That is not an adaptation that will arrive by itself. It is a problem for mankind that has to be consciously faced and solved. Under all sorts of falsifications the sovereign states of the world have been thrusting out in a blind effort to achieve the new scale. One may hazard the general proposition that the outline of history of the last hundred years can be stated as the more or less lucid attempts of all the main sovereign states of the world to secure a world-wide control of the raw materials necessary for the mechanical civilization upon which we have entered. All our modern imperialisms, are this : the more or less conscious efforts of once national states to become woyld-wide. And since at one time there can be only one complete world-wide state upon ourplanet, enormous pressures and rivalries and conflicts exist and intensify. And it seems to me that only two alternatives about the human future can be considered. Either these jostling and mutually incompatible independent sovereign states, which the great change of scale in the economic processes of life is continually forcing towards world dimensions, must fight among themselves until only one survives, or else mankind generally must be made to understand the nature of the present process, to substitute for the time-honoured but now out-of-date traditions of independent national sovereignty a new idea of world organization, and to determine political effort in that direction. The former alternative opens out before us the prospect of a long

{p. 112} series of probably more and more destructive wars which may lead to the exhaustion and degeneration of our species; the latter demands mental and moral adjustments of the most complex, difficult, and laborious sort. It means a tremendous break with tradition and a fundamental reconstruction of education throughout the world. But to me it is plainly the only sane course for human effort.

It is one of the characteristics of this happy-go-lucky time that few people realize the importance for themselves of their interpretation of recent history. Most of them attempt no interpretation. They drift from the last war to the next under the guidance of historical tradition, " minding their own businesses " until the next big impact smashes them. But I put it to the reader that ail interpretation of current history is a necessary basis for any rational political activity, and I challenge him, if this general interpretation I have given is wrong, to ask himself and, if possible inform this conference of intelligent people in which he participates, how far it is wrong and what is the general form, the right interpretation, to which our activities should be adjusted.

And yet I find such dominating figures in current affairs as Lord Melchett and Lord Beaverbrook, and such an active representative of scientific organization as Sir Richard Gregory, if I may drag him also into the talk, not in agreement with this interpretation. All of them seem more or less clearly to be putting quite a different construction upon the present world situation

{p. 113} and its possibilities. In my William Clissold I developed the idea, with a very evident application to the great enterprises of Lord Melchett, of an Open Conspiracy, of a sustained conscious and deliberate thrust towards cosmopolitanism and free world exchanges, in economics, in finance, in thought and purpose. In earlier books I had called the Open Conspiracy idea The New Republic or the Order of the Samurai, but the idea is the same. Political readjustment, and the development of world controls of the living interests of mankind, have to follow the necessities of such a thrust. But the abandonment of the Liberal Party by Lord Melchett and the general trend of his public conduct have forced upon me the unpleasant realization that he is livfng upon the narrower, more dangerous, and ultimately futile conception of the self-sufficient Empire, which I saw coming into activity in my Coefficient days, the days of the conversion of Joseph Chamberlain and the dawn of Tariff Reform. And if he is doing so, probably most of our other big financial and business leaders who are intelligent enough to have general ideas are doing the same thing. Which is for me a very disappointing realization. My con- ception of his proper r6le had been a sustained effort to lower the barriers about the Empire and develop alliances in the direction of federal association, a frank and friendly disposition to financial and economic co-operations and amalgamations with foreign, and particularly with American, German and French, groups, and a friendly and helpful attitude towards the

{p. 114} propaganda of cosmopolitan ideas and the reconstruction of education on cosmopolitan lines. I will not enumerate the circumstances which made such expectations particularly reasonable in the case of Lord Melchett. But my expectations have been disappointed, and here I have to deal with him as one of the champions of these plausible and dangerous theories of patriotic Imperialism.

What is the mental basis of this belief in a selfsufficient British Empire? It seems to me there are three possible ways in which such a creed may be held First, there may be a conviction that, contrary to my assertion, there

can exist upon the same planet, without mutual destruction and for an indefinite time, a number of sovereign world systems, growing out of the extension of the old sovereign states of the eighteenth century, and that the British system at any rate is powerful enough to maintain itself against all other pressures and rivalries. Against this I set the facts that the existing British Empire was made by the steamship, that its prosperity and security depend upon the sustained control of the seas, that the aeroplane, the submarine, and the competitive shipbuilding of other states, have so changed the cohesion of this sea-knit confederation that it is now no more than a heterogeneous system of regions linked by long and vulnerable lines of communication. Its present disposition to build tariff walls along these threads, and so monopolize the economic advantages its disproportionate share of the productive areas of the earth give it, will practically

{p. 115} oblige less fortunately situated imperialisms to assume an attitude of hostility. If it will not have economic pooling, then it will get war. And the next time it gets a world war, because of its disproportionate share of tropical sunlight, it may find itself with a less fortunate selection of allies-or with no allies. The idea -so popular already among the younger generation abroad, the idea of subduing national patriotism to a United States of Europe, which M. Briand has recently taken up, is a plain retort to the idea of our monopolistic imperialist system. What is going to occur when All Europe realizes that the ratio of its overseas supplies of raw material to its industrial population is less than that ruling behind the great imperial tariff wall?

But there is a second system of ideas, rather more plausible, in which it is admitted that the Empire is to be regarded as a temporary league leading on to a still wider synthesis of world controls (imperialism of 1890), but that meanwhile it is to be run as this self-sufficient Empire, with tariff walls, preferences, monopolizations, "keep out the foreigner," and all the rest of the competitive outfit. Then suddenly, I suppose, it is to do some tremendous volte-face and make a deal. But the objection to this second group of ideas lies in the fact that so long as we remain self-sufficient we build up army, navy, air forces, and a patriotic imperialist tradition, we mould economic interests to the imperial boundaries, we force lines of economic interaction into unnatural paths, and so make the empire less and less capable of that final amalgamation, physically

{p. 116} and mentally, without a mighty struggle. New ideas do not come suddenly. Wars do.

The mass of patriotic men of affairs to-day have, I believe, neither of these two foundation systems of ideas in their minds. The third system of fundamental ideas in vogue among patriotic imperialists is simply the old junk of nineteenth-century political thought. They have nothing in their minds of their own. They have never thought themselves out; nor have they thought out their world. They have just gone on doing business and drifting along in accordance with the political and patriotic traditions of their forefathers (which are as much out of date as stagecoaches and semaphore telegraphy).

I suppose that Lord Melchett, Sir Richard Gregory, and perhaps Lord Beaverbrook, would fall under the second of these three divisions of imperialists. But Lord Beaverbrook might come into the first-named class. I have given my reasons for regretting they are any sort of imperialists at all. I pose the Open Conspiracy as the modern scientific opposite and alternative to their semi-romantic, short-sighted, and foredoomed imperialism.

{p. 117} CHAPTER VI

THE WORLD CHANGE *

THE method of managing human affairs in separate compartments called independent sovereign States, such as Britain and France, has worked quite well for many generations. But during the course of a lifetime or so there has been a great change in the conditions of human life that renders nice little separate sovereign States a less and less possible method of conducting human affairs.

Consider how people lived in England or France or any other country in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. They ate, they drank, they worked and played, they lived in houses that didn't look so very different from the houses we live in now, their furniture was similar to ours, they had clothes, sometimes more picturesque and elaborate, but otherwise very like the clothes we wear. But-their food and drink-with the possible exception of a bottle of wine or so-were produced within a few miles; their tools and playthings were all made near by; their houses were built of material found.in the neighbourhood; their furniture and clothes were equally home products. In a prosperous English home then you might find nothing that

* Extract from a talk broadcast in July 1929 under the title The Way to World Peace. The rest of the talk is not given because it was largely a repetition of the Reichstag Address.

{p. 118} came from outside the country, except perhaps a little silk, some spice, a bit of gold, or a precious stone. The country was a complete system in itself. If in those days England had been cut off completely from all other countries, if all the other countries had suddenly ceased to exist, had been entirely depopulated and cut off from England, people in England could have gone on eating, drinking, working, and playing, sheltering themselves and clothing themselves in the way they were accustomed to, with only the slightest changes. And the size of the boundaries and the scope of governments of those days were adapted to that condition of things. England and France and Spain and Portugal were really independent of each other and could get along at a pinch without each other. Each was a little world'in itself-into which patriotism fitted beautifully.

But to-day all that is changed-except that the size and boundaries of England, France, Spain, and Portugal remain almost the same.

To-day a large part of our food and drink comes from countries beyond our boundaries and some of it comes from the ends of the earth. We have altered our way of living and become accustomed to a greater variety of foods, and our populations have increased beyond the capacity of our national food supply. Need I recite a list of the familiar things that would vanish from our homes if suddenly all -that we owe to importation were to disappear: tea, coffee, chocolate, oranges, lemons, bananas, most of our bread, most of our meat, and so on? And equally with our clothing.

{p. 119} We should find ourselves half stripped. The car in the garage would become immobilized for want of petrol and our telephone useless for want of copper derived from imported ores. And no effort to adjust things and make our forty odd million people suffice for themselves would save us. The crops in our fields would wither if the nourishment they had received through iM7 ported fertilizers were withdrawn. Seven-eighths of our industries would stop short, through the lack of this or that necessary ingredient, metal, fatty substance, oil, or what not. And that would throw most of our population out of employment. Everything would be dislocated.

Thus, instead of belonging, as our great-great-grandparents did, to a comparatively simple local economic community, almost completely self-sustaining within its national boundaries, we have become members of a vaguely defined world-wide economic community. The other parts of the planet have become necessary to us as they were never necessary to our great-greatgrandparents, and we and what we do and produce have become necessary to the other parts of the world. This process of the extension and intermingling of needs and interests is still going on very rapidly. We are rapidly becoming one world-wide community of interdependent human beings.

But-and this lies at the root of all this business of peace and war-the sovereign governments of the world have not been able to accommodate themselves stage by stage to this great change, this great fusion of once separate economic systems. They have felt

{p. 120} the need, the urgency to do so, but they have not succeeded. The general history of international relations in the last two centuries, indeed, is a history of sovereign States all trying to keep pace with this continually extending range of our vital interests. It is the story of the sovereign States of Europe all thrusting out to get control of the minerals and metals, the tropical products, the food-growing areas, necessary for their continuous development. Putting it compactly, every sovereign State in the world is now attempting to become-it is driven by the necessities of modern civilization to this attempt to become - a world State. And-forgive me for telling you anything so obvious-in one world there can only be one world State. I know many British people will be disposed to dispute that. They will say that these considerations may trouble other peoples perhaps, but in our Empire we have a system of world territories that could be now a self-sufficient world State regardless of all the rest of the world. But in July 1929 Sir Thomas Holland was explaining to the British Association that this is not so. We nearly monopolize certain products, it is true-nickel and gold, for example-and we have ample supplies of many others; but for antimony, bismuth, borates, petroleum, phosphates, potash, pyrites, mercury, sulphur, and radium, all vitally necessary to a modern civilization, we must go outside our farflung boundaries. Even the British Empire, altogether the largest and most diversified of political systems that has ever existed, is not economically independent.

{p. 121} CHAPTER VII

MY POINT OF VIEW

A Talk broadcast in a series of " Points of View "; October 1929.

IT has exercised my mind a lot to find out how much I could tell you of my Point of View-in half an hour. Because I suppose that means telling what I think I am, why I exist, what I think I am for, what I think of life, what I think of the world about me, and things like that. These are questions to which I have given, innumerable hours, in conversation, in reading and writing, in lonely places, and particularly in that loneliest place of all, the dark stillness of the night. Is it possible to give you something like a quintessence? Anyhow I am going to try.

In the perfume factories of Grasse in Provence they show you little bottles of concentrated extract. In this little bottle, they tell you, we have condensed the scent of half-a-million roses; in this, acres and acres of jasmine. In this brief talk to-night I am trying to give you the gist of many thousands of nights and days ofthought. I will try to make myself as clear as possible; but you must forgive me if now and then I have to be more concentrated than explicit.

We have already had the Points of View of Mr.

{p. 122} Lowes Dickinson, of the Dean of St. Paul's, and Mr. Bernard Shaw in this series of talks. I will not spend very much of my time discussing what they have said so well.

Mr. Lowes Dickinson talked of democracy. Demoracy, I thought, was the name used rather confusingly for two different methods of government, one used in the little city states of the past and the other in the big states

of the present, and I have made and written various criticisms of democracy on that assumption. But Mr. Lowes, Dickinson said it meant the fullest freedom of speech and discussion and a respectful treatment of all one's fellow human beings, and I have nothing but agreement with that sort of democracy. And the Dean of St. Paul's talked of Christianity. Christianity I have always held to be defined by its creeds, and since I cannot believe in many statements in these creeds-the Resurrection of the Body, for example-I have always refused to call myself a Christian, because that might have been sailing under false colours. But when the Dean of St. Paul's explains that these creeds do not bind him, and that Christianity can learn and alter its ideas without limit, almost am I tempted to call myself a Christian and accept his teaching. Mr. Shaw talked of this and that in a manner that was highly provocative. But I have long since trained myself not to be provoked by Mr. Shaw, and I continue to admire beyond measure the beautiful prose he talks and writes and his admirable pronunciation. He said that Russia is the only country which is

{p. 123} training its next generation to be better citizens than this one is. Well, I hope that is so.

If I have a general criticism to make of my three able and distinguished predecessors, it is that they have given us views rather than a statement of their Point of view. They told us what they saw, but not where they stood. Now I want to tell you where I stand. I am unable therefore to join on what I have to say to what my predecessors have said. Instead, I propose to begin at quite afresh point, and a rather more fundamental one.

I can say best what I have to say by talking first about immortality. I will open my matter with a question. Here is a voice talking to you. Here are thoughts being presented to your mind. This kind of mental intercourse which the wireless makes possible is at once extremely detached and extremely intimate. There has never been quite this effect of impersonal nearness before. We are sharing ideas. Our mental lives are in contact. The question I would put is: How far can we consider this mental life we are sharing to be immortal? And more particularly I would ask you a question I have often asked myself : What is this H. G. Wells who is now thinking before you and with you?

Now what do you suppose our little conference amounts to? What is happening now? You are Mr. So-and-so, or Mrs. So-and-so. or Miss So-and-so, and someone called H. G. Wells is talking to you. That is what most people will call self-evident fact. That is

{p. 124} what will pass muster as the truth of the matter. But is it altogether true ? Let us go into things a little more precisely. I will talk about my side of the talk, which is this H. G. Wells, but what I have to say will apply quite as well to your side also. This H. G. Wells is a person who was born in the year 1866 and who has since gone here and there and done this and that. His voice is here, some thought that may be considered to be his is here, but are you sure that all of him is present here ? May I point out to you that, so far from all of him being present in this discussion, very much of him is not present anywhere. The greater part of him is no longer in existence. It is dead. It is past and forgotten. He is already for the most part as dead as his grandfather.

Let me explain a little more fully what I mean by this. Consider the childhood of this person. I will tell you of one incident in it. In 1867 he was a small and extremely troublesome infant. He felt things vividly and expressed himself violently. He had one day a great and terrible adventure. It must have seemed like the end of the world to him. He was lying on a sofa and he rolled about upon it and fell off it. He must have been scared by that fall. But also he fell on a glass bottle. It broke. He was cut very dreadfully about the face. This body I have with me to-night still bears a scar over one eye. No doubt he was frightened and hurt, taken up and soothed. The doctor came and sewed him up. What a storm of feeling, what a fuss it must have been ! Yes, but what

{p. 125} do I know of all that now? Nothing, nothing except what my mother told me of it; nothing else at all. All the fear, all the feeling, all the details of the event have gone out of my conscious existence. All that is quite. dead. Now, can I really say that H. G. Wells of one year old is here? You will say, perhaps, " Of course he is." There is the scar. And if that child of twelve months old had not existed, how could this present talker exist ?

But wait a moment. That grandfather of mine! He was a gardener and he was rather good at growing roses. One day towards the end of the reign of King George III he stood in the sunshine in a garden at Penshurst and budded a rose. I know that for a fact just as completely as 1 know for a fact that H. G. Wells fell off a sofa in 1867. And also, be it noted, if my grandfather had not existed the present talker could not exist. My nose and my eyes would not be the shape and colour they are. If the scar is H. G. Wells of 1867, the eye is Joseph Wells of 1828. So, by the same test, if that infant H. G. Wells is alive here, his grandfather is alive here, and so far as one is dead and forgotten, so is the other. There is the same physical continuity; there is the same forgetfulness.

Now this idea that the thinking that is using the voice of H. G. Wells to talk to you to-night is not all of H. G. Wells is a very important idea in my point of view. It is pot only that I who am speaking am not in any real sense that baby of 1867, but it is also that I am not a certain ill and angry young man of twenty who lived in

{p. 126} 1886. He was struggling in the world under what he thought was an unjustly heavy handicap, and he talked and he wrote. I have photographs of him as he was then; 1 have stuff that he wrote. And for the life of me I cannot identify my present self with him. I have left him behind almost as completely as I have left my grandfather behind. On the other hand, I have recently been collaborating with one of my sons. We share many ideas and we have very similar mental dispositions. I feel at present much more closely identified with him than with that young H. G. Wells of 1886: or even with the H. G. Wells of 1896, whom I find from a photograph wore side-whiskers and a cascade moustache and rode about the countryside on a bicycle.

And now let us turn to another aspect of this curious enquiry. This train of thought which is talking to you now is something very much less than H. G. Wells who is, from my point of view, already very largely dead. But also it is also something very much more than H. G. Wells. You and I are thinking about what is immortal in ourselves. Now H. G. Wells never started that topic. It came to him. He heard people talking about it and preaching about it. He read about it. People who died in Egypt five thousand years ago and whose names and faces and habits and sins are utterly forgotten were talking about it. Plato, Buddha, Confucius, St. Paul have all had something important to say on the matter. That discussion came into our lives as we grew up. We may participate in it, change

{p. 127} it a little, before we pass it on. It is like a light passing through a prism which may test it, refract it perhaps, polarize it perhaps, and send it on again changed. We are the prism. The thoughts existed before we were born and will go on after we are finished with altogether.

Now here, you see, is something more, very fundamental, of what I am trying to say to you. Either this will seem the most lucid of realities or the most fantastic of speculations. But first let us have what I am putting to you plain. Here, I say, is this H. G. Wells who is talking, and he is-I have tried to show-so far from being immortal that the greater part of him is already dead and gone for ever. I will not presume to apply the obvious parallel to you. That is your affair. But also over and above this H. G. Wells is something, a living growth and a continual refining of ideas, a thought process which is bringing our minds together, expressed by his voice and carried far and wide in radiations from this centre in London. And this thought-process has lived already thousands of years ago and may, so far as we know, passing from mind to mind and from age to age, continue its life for ever. We are mortal persons responding to the advance of perhaps immortal ideas. We are not ourselves only: we are also part of human experience and thought.

I hope 1 have made my meaning clear thus far. You may not agree with me exactly, but I hope you have understood me, so that I can go on to the next light upon my point of view.

A second very fundamental question which man has

{p. 128} been debating with himself for many centuries, and which comes to most of us in due time and perplexes us, is the question of what is an individual. It is a question that joins on very closely to these ideas about immortality. How is the individual related to the species? How is the part related to the whole? How is the one related to the many? How is he or she as a whole related to everything in his or her make-up? A great part of the dialogues of Plato, for instance, consists of experiments and explorations about this group of questions.

I agree that to a lot of people this sort of discussion will seem hair-splitting, tedious, and unmeaning. They will fail to see what it is about and what good it is. They feel sure they are individuals, and that is an end to the matter. They will say that they do not want to bother their heads about it. Quite a lot of People seem to live now chiefly to escape having their heads bothered about anything, but most of that kind have probably stopped listening to this quite a while ago, if ever they began. To many however these questions are full of meaning, and to some of us they are among the most important questions in the world. They are so to me, and I cannot explain my Point of View at all without discussing them.

I suppose the ordinary and obvious answer to this question of what is an individual would be to say it is a living being detached from the rest of the world. It is born or hatched as a definite distinctive self; it maintains itself for a certain time against the rest of the

{p. 129} universe, and at last it dies and comes to at least a physical end. But is that an impregnable statement? If one pries into descriptive biology or into modern psychology, one finds first one curious fact and then another coming up to weaken and undermine this idea of the complete integrity of individuals. They are not so definitely marked off as we are disposed to think.

Go first to the biologist.. He will agree that men and cats and dogs are very individual creatures. He will probably say that they are strongly individualized. But when you ask him if that is true of all living things, he will at once say " No." He will tell you that -most, plants seem much more individualized than they are. You can take a plant and break it up into a number of plants. Are they new individuals or are they fractions of the old one ? You can take two plants even of different species and graft them together. What is the grafted plant, a new individual or one or both of the old ones? Trees seem to be much more individual than they really are, just as mountains do. It is a disposition of our minds to think of them as individuals. We talk of the Jungfrau or the Wetterhorn as though they were as complete and distinct as pyramids, but really they are only peaks on a general mountain mass. And it is not only plants and all the vegetable kingdom that are wanting in individuality, but the biologist will tell you of innumerable species of lower animals also, of which two sometimes come together and coalesce into one and one will break up into two or many, and again of individuals that branch off others but never

{p. 130} separate and so become what are called colonies, a sort of super-individual. If the higher animals could do as the lower animals do, we should have Mr. Lloyd George coalescing with Mr. Snowden into one individualwhich I am sure would be a terrible nightmare for the publicists of France-and we should have Mr. Winston Churchill breaking up into dozens and scores of Winston Churchills and writing books, painting pictures, forming governments, commanding and constituting armies and navies, and carrying every aspect of his versatility to the last extreme. I am afraid he would insist upon it. But the biologist assures us that all the higher

animals have lost these powers of combining and dividing and spreading themselves out. They are highly individualized, he says, they are unified and drawn together, they are cut off from the rest of the universe into themselves, to a degree no other creatures have attained. These individualities such as we have are an exception and not the rule among living things. They are not the common way of life.

But though we are highly individualized, says the biologist, our kind 'of creature is not completely individualized. He will tell you of various curious cases when sheep and cats and dogs and babies have been bom with two heads to one body or two bodies to one head. When there are two heads, where is the individual then? And he will bring home to you the fact that a great part of our bodily selves is unknown to us. We do not know what is inside of us until we learn about it from talk and lessons and books, and unless

{p. 131} trouble is brewing we do not know what goes on inside there nor how it feels. Our particular individuality in fact does not penetrate to our interiors. And if you will let the biologist run on he will tell you that in the blood vessels and substance of our body are millions of little beings, which are extraordinarily like some of the smallest, lowest microscopic animals which lead independent lives, and these go about in our bodies as citizens go about in the streets and houses of a city. These little beings, these corpuscles, kill disease germs, carry food and air about, and do a multitude of services. They have minute individualities of their own. We are made up of millions of such minute creatures, just as cities and nations are made of millions of such beings as we are. There are, you see, different ranks and kinds of individuality. It is not the simple matter so many people assume it to be.

Now when we turn from the modern biologist to the modern psychologist we get still more remarkable revelations about this individuality of ours, which seems at first so simple. He tells us of minds split and divided against themselves. I do not know whether you have read of cases of what is called divided personality. They are fascinatingly strange. They are rare but they occur. There are people who suddenly forget who they are. The individual becomes someone else. That may happen under hypnotism. It may happen in cases of insanity. But it may also happen without either hypnotism or insanity. In the same brain and in the same body it is possible for first one

{p. 132} and then another personality to take control. Perhaps you have read a story of R. L. Stevenson's which was suggested by these cases: the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That puts these phenomena in an extremely fantastic fashion, and it ascribes the change-over to a drug. But the change in the actual cases occurs without a drug. Quite a number of us go some little way towards such a change. Which of us indeed has not a better self and a worse self ?

I have had to make this appeal to biology and psychology with my eye on the clock, but I think I have at least said enough to show you the support I find in these sciences for my profound doubt whether this H. G. Wells of mine is really the completely independent separate, distinct being that it is our habit of mind to consider him. Perhaps my individuality, my personality, seems to be distincter than it is. Perhaps it is how shall I put it ?-a convenient biological illusion.

If I had the time I could produce a great mass of facts to support that, to show how individuality has arisen in the course of evolution and how every individual is, as it were, a sort of experiment made by nature to test this and that group of qualities. In collaboration with Julian Huxley and my son G. P. Wells, I have been trying to present that mass of facts to the general reader in a work called The Science of Life, but our utmost efforts to compress and simplify leave us with a large book, and so I can only allude to it here as being full of light upon this issue, the sort of light there is no time to give you now, and then turn to

{p. 133} another aspect of this question of " What am I? " and "What are you?"

Let us look within. How do you feel about your identity with yourself ? Well, anyhow, let me tell you how I feel about H. G. Wells. I have already tried to show that as a matter of fact a lot of him is already dead stuff and irrelevant stuff, and 1 have also tried to show that this thought that is talking to you is something very much more than H. G. Wells. And when it comes to introspection, then I feel, very, very clearly, that I am something very distinct from this individual H. G. Wells, who eats and sleeps and runs about the world. I feel that I am linked to him as a boat may be moored to a floating buoy. More than that, I have to use his voice, see with his eyes, experience the pain of any physical misfortune that comes to him. He is my window on the world and my mouthpiece. I have to think in his brain, and his store of memories is my only reference library. I doubt if I can think or feel or act as an individual without him. But I do not feel that I am he.

I take a great interest in him. I keep him as clean as I can and am always on the watch to prevent him getting sulky, dull, or lazy-not always with success. He has to be petted and persuaded. I like to be told he is good and remarkable, just as I like to be told my automobile is a good one. But sometimes I wish I could get away from him-heavens, how I wish it at times! He is clumsy in all sorts of ways and unbeautiful. His instincts and appetites are dreadful. He begins

{p. 134} to show considerable signs of wear. The reference library in him might be better arranged and the braincells quicker at the uptake. But he is all I have to keep me in touch with the world. When he goes I go. I am silenced for ever.

Now there is nothing original in this sense of detachment from myself. Most people get to something of the sort. When we are young we identify ourselves with ourselves very completely and fiercely. That may be a biological

necessity. But as we ripen--or as we age-the separation widens. All through the historical past of our race one can trace this feeling of detachment. They used to call the part that is talking to you now the soul, and the rejected part the body; but that is not quite my point of view. The H. G. Wells I look down upon is mental just as much as he is physical; he is the whole individualized, self-centred personality. When I read St. Paul and find him talking of the Old Adam and the New Adam, he seems to be saying something very much nearer to the truth than that popular distinction of body and spirit. When he cries, " Who can deliver me from the body of this death? " I find him very understandable. How warmly have I echoed that cry ! My feeling is just that sense of being thought-a part of a great process of thought-which finds itself entangled-as some young creature may be entangled in its egg membranes-in an over-developed, over-intense, over-limited egotism.

Now what I am saying here is not, I believe, an orthodox Christian view. Orthodox Christianity insists

{p. 135} that we are ourselves for ever and ever. Mr. Gilbert Chesterton ought to tell you about that. My point of view is much nearer stoicism. It is indeed stoicism seen in the light of modern biological science. I do not believe in the least that either the body of H. G. Wells or his personality is immortal, but I do believe that the growing process of thought, knowledge, and will of which we are parts, of which I am a part and of which you are a part, may go on growing in range and power for ever. I think that Man is immortal, but not men.

There you have my point of view, given to you as precisely and clearly as I can. Man, I take it, man in us, is more important than the things in the individual life, and this I believe not as a mere sentimentality but as a rigorously true statement of biological and mental fact. Our individuality is, so to speak, an inborn obsession from which we shall escape as we become more intelligent. And we are under a necessity to escape from it as we become more intelligent, because increasing intelligence brings us more and more clearly face to face with the ultimate frustration of every individual desire in age, enfeeblement, and death. Personality, individuality, is a biological device which has served its end in evolution and will decline. A consciousness of something greater than ourselves, the immortal soul of the race, is taking control of the direction of our lives.

If I had the time and erudition I think I could make an argument to show that this idea of the immortal

{p. 136} soul of the race in which our own lives are like passing thoughts is to be found in what Confucius calls the Superior Person, the Higher Being that is, in what St. Paul calls the New Adam, in the Logos of the Stoics, in the modern talk we hear of the Over Man or Super Man. But I cannot pursue these suggestions now.

If I may say a word or so about the Views one gets from this point of view, I would insist first that the subordination of self to a higher order of being does not mean the suppression of all or any of one's distinctive gif ts. We have to use ourselves to the utmost. We have to learn and make to the full measure of our possibilities. It is a sin to bury the talent, the individual gift which we possess for the good of the master being, Man. Nor must you imagine that the subordination of self to the immortal being of the race means a subordination of one's narrow self to the equally narrow selves of other people. It is for them also to give themselves to that life and all that increases knowledge and power. I do not believe in the surrender of one jot or one tittle of one's intelligence and will to the greatesthappiness of the greatest number, or to the will of the majority, or any such nonsense: I am not that sort of democrat. This world and its future is not for feeble folk any more than it is for selfish folk. It is not for the multitude, but for the best. The best of to-day will be the commonplace of to-morrow.

If I am something of a social leveller it is not because I want to give silly people a good time, but because I want to make opportunity universal, and not miss out

{p. 137} one single being who is worth while. If I want economic change, it is because the present system protects and fosters a vast swarm of wasteful spenders, no better in their quality and much worse in their lazy, pretentious traditions than the general run of mankind. If I am opposed to nationalism and war, it is because these things do not merely represent an immense waste of energy, but because they sustain a cant of blind discipline and loyalty and a paraphernalia of flags, uniforms, and parades that shelter a host of particularly mischievous, unintelligent bullies and wasters; because they place our lives at the mercy of trained blockheads. Militarism and warfare are childish things, if they are not more horrible than anything childish can be. They must become things of the past. They must die. Naturally my idea of politics is an open conspiracy to hurry these tiresome, wasteful, evil things, nationality and war, out of existence, to end this Empire and that Empire, and set up the one Empire of Man. And it is natural that I should exalt science. In the scientific world I find just that disinterested devotion to great ends that I hope will spread at last through the entire range of human activity. I find just that co-operation of men of every race and colour to increase Man's knowledge. We can all be citizens of the free state of science. But our political, our economic, our social lives have still to become illuminated and directed by the scientific spirit-are still sick and feeble with congenital traditionalism.

My time draws to an end. I was asked to give my

{p. 138} point of view, and I have given it. I hope to have interested you, and I hope I have not offended you. This is how I try to live, and this is how I have got to a certain mastery over the greed, the fears, the passions, and vanities that troubled my earlier days, and rid myself altogether of the fear of death.

It is good to be a part of life. Just as a sundial only counts the sunny hours, so does life know only that it is living. Many experiences there are in life, but one there is that we shall never have. We shall never know that we are

dead. My Point of View, I can assure you, is not an unhappy point of view. I have found it a good working point of view. I wish you-you other fragments of Man-could tell me what you think of it. I wish we could turn this apparatus about now and I could listen in to you.

{p. 139} CHAPTER VIII

PRESENT-DAY MORALS *

THERE have been immense changes in people I s ideas of conduct during the past half-century, and almost all these changes have been releases. " Thou shalt not " has ceased to be the prescription for a respectable moral life. What indeed is the current prescription for a respectable moral life? What is the nature of the indisputable wide difference between the behaviour of people now and the behaviour of people fifty years ago ?

I doubt if it is an altogether simple difference. But I think there is one main cause for it so plain that it completely overshadows the others. It is the destruction of the arbitrary imperatives which once sustained the moral code that is now in collapse. As late as fifty years ago human society was still permeated by the fear of the unknown, a religious dread of consequences, clear and definite in the case of the pious, but affecting even the sceptic through his isolation and lack of moral support. The front of authority was unbroken. Doubt got no countenance and questions were never answered because it was sinful even to ask them. In the code of morals that prevailed at that time, the broad,

* John Bull, 1930.

{p. 140} gentle, and exalted sentiments of the New Testament were little more than a gracious adornment for the explicit severities of the Old.

This former code, deriving from conditions of life profoundly different from our own, laid great stress on punctual religious observances and the restriction of the sexual life to certain sanctioned channels. Beyond that it was amazingly defective. It did not enforce truthfulness, much less frankness; it was silent or ambiguous about industry, social service, and the proper uses of property, and it evaded political responsibility. But it was savagely hostile to two things: lack of faith and lack of chastity. And it is well to be clear about the real meaning Of chastity-because it is too often assumed that it is a very mystical and beautiful quality in sexual conduct. It has never really worked out in practice as anything of the sort. It has meant simply restraint from any physical expression of love unless the permission of a minister of religion or of a registrar duly appointed for the purpose of making acts of love chaste in a regular and orderly manner, had been obtained. Chastity was essentially subordination of the sexual impulse to the religious organization. And the religious organization, for reasons into which we cannot enter now, has always stressed sexual restraint and limitation, and has generally been disposed to insist that complete sexual abstinence is the perfection of self-submission and therefore the highest form of chastity.

Within a lifetime this intense and narrow canalization

{p. 141} of the innate moral impulse in man, into orthodoxy and chastity has completely broken down. Faith was the first thing to go, and chastityl its associate, has followed. Faith has gone because the old story of the world, the explanation of the nature and causes of things propounded by the religious organizations, has undergone profoundly destructive criticism. A great accumulation of scientific conviction has arisen in complete discord with its statements. The old story has been not so much controverted as quietly put in the wrong. It has become difficult to believe, and the religious organizations have been unable either to substantiate it or to accommodate it to the new realizations of science and critical thought. And so, following a generation which lost its faith, slowly and reluctantly indeed but conclusively, we are now confronted by a new generation which finds no value in faith and no virtue in chastity.

This is not a loss of morality, but a shifting of the moral standards. To be a social animal is to be a moral animal, and these " emancipated " human beings are still under an inherent and ineradicable necessity to keep standards and respect obligations. The very decay of " faith " is due to a profounder virtue-the disposition and the' courage to seek and find the truth. And the first main difference in the conduct of people to-day, as compared with that of their grandparents, is their enormously greater sincerity, directness, frankness, and breadth of thought and talk and discussion. They are not afraid. Read the

{p. 142} novels of our grandparents, the old newspapers of that time, Punch especially, and everything that reveals mental attitudes, and you will realize that to go back to 1870 would be to go back to a blinkered, narrow way of living insufferable to anyone born in this century. We have written truth and freedom in the place of faith, and health and cleanliness in the place of chastity. For the "Thou shalt not " and "Thou shalt " of the old, now bankrupt theology the new way of thinking has substituted "Why should you not?" and "Why should you?" and follows up its questions relentlessly.

The consequences of this great jail delivery of minds go far beyond the range of those sexual matters upon which the older morality was concentrated with such morbid intensity. Released from these preoccupations, the new generation awakens to social and political responsibilities, and finds itself in a world hideous with justified war and crazy with economic delusions. It discovers that smug acquiescence in unjust and unrighteous institutions is a sort of mental self-pollution, and that unrestrained acquisitiveness is a monstrously more harmful vice than the excessive or perverse indulgence of a sexual appetite. Furtive motives are uglier than

physical lusts. Mental drugs do more harm to your being than bodily ones. A man has less right to get drunken upon vulgar patriotism than on raw spirits, and a shabby profit is worse to snatch than a dirty pleasure. These are propositions to outrage every sensibility of the old-fashioned respectable,

{p. 143} who believed they could purchase the right to be unrestrainedly mean, timid, self-seeking, competitive, and malicious at the price of a little dirty continence and much silence and concealment about sexual things.

In.the excitement of its revolt against the purely repressive moral teaching of the orthodox age, the new generation may have been disposed at first to rejoice too loudly and indqlge too freely in crude and extravagant freedoms. The reaction from prim conformity has had a noisy and harsh phase. Gouty toes have suffered. And it was in the nature of things that the first releases of the young should manifest themselves in wild experimental drinking and unrestrained sexual freedoms and the like disconcerting dissipation. It is nothing to be alarmed about. The natural desire to be " fit," the natural preference for lovely and orderly forms of freedom, the innate gravity of love, may be trusted to clean up all that.

And the indifference of the young to social obligations and political interests is, I am convinced, an appearance and not a reality. They do not interest themselves in parliamentary institutions and the traditional humbug of this Party or that Party and its Great Leader any more than they wear crinolines, ringlets, side-whiskers, and pegtop trousers. For them at any rate Mr. Gladstone and Abraham Lincoln are dead and buried. They wish their degenerate imitators were dead too. To them parliament is not so much an " arena " as an enclosure of noxious bores. In vain is the party net spread in the sight of the young. They would as soon money and credit, and about the brutality and stupidity of war. They are questioning and ransacking the tawdry old patriotisms, the fever rags of false loyalties, and the pretentious economic concealm t whi h

{p. 144} discus s that reform of the Prayer Book which occupies the minds of the aged. The young seek new forms of expression.

They want particularly to learn about threaten their lives, even more vigorously than our generation questioned and ransacked the validity of the ancient taboos and superstitions that cramped and crippled our dreams and desires ... And then they will ask what they ought to do about it all?

Their answer will be the backbone of the new morality.

{p. 145} CHAPTER IX

DIVORCE *

I Do not know why The New Yoyk Woyld has invited me to take part in a symposium on divorce. I am not even an amateur of the subject. I have avoided it. It hardly appears in my novels. I have never actually appeared in a divorce court, I rarely read divorce trials, and I know nothing of the statistics of the subject. I was divorced once, but it was a very light and early divorce, and it did not prevent my first wife and me remaining on terms of mutual respect and affection to the very end of her life. I have met a certain number of divorced people, and generally they seemed more sedulously respectable and much more socially timid than the average human being. The children of divorced and separated people appear to suffer from the same disadvantages as illegitimate children; they are apt to be torn by a divided control, and they do not grow up with that solid assurance which the sense of home as an unassailable background and retreat gives to a certain percentage of the children of more or less prosperous married people. They are less likely therefore to be socially courageous. If they are not

* Published in The New York World, 1929. 145 146

{p. 146} very good stuff indeed they may start life with a demoralizing feeling of specific inferiority.

Why have I hitherto avoided this subject of divorce?

The editorial letter awakens me to my reluctance, and if I am to make any worth-while contribution to this symposium it must take the form of an answer to that question. I have avoided dwelling upon and writing about divorce because I dislike divorce. I dislike the thought of divorce. The idea of separating two people who have been intimately allied and who have rejoiced and confided in one another, by a formal public dissociation savours of the inhuman to me. No devout Catholic could be more flatly opposed to divorce than 1 am. It is a thoroughly hard and unpleasant necessity in modern life. It is a disagreeable aspect of a larger and still more disagreeable fact, the hard, rigid, irrational exaggeration of marriage in the modern community. Divorce is merely one ugly consequence and reminder of this indiscriminating, clumsy, implacable institution. Like many socialists, I have in my composition an extreme individualism. I resent needless invasions of the private life. The sexual conduct of an adult is his or her own affair so far as it does not affect the collective welfare; it is a part of his own peculiar personal mental, moral, and physical hygiene. If it attacks the collective well-being, then and then only is the intervention of the community justified. The community has a right to suppress flagrant indecency just as it has a right to suppress noise or black smoke. And it has to protect all young lives from being either

{p. 147} cramped, perverted, or unduly stimulated by the Positive or negative aggressions of grown-up people. There is also a reasonable case for the Prevention of the unions of unsterilized defectives. Apart from these things, the community has no other legitimate interest in sexual affairs until the birth and care of children come into the question. Then, for its own preservation and the general welfare, it has to be notified, and it has to stand over the parents to ensure the children a proper upbringing. In a modern state the well-being of children is the only rational justification of a marriage bond. There is no other justification that is not either sentimental or mystical. The conclusion of a marriage before offspring are assured is as absurd from the rationalist point of view as the failure to establish a linked responsibility when offspring occur.

But we have to bear in mind that the contemporary forms of marriage were not the outcome of a rationalist process. Marriage, as we trace it back to the early phases of human society, seems to have arisen as a mitigation of that animal jealousy which would otherwise have torn the growing community apart. It was a system of taboos which had little or no relation to children. Even to-day there are savages who have marriage regulations of a sort and yet who are ignorant of the real relation of their sexual life to offspring. They do not know that making love produces children. Yet they have stringent rules about making love. They apportion people to each other for " mutual comfort " as the English Prayer-book puts it. To this

{p. 148} day for a large majority of people marriage is an institution for the protection and enforcement of individual sexual rights. To this large majority it is a contract for sexual monopolization, and for them it has no other meaning. Consequently we find in various countries-in the State of New York, for instance divorce is given for adultery and for no other reason. That marriage is an institution for the protection of the home and family is a proposition justified neither by history nor by present practice. It is a new conception which people are seeking to impose upon the old. It is an excuse for continuing the old restrictions into a new age.

We may clear up this question very greatly by giving these two distinct ideas different names. We may call the older idea of marriage jealousy-marriage, and the newer idea parentage-marriage. Now the former I would put outside the power of the State altogether. I would abolish jealousy-marriage. It is something that has served its turn in social development. I would not have the State intervene to make people live together or oblige them to live apart. I would not have it penalize any wavering of desire. I would have it declared that sexual love should not be bought, sold, hired, or made the subject of any contract whatever. Such matters should be left to religious bodies, to " society," to the gossips if you will, to deal with in their own fashion and with the powers and influence they possess.

But a child I would make a living and legally unkillable link between its parents. They would be jointly and severally responsible for its loving care,

{p. 149} its upbringing and welfare until it was fully launched into the world. And if either or both fell short in their duty, then the State would appoint trustees and assessors with authority and powers to recall them to their responsibility, with the power to call them together and arrange the best working scheme for the child or children concerned. I would have the conjoint responsibility imposed upon the parents of all children -whatever other relationships existed. It would be a sort of secondary marriage.

You may say I am proposing here to abolish the monogamic family. I am proposing nothing of the kind. The monogamic family exists not because it is imposed upon us by law, but because for the run of mankind the domesticated companionship of one man and one woman is the most natural, comfortable, and convenient way of living. Most people would live so paired for most of their lives if there were no laws whatever to oblige them to do so.

I doubt if the average duration of European or American marriages is much longer than the average duration of what are called irregular unions. We credit our laws with too much power in these matters. They simply intervene to prescribe and over-regulate what would exist without their intervention. They lock the door of home upon people, make a stupendous parade of unlocking the door at marriage, insist on locking the couple in, and make a still more tremendous fuss if they want to come out again. This fuss with the locks provokes a violent claustrophobia in many a mind that would otherwise remain quite contentedly inside.

{p. 150} But in a world in which marriage has really become an adequate institution for the protection of children, and has ceased to be a public contract in confirmation of possessive jealousy, the question of divorce hardly arises. People who have contracted religious marriages or made a social parade of their sexual intimacy may find a need for an equally public repudiation of their unions, but I do not see why the State, that overworked institution, should be compelled to act as register for their sterile or sterilized associations and partings.

In the little close communities of the past the pairing of So-and-so and So-and-so, or their separation, the establishment or relaxation of the personal taboo upon them, was perhaps of general interest, but what possible public significance has the public pairing of people in New York or London or Paris? It simply obstructs the already congested traffic, and the subsequent divorce defiles the newspapers with particulars unsuitable for publicity; nobody is a bit the better for it and some of the children are the worse. But when the intimations of parentage come in, then the business is altogether different. It is plainly the function of the modern State to enquire into the matter forthwith. It has to ask, " Are you prepared to make a home for this child? Are you prepared to give it the loving attention it needs, the sense of belonging, the sense of your conjoint support and goodwill until it is fairly started in life ? And if you are not, then why, having regard to current knowledge and usage, have you started this thing, and what sort of exceptional grade of marriage

{p. 151} and co-operation do you propose to adopt with regard to it ? "

I do not see how, in the development of the modern community and regarding marriage as an institution primarily concerned with the welfare of children, we can avoid the prospect of supplementary types of marriage to stand beside the normal everyday marriage which is now the only permitted form. If we are to prepare a future in which there will be fewer neglected children of divorced people, insecure deserted illegitimate children, unhappy step-children, and children living in homes of hate, then we have to face the possibility of a variety of types of marriage. That has not yet been fairly contemplated by social reformers. And if the first essay proves unsuccessful and the home becomes unhappy or for any other reason impossible, then it seems to me that the proper remedy is not the hostilities of divorce and the tearing apart of parents, but that they should sit down with an assessor to readjust their marriage at a new level, and so change its grade.

I put this much reform of marriage institutions as an alternative to divorce law reform. I think our contemporary scheme of marriage and divorce is ridiculous, stupid, and cruel. I think it is over-elaborate and roundabout first to insist upon everybody being tied up in one rigid, invariable fashion, and then to admit the absurdity of this proceeding by creating a series of complicated and humiliating rules to untie uncomfortable pairs. In regard to divorce I am probably, by modern standards, sentimental and

[p. 152} old-fashioned. It seems entirely dreadful to me that two people who have been linked by something more than a casual encounter, who have gone about as close allies, who have done tender and unselfish things for each other, who have cared for the same things, who have laughed together and made happiness and delight for each other, should be supposed to be capable of a complete mental and physical separation. They must have left a thousand marks upon each other. The severing humiliation, the breach of faith or expectation, the definitive wound or whatever else it was that has separated them, ought not to efface or corrupt that hoard of memories. Ought not-but I see that it does. " I have found you out," says one, and instantly that former treasure is dusty lumber to be got rid of as soon as possible. Or, " If you can love another being in this world, your love is rubbish to me."

That is the common way of it, and it is horrible; and my article upon divorce law reform amounts, I see, now that I have written it, to little more than a shrug of the shoulders at my fiercer fellow-creatures. Why are human beings egotists, only to make themselves or others, or both themselves and others, unhappy? Marriage laws and divorces, even more than economic and belligerent patriotism, remind me, as I care less and less to be reminded, of the irrational ruthlessness of mankind.

{p. 153} CHAPTER X

THE A B C OF WORLD PEACE *

IT may be worth while to turn our attention for a moment or so away from the comings and goings of the multiplying tribe of Peacemakers who figure so largely in contemporary affairs, and devote three or four articles to the elementary conditions of the Peace necessity.

We may find in a return to fundamentals some explanation for a certain suspicion of futility which taints our general approval of all these angelic activities.

What is the distinctive feature of our age ? An enormous increase in the range and power of human action. We can fly round the world in twenty days, blow a man to pieces forty miles away, see and talk to our aunt at the Antipodes; the food we eat was grown anywhere and everywhere on earth, etc., etc.

I will not repeat the astounding list. It is familiar to everyone. Yet nevertheless we are still living in little cramped sovereign States whose scale and boundaries were determined before any of this expansion of range and power began. They strangle us with petty rivalries.

They preserve an ancient tradition of independence and war. But war has become monstrous. The puny

* The Daily Heyald, March 17th-2oth, 1930.

{p. 154} warfare of the past was cruel and hard, but it did not wreck human society. Modern war can and very probably will. What are we going to do about it?

The plain answer is that we have to scrap these old, outgrown boundaries and these outgrown sovereign loyalties, throw them out of our minds as we throw off infantile garments as we grow up.

That is what we human beings have to do. This is the plain necessity of the case. And that is what at present we are not doing. For dreadfully reasonable reasons. Because we do not know h-ow to set about it.. Because it demands a new sort of politics and a new sort of politician.

There is no such thing as a cosmopolitan politician; there exists no cosmopolitan statesmanship. That is the key to the difficulty.

There is cosmopolitan science which is as true in China as it is in Peru; there is cosmopolitan engineering or medicine, and there is even quasi-cosmopolitan industrialism and finance.

But the politician has to be, or he has to pretend to be, the devoted servant of the outgrown, misfitting traditional political system to which he belongsEngland, France, Ruritania, or whatever it is. He could not live as a politician without being national and loyal and patriotic.

So he has to shirk the main problem of scrapping our strangling, old-scale sovereignties altogether; it would never do to talk about that; and, since there is this great and imminent Fear brooding now over all human life, he does his best to persuade himself and

{p. 155} others that all sorts of minor dodges are perfectly splendid and satisfactory Peacemaking, and that they really will. stave off and mitigate war.

World federation? He pretends not to hear, not to recognize, the horrid phrase. He loves his little old flag; his own dear little separate land. It is his profession. He cannot begin to admit the possibility of any merger. But Arbitration? Pacts? Yes. Promises never, never, never to use the guns and poison gas we are making and improving so abundantly? Ah, there you have practical politics !

And just now in particular Disarmament. Only fifty cruisers instead of seventy! What a stride! And nobody to be smashed, crushed, blown to fragments, scalded to death, or drowned in any ship of more than 25,000 tons ! No ship to be sent to smithereens by any submarine of more than 300 feet in length ! It's a sort of new Magna Charta for humanity. Something done and nothing really changed, the Nobel peace prize for some politician or other perhaps, and harps and palms galore.

At its best Disarmament may do this; it may diminish the number of people socially, professionally, and commercially interested in patriotism and in keeping war in view. That might prove a useful step towards reality in the matter. But let us set about the business logically and sanely.

The first step in any honest disarmament of Great Britain would be, of course, mental and moral; the complete disuse of military uniforms by the monarch,

{p. 156} for example, and the abolition of cadet corps in the public schools.

It would be excellent, for example, if one of these Peace Conferences were to forbid men in official positions the use of gold lace and spurs and feathers, and to restrict each country to so many million brass buttons a year. That might have a real effect upon the roots of war. It would not be the world- peace, but it would be the diminution of an offence against World Peace. And we might abolish military tattoos.

But 1 will not expatiate on Disarmament at its best. Disarmament is rarely at its best. Most of it is pure imposture. It is a haggling of experts to relinquish disadvantages and sacrifice the obsolescent, so as to be able to get ahead in new unspecified directions.

The battleship is played out and the big cruiser follows. So we have the sublime proposal of an allround reduction in these arms.

It is like a burglar undertaking never to carry a pike or wear armour on his rounds. just one simple little automatic is all he asks for. To protect himself from other possible bad burglars. He agrees to be restricted to that. Gas we store in abundance and promise not to use. The air and land forces generally are, by request, ignored.

I decline to be enthusiastic about any of this Disarmament parade. I do not even think it leads towards peace. I find it hard to believe in the sincerity of those who pretend it does.

The only real way to end war is to destroy the liberty to make war-that is to say, to put an end to the out

{p. 157} grown sovereign independence of States. The only real way to peace in the world is world federation.

Federate the great Powers of the world and, provided the federal government is firm in its saddle, it will not matter if the seas are paved with battleships and all humanity wears uniform and passes its time exchanging military salutes. There will be no one to fight until we open communication with the moon.

But leave Britain, France, Germany, the. United States, and Russia free and independent and sovereign and competitive as they are now, and another great war in the history of humanity is as inevitable as sunset.

The French have much to justify them in their refusal to disarm until they get a treaty of mutual aid and protection.

That is why they haggle now-and I am all for them. They begin to talk of the United States of Europe. That is a gleam of sanity in European political thought.

A little Disarmament, the repudiation of certain weapons and practices, will merely make war less formidable at its commencement and so easier to begin. The logic of modern warfare is irresistible; it is impossible to canalize it or localize it; however partially you begin it, before it is over you are all in.

And as all this chaffering of experts at the London Disarmament Conference witnesses, nothing whatever has been done since the Armistice of 1918 to alleviate sensibly the risk of another world war.

How can people even pretend to take this chaffering as any sort of move towards peace ? These war experts are

{p. 158} merely playing for position in view of the next world war.

One fact stares our Peacemakers so hard and so persistently in the face that they are quite unable to return its.glare. They rush about Patronizing, sentimentalizing, pacting, and leaguing, and handing each other olive branches, manifestly with a common understanding that this obtrusive, conspicuous fact is to be ignored.

This disregarded chaRenge is that Great Britain, the United States, France, Germany, and japan have all the necessary power, moral, material, and financial, to impose peace upon the seas, oceans, and waterways of the world, and that, with the co-operation of Russia, the absolute cessation of warfare throughout the world could be decreed now.

To be brutally frank about the matter, two of these six names could be omitted and the thing could stffl be done. No other Power need even be consulted.

Italy has neither coal nor steel nor food for its wildly breeding population, to carry on a war of secession from such a decision, and no other Power counts so far as this question of the forcible imposition of peace goes.

All the rest of the world in aWance could not resist the demand for world federation and disarmament these major Powers could make.

If these dominating Powers-and really there need be only four of them-chose to say:

" We federate - we make a settlement of all our outstanding difficulties ; we establish a permanent federal council to which we entrust the preservation

{p. 159} of that settlement, the power to decide upon any unanticipated dispute, and the conduct of our common foreign policy towards States not federated with us.

" And we pool our armies and navies and put them under the control of this council, to reduce them to an indicated minimum. They will become the Federal navy and army.

" And further, we place our protectorates, tropical possessions, and so forth, under this council; we give it control of inter-state trade and instruct it to organize the progressive reduction of the tariff barriers that are strangling the trade of the world. . . . "

If, I say, these dominating Powers, these four Powers, chose to go boldly into such a federation, the age of inteynational way would styaightway be at an end.

And is it such an impossible " If " ?

Why shouldn't they do that?

Federation of this type was achieved by the thirteen states of the North American Union, and at a time when communications were barbaricaRy imperfect. It has been a gigantic success.

It would not be necessary to have any revolutions in any of the countries concerned to bring about such a federation. They can still keep their kings and mikados if they like-for home consumption.

Kant, I admit, thought otherwise, and held that only Republics could form a world federation; but then he wrote in the glow of the French Revolution. Yet surely it need not affect the home constitution of the states concerned to delegate and cede a certain specific

{p. 160} part of their independent sovereignty to an overriding council. Is there such a thing as an innate instinct for complete national sovereignty?

Ask M. Briand, who has been gaining immense popularity in so intensely a patriotic country as France with a far less workable project, the United States of Europe.

This project merits attention on the part of all who meet such suggestions as. I am making with cheap and

obvious " impossibles." The scheme of the United States of Europe (" Europe ma patrie ") involves inter-State Free Trade and a consortium for overseas possessions.

The League of Nations, you may object, is in the way of such a Federation as I am proposing so brutally here. The League of Nations can get out of the way.

What does it matter if the Armament industry bribes the representatives of Ruritania, Hippopotamia, Rodeoia, Tundura, Laputa, the Bot States, and the .Cannibal Islands, to outvote the dominant Powers and forbid the banns of this great union, provided the Great Powers disregard them?

What do such votes matter? States are made for man and not man for States. Counting heads is bad enough, but counting States is worse.

If among all these ineffective peacemakers who pervade our present world we had six lucid, Persuasive, and determined statesmen, we should all be marching gladly towards such an entirely effective peace federation as I have indicated now.

States are made for man and not man for States;

{p. 161} that is the most obvious and most neglected truth in the world to-day. The politicians ignore it naturally enough because by the very nature of their training they are accustomed to think in terms of the existing State, its offices, its Constitution, and so forth.

But it is not merely the politicians who ignore the fact that States are temporary conveniences and not sacred entities. We have all been brought up in similar blinkers. The politicians are obliged to pose as patriotic advocates by our limitations.

We know that the urban district of Little Puddletown and the metropolitan police boundaries and the county of Middlesex are for our human convenience, and can contemplate the partial or complete merger of any of these divisions in some larger administration without convulsive emotion.

But when it comes to Britannia, Columbia, and La France, romantic colourings come in. Why? Feelings of a religious profundity are touched, feelings that have been instilled since our infancy. From our earliest years these national names have been personified and defined for us. They are in effect goddesses.

It seems blasphemy to us for anyone to say that Britannia is a three-headed fiction speaking English, Welsh, and Gaelic, that Columbia is a patchwork of fortyeight states, that La France is now actively suppressing local languages and culture in Alsace and Brittany.

For ever now, it seems, these inconvenient political arrangements of the later eighteenth century are to remain, sovereign and inviolate, even at the price of

{p. 162} peace. They may not sink even to dominion status, to the status of federated allies.

True that Christianity makes some pretence about a Prince of Peace who is Lord of all the World, but no Christian body I know of except the Quakers has ever given sustained evidence of really meaning it. The rest give unto Caesar a great deal more than the things that are Caesar's and reserve for the Church the residue of the things that are God's.

But stay! Perhaps I am going too far there. Was there not a few weeks ago a certain papal encyclical on education that warned the world at large and Caesar in particular against the teaching of violent and provocative nationalism? Has the Roman Church really discovered at last that it is Catholic and not Roman, or is this merely a phase in its quarrel with Mussolini?

The fact remains, however, that even in our vast heterogeneous Atlantic States politicians do not dare to speak plainly and boldly of this obvious door to World Peace, a federation of the dominant powers, that gapes open before mankind.

The most enlightened of them will not speak it out. They will sign Briand-Kellogg pacts to renounce war, but they will provide no instrument to prevent and replace it. It has to be replaced, for otherwise there is a gap in the international process.

Our peacemakers will make gestures and speeches of quite incredible magnanimity-to the proper audience. Some, in need of journalistic support, will even come along to such irresponsible people as myself.

{p. 163} Don't talk of Federation yet," -they will say. Don't mention it yet. The world is not ripe for it. We see the door as plainly as you do. We're edging towards it. But we want to back into it by a sort of accident, and quite informally. So as not to offend our patriots, who may vote against us if we actually turn our faces that way. You see, it is so necessary t at everybody should vote for us. Or how can we lead them? Do consider our difficulties."

But if they try to back through the open door of this obviously necessary and overdue Federation of the dominant Powers, they will trip up on the threshold.

The only way to organized World Peace lies through such a Federation, and the only way to get to that Federation is boldly frontwise, in the sight and knowledge of all mankind.

I have pointed out that the peace of the world can f or the present be secured quite effectively by a permanent unified alliance, that is to say a Federation, of only four great States in the world speaking in all three languages.

Such a Federation would secure the peace forthwith, and, as I will now point out, it would lead very rapidly to a practical, and finally to a formal, Federation of all mankind.

I have already shown how entirely reasonable and practicable a suggestion the first step is. It would be quite unnecessary to drag in any other States to begin with to make this Federation effective. There would be nothing on earth outside it that could prevent it or withstand it.

{p. 164} And from the very outset it would find a number of other highly civilized States-all the highly civilized North European States, for example-prepared to welcome and co-operate with it.

It was one of the fundamental errors in the planning of the League of Nations that it aspired to be a comprehensive League-and left out Russia. It was conceived by a legal rather than a statesmanlike mentality. It was presented to countries quite incapable of understanding its aims or entering into its spirit.

The superstitious reverence for a sovereign State, any sort of sovereign State, as something sovereign and divine, ruled. its makers' mind. It might be called the League to preserve the separate sovereignty of all existing nations for ever. It was a sort of constitution for a patchwork world.

The framers of its covenant were manifestly haunted by the idea that before any new step towards world synthesis was taken Abyssinia ought to be asked. Brave little Abyssinia 1 1 see no need to ask Abyssinia.

I see no need to ask any sovereign Power on earth except the great groups of people I have already named. They are the main mass of mankind. Let four or five of them begin.

Indeed, even two might begin, the two Englishspeaking systems. But before they had even begun, the mere realization that they were presently beginning would inevitably bring in the two or three other Powers needed for a complete peace ascendancy.

At first there might be a great outcry against a

{p. 165} conspiracy to establish Anglo-Saxon world dominion. It would be represented as a proposed subjugation of the world to Anglo-Saxon ideas. We who have so few ideas!

Then after that storm had blown itself out the fundamental common-sense of France would assert itself. There would probably be much less suspicion and resistance in Germany, and that would help the traditional realism of the French to face the new situation.

No doubt the first conferences would sit down to a problem with many tremendous side issues and innumerable intricate comers. The dodging and haggling traditions of the old diplomacy would be difficult to eradicate. Time after time these opening conferences would quarrel, despair, break up, and re-assemble.

But they would be handling a problem leading to a comprehensible, real, and final objective. They would be going somewhere. It would no longer be one of the restricted conditional problems-of disarmament, of indebtedness and the like, which rest on fictions and reservations, and have " ifs " and " ans " that recede in all directions towards a menacing darkness of disregarded possibilities.

And all the more reason is there in these inevitable complications and stresses for the, restriction of the first attempt to federate to two or to a few Powers.

By the time that Britain and the United States if at first only these two could be brought togetherhad worried out the broad lines of a federation agreement, more than half the workneeded to incorporate

{p. 166} France or Germany, or any other Power considered to be a possible partner, would have been done.

The pattern of the over-riding Council would have been outlined, the amount of co-operation and fusion of the foreign officesl diplomatic and consular services needed, the extent to which the armed forces could be unified, the scheme for a common control of trade and traffic, the need of an interchangeable citizenship, the progressive diminution of tariff restrictions, the amount of unification of the monetary and credit systems that may be desirable.

These are immense tasks, but they are neither innately impossible nor overwhelmingly monstrous. They will be

vastly easier to do at first as between two Powers than three, and between three than four. Liberia and Abyssinia and Monaco and all that brave little band can very well wait until the finished work reaches and envelops them.

I am arguing here not simply for federation, but for progressive federation, leading finally to a federal super-government for all the world, as the only way to a real World Peace. If you talk about World Peace and will not face that way, you are talking rubbish.

And this process involves gradual suppression, bit by bit, throughout the earth, of independent sovereignty. This is a road upon which we ought to be starting now. The start is overdue.

The continual refusal of our leaders, statesmen, and politicians to face the first uphill initiatives of this road is exposing the world not only to the gathering threat of

{p. 167} another great war, but to an infinite waste of human resources in bickering tariffs and an entangled and wasteful economic life.

I know this much of cosmopolitanism is as yet too much for many of those who talk of peace and seek to secure it.

I know I argue against the prepossessions of much progressive thought. There are a great number of people who still hold that there can be World Peace in a league of perfectly independent sovereign states.

That is what they tell me at Geneva. They have told me that for ten years, but they say it now with less conviction than they did.

It was all to be beautifully simple. The league was to gather together all the nations of the earth, and they were to give their collective authorisation to the development of a world secretariat and to a series of agreements for international co-operation in this matter and in that matter, until at last every matter of world interest and every possible source of international conflict would be under these delegated world controls.

Then would come a day when it would be realized that there was no more need for armies and navies, except for ceremonial purposes. The International Court would assemble and white gloves would be presented to the presiding jurists.

And, amidst universal rej oicings, all the nations would salute the flags of all the nations, and there would be processions of national costumes and parades of troops

{p. 168} -carefully disposed in line so as to avoid as far as possible delicate questions of precedence.

Somebody would compose a beautiful piece of music for massed bands interweaving all the National Anthems. Olympic sports, with chivalrous cheers for the other nations all the time, and a pattern of white, black, yellow, and brown boy scouts waving olive branches, would crown the proceedings.

I am afraid I am too much of a realist for such dreams. I do not believe in internationalism; I believe in worldfederation-that is to say, in cosmopolitanism. The day of nationalism and its correlative internationalism is drawing to its end.

We do not want to deal in nations any more. We want new forms. Nations are, and always have been, militant forms.

There will be no secure peace on earth until flags, military uniforms, boundary posts, customs houses, and all the symbols of sovereign independence have followed bows and arrows, armour, chains, fetters, instruments of torture, and suchhke ancient methods of dealing between man and man, into the museum of superseded things.

The only way to secure permanent World Peace is through the concentration of power in a progressive federation of the States of the world.

There is really no obstacle in the way to such a federation except nationalism, patriotism, the insistence upon national sovereignty in all its world-wide diversities.

There are no obstacles but mental ones. So that the problem of getting to permanent World Peace is the

{p. 169} problem of getting past, over, through, or rid of that obsession with independent nationalities. Is that a possible thing ?

Is patriotism to that obstructive extent something interwoven in human nature ? Is it innate ? Quite obviously not.

Imagine a baby born in Milan of patriotic Italian parents. Suppose that by some miracle it is changed at birth unobtrusively, when the parents are not looking, for another baby born of equally patriotic English parents in Kent, and what will ensue?

The Italian baby will grow up a passionate English patriot, the English one a conscious and determined Italian.

Suppose I had directed their education. They would both be cosmopolitan liberals.

This national feeling is obviously an " acquired characteristic," a matter of suggestion and tradition. It depends entirely upon the educational influence brought to bear upon the child.

The outlook of the growing human being upon the world depends upon what it is told about the world. Its political conduct and disposition will be shaped by what it is taught and what it can find out for itself about history.

For history in education is essentially the explanation to us of what we are, how we come to be what we are and what is expected of us in view of these things.

Patriotism is made, a little by home and social atmosphere, to some extent by books, more perhaps by

{p. 170} newspapers, but mainly by the teaching of history in our schools.

That obsession with the sovereign independence of states, which is the only real obstacle to world federation and World Peace, rests upon the teaching of purely nationalist or imperialist history in schools.

It is assumed you must be patriotic, and you never get a chance to think otherwise. Until that teaching is changed the attainment of a permanent World Peace is impossible.

This present teaching of the militant separation of peoples, has to be replaced by the teaching of history as the common adventure of mankind. Till then all this Peacemaking of which we hear so much will remain the futile balderdash it is at present.

The politicians cannot go on to the reality of world federation because the mass of people in the world are unprepared for it.

World federation and the teaching of world history are two correlated and inseparable things. World history is a far more natural, attractive, and interesting subject for young people than the litigious particulars of national history.

The savage and hunting stages of human evolution, the development of cultivation and nomadism, the world movements of peoples, the onset of science and invention, the discoveries and changes of the modern world, the abolition of distance, and the increasing co-operation of man with man, make up a school subject infinitely more exciting, attractive, and teach

{p. 171} able than a rehearsal of the devastations of William the Bastard, the claims of Edward I to the crown of France, the names of the six wives of Henry VIII, a lying version of the wars of the French and English, and the dynastic consequences of the sexual life of the Stuart family.

(Or in the case of America a list of atrocities committed by the red-coats during the War of Independence.)

There is no real reason for the failure of the schools of the world to respond to the needs of our new ageexcept the patriotic insistence of the adult generation, already poisoned, to see the same dear old mindcrippling poison handed out to the young.

The same traditionalism that makes our politicians silent about world federation keeps them from attempting this fundamentally important and urgent change in the matter of education.

The only modern statesman who seems to have realised that a new Europe and a new world demanded a new education was Stresemann. His untimely death was a stupendous loss to mankind. He was on the eve of a Kultur-kampf in the German universities to rescue the German mind from traditional educational methods.

When the present Labour Government came in I had great hopes of Sir C. P. Trevelyan as Minister of Education. I supposed him alive to the essentials of the peace problem.

Already in 1921 Mr. H. A. L. Fisher, one of the most progressive of British education ministers, had appointed a committee to inquire into our history teaching, and

{p. 172} his admirable Introductory Note to its Report in 19:23 asserted very plainly the need for the teaching of World History. The London County Council supported his initiative.

But the impulse has died away; the teachers lacked proper inducements, they did not get proper help and guidance, and then we had had a phase of Tory reaction in Whitehall.

We have gone back upon Mr. Fisher. I looked to Sir Charles to revive that waning fire. The production of an outspoken memorandum of advice and a new syllabus of instruction in human as distinguished from nationalist history would have been a very great gesture indeed in the cause of World Peace, a finer gesture by far than scrapping a battleship or so, or making polyglot speeches.

It would have marked the Labour Government as something " different " in the scheme of human purpose, as a Government of promise.

Unhappily that gesture has not been made. Sir Charles was in a great fuss about finding the extra seating accommodation an additional year of elementary education demands. He hadn't a scrap of brain left free for the question of what was to be taught in that extra year. But that extra year from fourteen to fifteen is just the year in which the teaching of history might be most effective. In that year a youngster can be made combative patriot or world citizen, according to the trend and tone of what he is told about his country and the world, and at present the whole trend of historical teaching in British schools is in the

{p. 173} combative direction. It is a monstrous pity that the Labour Party did not begin, during its days of opportunity, to realize the need of a distinctive content of education to sustain its conceptions of social life -and World Peace. So the whole trend of historical teaching throughout the world at present remains in the combative and competitive direction. This is the essential thing that in the end, unless we bestir ourselves, will stultify all our sentimental peacemaking.

Progressive federation and a new teaching of history are the two aspects-the political and cultural aspect of the task before mankind-if the peace of the world is to be assured. And nobody Of any prominence or authority in any part of the world is doing anything whatever about it.

So praise and cheer our distinguished Peacemakers as much as you like, take a hopeful view of life, and curse all pessimists and alarmists to your heart's content, but in that case see that you find out the most trustworthy make of gas-mask and get some for your family before the rush begins.

Everywhere throughout the world, while the conferences meet and the politicians orate, war is being sown anew, steadily, day by day, in the schools.

{p. 174} CHAPTER XI

RUSSIA AND THE WORLD *

A Talk broadcast in July 1931

THE listeners of the B.B.C. have now had the opportunity of hearing seven talks about Russia, and very good talks they have been. These talks have been given the collective title of "Russia in the Melting Pot." That gives a good idea of a human society liquidating and trying to reorganize itself. The whole of human life now in Russia is being reconstructed. The way people work and eat and sleep and are clothed and carried about is being changed. But Russia is not the only part of the world which is being reconstructed. Everywhere to-day we have a sense of change about us, such as the world never felt before. Our economic life is manifestly out of gear, very seriously out of gear. There has been a creeping paralysis of business. We are over-producing and under-consuming, none of us who have investments feel safe with these investments and none of us who are gainfully employed-as the

* The previous seven talks in this series had laid before listeners first-hand evidence on the progress of the Russian Five Year Plan. Mr. Wells, as a detached observer who has visited Russia, but not recently, summed up the facts and drew a general conclusion.

{Q: did Wells mention the Ukraine Famine?}

{p. 175} census forms put it-feel safe that employment will continue. Our political life is out of gear even more than our economic. We are taxed overwhelmingly, crushingly, to pay for the last war and to prepare for the next. Plainly there is urgent need of some supreme control in the world, to arrest this stalling of our economic machinery and to put war out of the listof possible things. Unless our statesmen and leaders can get together and contrive that, we too shall totter on the brink of this same melting pot and fall in-Germany, I suppose, first. It is all as plain as daylight. The statesmen of Europe and America to-day are having their opportunity-as Kerensky had his opportunity in 1917. Reconstruct on a bold scale, get together now, stop the decline-now-or follow Russia through the melting pot.

In the latter stages of the War we talked a lot about reconstructing the world as one whole. The world was to be reorganized for peace and social justice. It was to be made safe for democracy and fit for heroes and all sorts of lovely things. That was just politicians' patter. We know that now. They did not mean these phrases. They did not even know what these phrases meant; but they felt they sounded good. They cheered people up

and made them think that to go on fighting was worth while. Since then we have had thirteen years of muddlement. We are no nearer to-day than we were then to that unified world-which might be so prosperous and so splendid, which might give us all lives ampler, freer, and better than any lives that have ever been lived before our time. That

{p. 176} reconstructed world is just as far off as ever. But is collapse as far off ?

Russia fell into the melting pot in 1917. That was a great misfortune, for us as well as for Russia. Russia is one-twelfth of mankind. She collapsed in 1917. It has put her into a different phase from the rest of the world. She is trying to reconstruct after collapse; we are trying to reconstruct (or we ought to be trying to reconstruct) at the eleventh hour now before collapse overtakes us. This difference of phase is unfortunate, because under modern conditions the world's affairs must be dealt with as one whole. There is no other way of dealing with them now. But because of her early collapse the Russians are trying to reconstruct the world on a pattern which does not fit in with the world pattern the rest of us ought to be following.

Why did Russia fall into the melting pot so much before the rest of the world?

She was only superficially Westernized, she was in essence an Oriental despotism, and her monarchy was absolute and absolutely incapable. She could not stand the hideous strain of modern war because her organization was not modern. Sir Bernard Pares, in his B.B.C. talk, explained very clearly how the second revolution, the Bolshevik revolution that swept away that eloquent, compromising, ineffective politician Kerensky, who, like most politicians, promised so much and did so little, was a wild storm on the part of the Russian people for Peace. It wasn't a revolution to get something. It was a revolution to get rid of

{p. 177} something-the sham of patriotic government, the horrible reality of war. It was a storm; it was a great wind of indignation and despair to get rid of a militant patriotic government. It was 100 million people frantically refusing the war game. While that storm raged almost anything might have happened to Russia. Wh at did happen was that quite a small organized body, the Communist Party, with ideas of its own and a will of its own, seized control. It promised Peace at once, and it seized control on the strength of that promise.

The Communist capture of Russia is one of the most extraordinary accidents in all history : more marvellous than the rise of Islam. In 1916 Marxist Communism was, still a small insurgent movement, of no great importance in any country of the world. In 1918 it was fully in possession of Russia. It was in control of the lives of millions, and it was free, as few Governments have ever been free, to do what it would with them.

What were the ideas of this group of people who had suddenly become of first-class importance in human affairs because of their control of Russia? Let us try to get it clear in our minds what they were after and what they were up to.

The first great idea they had-though I am afraid they are losing it now-was this, that the reconstruction of human life is a world task, a task for the whole world. There, I submit, they were profoundly right. They did not, however, call it world reconstruction, but world revolution-and there perhaps they departed

{p. 178} from absolute rightness. The task before mankind is something much greater than any revolution, any rolling over of one class so that another class comes uppermost. It is a change of scale and a change of spirit.

But, at any rate, those Bolsheviks felt that the making of a new life for mankind was a world affair and not a local or national affair. Hence they appealed, and they continue to appeal, to the rest of the world to accept their ideas and co-operate in their effort. That has led to endless difficulties about propaganda with Governments which think that every country should mind its own business and leave every other country alone as though no other countries existed. If I may be permitted, I would say that, though the Russian idea of a associating their changes with world changes is, no doubt, troublesome, the opposite idea of national isolation is idiotic. We cannot live in a patchwork of patriotic, sovereign States any more; we have to live as world-citizens or we are going to perish.

But if the Communists were profoundly right in their early realization that economic and social reconstruction must now be world-wide, their next article of faith was Just as profoundly wrong. Their next article of faith was the persuasion that they knew everything. Communism is the most narrow-minded cult that exists. Its devotees are convinced that the little bunch of Communist writers, beginning with Marx and Engels, provided the only intellectual activity of any importance in the past eighty years. They will not learn from, they will not listen to, any

{p. 179} one outside the party. They still believe-in spite of the fundamental blunderings we will presently note that they can teach our Western world everything that is necessary for the salvation of mankind.

And a third characteristic of this band of men who found, themselves in power in Russia was that they had no plans. It was part of their organized conceit that they had no plans. It was not an accident; it was an essential thing in their training-to be planless.

Before they came to power they had a rigid hostility to what they called Utopianism-that is to say, the making of any plan or picture of the world you desire in place of the world that is. You cannot grasp the essentials of the Russian situation if you do not recall that original hostility of theirs to the Utopian method. Because of that they

came to power with only the vaguest ideas about what they were going to do after they had expropriated private ownership and smashed the Capitalist system.

They did not know whether they wanted mass production or not, whether there was to be a sort of dividing up of the land or whether there was to be big estate farming, whether their factories were to be run by State officials or by mass meetings of the workers. They did not know whether everyone was to have equal pay or not. They did not even know whether they were golng on with the use of money. Upon such quite fundamental matters as these they had not made up their minds. Inevitably they floundered.

That is why the history of Russia since 1917 is not

{p. 180} the history of one single progressive, constructive effort. Quite otherwise. There have been three distinct convulsive changes, three revolutions in method. Most revolutions consist in one body of men giving place to another while things go on much as before. But the revolutions in Russia since 1917 have been absolute changes in the spirit and method of living-while the body of men in control has remained practically the same.

The first phase lasted from 1917 to 1921. That was a real attempt to bring Communism into being, to live on terms of equality and mutual service, from each according to his ability and to each according to his need. Trading for profit-speculation, as they called it-was punished by severe penalties up to and including death. That Communist Russia, the First Revolutionary Russia, failed. It failed in the face of a bad harvest, civil war, and intense foreign antagonism, but, I think, would have failed anyhow.

In 1921 Lenin proclaimed the New Economic Policy in the place of Communism. Private trading was to be permitted; foreign capital was to be allowed into the country on reasonable terms; the more capable and industrious peasants were to reap the profit of their better output.

This inaugurated the Second Revolutionary Russia, which lasted for seven years. It was no longer a Communist system at all; it was a collectivist system, it was a State Socialism. One cannot say that failed. The standard of comfort rose; production increased; a sort of bleak prosperity crept back to Russia. There

{p. 181} was a marked advance in public health and a marked increase in population. The class of traders and the class of prosperous peasants, the Kulaks, multiplied. Private fortunes began to accumulate. Russia seemed to be moving in a direction that would bring her to a state of affairs rather like that of America in 1820 - smaller farmers growing into big ones, business men laying the foundations of fortunes, and so on. She would come round at last to join in and follow up our Capitalism-wherever our Capitalism was going. That was not at all what the Communists had set out to do. And our Western Governments, strangely enough, remained hostile to Russia throughout that period. They nagged her about the Tsarist debts, they made her trading difficult, our British Government chose this time for its celebrated Arcos raid, and so on.

Then suddenly after 1927 Russia gave up its policy of concessions and half-measures and proclaimed the Five Year Plan and the independent reorganization of Russia on modern, scientific lines. Russia took to planning. The whole State was to become one great departmentalized business, a single rationalized system. It was to be made over to that. So we come to the Third Revolutionary Russia, which is neither Communism like the first, nor a blend of collectivism and restrained individualism like the second, but-as Mr. Knickerbocker has called it-a State Capitalism. It is the extreme logical development of the modern idea of rationalization. In five years it is intended to make over the vast territories of Russia and the lives

{p. 182} of 150 million people into a rationalized system of which there will be one owner, one single capitalist - the State-and everyone else will be an employee or a pensioner or a prisoner of that supreme owner.

Never in the whole history of mankind has so vast a change in the way of living been attempted. The Russians are trying to do independently, and against enormous disadvantages, what many of us believe the whole world must ultimately do-namely, rescue their entire economic life from haphazard and the chances of blind competition and acquisitiveness, and bring it into one controlled and centralized unity.

What sort of job are they making of it? What sort of lessons can we-who seem to be drifting now very rapidly towards some much greater unifying reconstruction, or to some vaster social disaster than Russia has ever known-what guiding lessons can we get out of it ? It is to these questions the witnesses the B.B.C. has called have addressed themselves.

They seem to me to have been very competent witnesses. Mr. Stafford Talbot, indeed, who has been trading, or trying to trade, with Russia through all her vicissitudes, told us not so much how the Five Year Plan works as how it is supposed to work and how it is trying to work, but most of the other talks consisted largely of direct observations. Mr. H. R. Knickerbocker's scrutiny has been the most systematic and full. Many of you will know his deservedly popular book on the Five Year Plan. His talk was a summary of that. Russia in the stress of her creative

{p. 183} effort he found like a country at war. Her people are enduring war-time discomforts, are shabby, ill.-fed, rationed, disciplined, stressed. But they have one single thing, it seems, that our Western unemployed lack: they hope. At least, a lot of them hope. Dr. Margaret Miller endorsed the testimony of Mr. Knickerbocker. Sir John Russell and Mr. Frank Owen gave vivid pictures of personal experiences to confirm the same picture. If I

may add the names of other witnesses outside the B.B.C. list who tell the same story, I would name Mr. Maurice Hindus, whose books, Red Bread, Broken Earth, and Humanity Uprooted, are moving, understanding, intensely living descriptions, and Joan Beauchamp, whose much slighter Agriculture in Russia gives you the impressions of a believer who writes without a doubt of the Five Year Plan. Her impressions are none the less informing on that account. The unanimous effect of all this testimony is one of drive, stress, and hardship--distress on the part of the old and of the old-fashioned; faith, hope, and courage and a savage' harshness on the part of the young.

Two main things the autocratic Russian State Capitalist is attempting to do. The first is to uproot the peasant, to get rid of his mediaeval strip husbandry, and to make him a worker on big to enormous farms, run with the most modern machinery available. This means a complete change in the pattern of rural life. In most of Europe the peasant and strip husbandry still prevail, but in Great Britain we got rid of them, after some intense social conflicts, a couple of cen-

{p. 184} turies ago. We British had a great social revolution then, though our history books gloss it over. The practical fault of that British rural replanning is that nowadays we find it was mapped out on a scale adapted to horse traction, with fields, hedges, lanes, and so forth that are inconvenient for modern mechanical agriculture. In America and most of the new countries of the world peasant and strip husbandry have never appeared. These new countries were opened up by machinery and they were planned for machinery, big production, and export, from the outset. This new Russian State Capitalist is trying now, in a great hurry and passion, to come up to date with his agriculture. He has been helped by an exceptionally good harvest. But it shows, through the testimony of all our witnesses, that he is having a great difficulty in getting anything like the agricultural machinery he needs and in getting people to repair and work the machinery he has. He faces a hostile world, which will not trade with him and which is now itself in profound monetary difficulties of its own, and so he has to make the second part of his effort, which is to try to improvise in Russia and for Russian purposes a mass-production system of his own. He has planned out and built immense factories. He wants to make Russia self-sufficient.

Now this second objective is no part of the world revolution idea. It is an abandonment of the world revolution idea. If we contemplate a world reconstructed as one whole, there will be no need whatever why any part of it should be reconstructed as a self-

{p. 185} sufficient system. We should say, let goods be produced where there are already factories and a population trained to work them, and let food be grown where it is most easily grown. There is no need to turn Russian agriculturists into factory hands while there are great industrial populations in Western Europe already trained and partly unemployed. But the barriers of hostility and suspicion that cut off Russia from the rest of the world have forced Ru~sia, that twelfth part of the human race, into this attempt to become economically independent of the rest.

The witnesses the B.B.C. has called have mostly expressed the opinion that in some measure this Five Year Plan will succeed. I am not nearly so confident as they are. I should like to bring in one or two bits of evidence that the B.B.C. has not been in a position to put before you directly.

One very important witness the B.B.C. could not, for various reasons, call and put on the London radio for you is Mr. Ordzonikidze, who is Stalin's right-hand man. Last May he published a report on the huge -new attempt to out-Ford Ford in the production of tractors at Stalingrad. This report tells of the clumsy handling of the machine tools, of 6,ooo breakages to 3,000 machines in ten months. The output has not yet reached a twelfth of its maximum possibility; 3,ooo not very good tractors were forthcoming instead of an estimated 37,000. There is a reassuring frankness about many of these Russian reports, and this is what Ordzonikidze discovered, among other troubles (I quote his own words)

{p. 186} complete absence of accounting; factory buildings filled with waste products and the courtyard piled with filth and damaged products; complete absence of control over the coming to work of the workers; foremen and engineers not at their posts; uncontrolled starting and stopping of conveyors, absence of suitable care for equipment, an absence of persons responsible for the correct course of production in individual departments. ..."

That is rather impressive. And now for another witness the B.B.C. could not obtain for you-Stalin himself. Four weeks ago he made a very amazing and memorable speech at Moscow, which portended a profound change in the further prosecution of the Five Year Plan. You have probably read reports of that speech. It was a cry for ability and for training. The Five Year Plan was dragging because it had not, he said, one-fifth of the directive ability needed. Russia had been discouraging brains, wasting brains, and failing to build up a technical organization. There was to be no more of that. Able and educated people, whether they were Communists or not, were to be given promotion, better pay, privileges, unhampered powers. And so on. It was better in any skilled job to have an expert who wasn't a Communist than a Communist who wasn't an expert. Stalin has found that out at last. It is a pity he did not find it out earlier in his career before he began to lop off the abler of his associates. It is a pity he could not think of it before putting some of his best scientific advisers on trial

{p. 187} for their lives last year. But better late than never. The day before that speech was delivered in Moscow Mr. Mouat Jones, whose valuable contribution I have not noticed hitherto, broadcast from Savoy Hill much the same facts, so far as technicians were concerned.

On that my summing-up culminates, because this, I think, is the thing that concerns us most. The Five Year Plan is staggering. The Five Year Plan may very possibly fail. That does not mean that Russia will collapse. Russia collapsed in 1917. But she may remain collapsed. She may not be able to get to her feet and line up with the rest of this changing world in the eventful years before us. And that will be because she has produced no body of managers, no civil service, no body of educated men, free, able, and willing to work together for her and mankind. That is her fatal deficiency. Her social structure is not developed enough for the task she attempts. She is like a reptile trying to fly before wings were evolved. She is like some stupendous palaeozoic tadpole trying to walk on land before its legs arrive. The attempt to construct at one bound a vast, modern State capitalism, a single rationalized, economic machine, by the methods of despotism, under Stalin has broken down, and Stalin perceives the error of his ways.

That is the most fundamental lesson which emerges from these talks about Russia. In spite of enthusiasm, the whips of the terror, unrestricted power, and urgent necessity, this first spasmodic effort to reconstruct an old society in accordance with modern machinery and

{p. 188} conditions falters and fails. Russia's experience to-day may be our experience to-morrow. The vast powers, the new swiftness and closeness that have come to mankind, demand a more unified and a more complex economic and political organization than has ever existed before. A wide education, a free, intellectual atmosphere, and a whole class, not merely of technicians, but of capable men with common ideas and a common sense of responsibility, are called for. An ego-centred autocrat, with a political party disciplined to death, a Press bureau, and a secret police, is no substitute for that.

The urgent problems of world reconstruction are now closing in upon Europe and America. For thirteen years Russia has been struggling through tragic difficulties and indecisions because of her want of mental armament, of assembled capacity, of intellectual organization. She has laboured, suffered, and struggled for thirteen years, and she labours and struggles still. She has shaken off the old world. Can she, with her handicap, evoke the new?

Can we? Unlike Russia, our social structure survived the War. We have still to see if it can survive the peace of division and debt that follows upon the War. How far have we-the other eleven-twelfths of mankind-in the last thirteen years mobilized our intellectual and moral forces for the creative effort ahead? How far have our schools and public discussions prepared us, as this old world of tradition crumbles about us into political and economic disaster-how far are we prepared to evoke a new and better order for mankind?

{p. 189} CHAPTER XII

WHAT I WOULD DO WITH THE WORLD

A Talk broadcast in September, 1931

TO-DAY I am going to ask a question. It is a very large and comprehensive question, but I believe it is one you may find it interesting to answer. I am going myself to sketch a very brief answer to it, but that will be the less important part of this talk. It is a question for which I am persuaded every intelligent man and woman in the world ought to have some sort of answer. And so after this present talk arrangements have been made for several men of light and leading to answer more fully, and I hope more satisfactorily than I shall do, this question I am going to put. But before I put my question it may be well to say a few preparatory words.

The question is going to be about the state of the world. And that, we are all aware nowadays, is a very serious state of affairs indeed. For some years it has been more and more evident that all mankind lives in very great danger of a new and more terrible sort of war, and that nothing effective is being done to render that disaster impossible. And in the last year or so it has been brought home to us that an

{p. 190} even more comprehensive disaster is probable, that our monetary and financial machinery is out of gear, that our economic apparatus is stalling and breaking down, and that want and misery are rapidly overtaking millions and millions of people. And this in a world where we are told by competent authorities there might be health, leisure, and abundance for all. I am not going to enlarge upon these immense and terrible perplexities. You know about them. There was a time when it seemed necessary to wake people up to these facts; but now most of us are well awake, and it is merely irritating and depressing to go on with the indictment of statesmen and politicians without foresight, financiers and business men without creative ability, teachers who will not prepare the new generation for the challenge of new conditions, and so on and so on. What were once solemn warnings have become by repetition only rather irritating grumblings, irritating because of their essential truth; we all know now that there are misery and fear where there might be abounding, happiness, and that it is human folly and insufficiency, poverty of imagination and poverty of soul, that we have to blame, and our minds recoil more and more from all this criticism and disagreeable realization. When 1 hear this too familiar tale of danger and lamentation unfolding once again, I find myself moved, and probably you also feel moved, to interrupt with this question, " Well, what are you doing about it ? " Even in that simple form the question stops the dirge.

The reply is usually, "But what can I do?" The

{p. 191} complainant, you discover, is doing nothing. He or she is only an unimportant person, with no influence and no authority. We all know these excuses. And even when I ask that question of people who are not

without some influence and authority, I still get practically the same reply. They may be doing this or that very necessary and urgent work, but they say they are helpless in the face of the general drift of things. It is too large a problem for anyone. Nowadays, thanks to the desperate courage of Russia, the word "(plan " is much in fashion. But for the world as a whole nobody has a plan. Apparently, outside Russia, we are all too modest, too aware of our own helplessness, to make any plan to control the general drif t of things. We let disaster threaten us, we let disaster draw nearer and nearer, and our world still seems unable to get together for concerted action for its own salvation.

I have racked my wits-maybe you have done so too-and talked to all sorts of people about this problem of getting together and realizing some plan of action broader and more far reaching than the hand-to-mouth measures of our politicians and public men, and gradually I have come to believe that it would clear up our minds enormously if we were all to do our best, each for himself, to get a clear plan of what has to be done, and to state it. Possibly a lot of us might find that our plans, when we really did our best to extract them and make them clear, were more alike than we supposed. I tried -out this demand for a plan on

{p. 192} various patient friends, and gradually worked out the formula of this question I am now going to put to you. I have exercised my own mind with it-and presently I will give you my own answer as briefly as possible. But the important thing I want to get out in this talk is not my answer but my question. It may strike you as a little odd at first, but I think you will see, when it is put to the test, that the form in which I put it gets rid of a multitude of complications and leads very simply to the essentials of the riddles of our time.

And now to the question. It is this :-First a hypothesis : "You are to suppose you are Dictator of the world for the next twenty years. All the world is exactly as it is, except that you are Dictator. You have no miraculous power and you have no direct power over the hearts and imaginations of men. You cannot make people love one another or believe in Mahomet for example, but, never mind how, people will obey you just as all law-abiding people obey constituted authority. They may not like to obey, but they w ' ill do so for the term of your Dictatorship. You have unlimited legislative and administrative power." Then comes the question .. -

"What would you do with the world? Would you abolish war ? And if so how would you set about it, and how would you arrange to leave things at the end of your Dictatorship to prevent its recurrence? Would you make any great changes in the economic methods of mankind? Would you make a Twenty Years' Plan? Would you do anything about money? Would you

{p. 193} make any great changes in the biological life of mankind-that is to say, in regard to health, population, and race? Would you do anything to the existing educational methods of mankind? "

That is my patent question, or, if you prefer it, that is my patent group of questions. Essentially it is intended to be a head-clearing question amidst our present confusions and anxieties. I submit to you that, unless you have an answer to this question and its various branches, you are not really qualified to vote in an election, much less to take any more important part in public affairs. For what is the good of pushing a cart when you do not know where you are pushing it ?

Well, I have tried my question on myself, and I will give you my answer. It may not be a very good answer in your opinion, and in that case I ask you to make another. But I submit you have no right to turn down my answer unless you have a bet ter one. So herewith at the microphone I assume the World Dictatorship-I am only the first of a series of World Dictators who will announce their policies through the B.B.C.-and do my best to tell you what I would do with the world if I had unlimited legislative and administrative power-but no power (we must bear that in mind) over the hearts and faith of men.

Would I abolish war? Yes. Many people think that war cannot be abolished, but I am not of that opinion. Some fierce and strenuous souls would not abolish it if they could. They regard war as the supreme sport in life. That is a question of taste., and my taste is not

{p. 194} for tragedy and triumph. I would abolish war. But simply to abolish war is nothing very much. Mr. Kellogg abolished war a year or so ago-without any, marked results. War still hangs over us, as threatenin y as ever. In Mukden, in South Manchuria, the other day it seemed quite like pre-Kellogg times. And so I have to go on to tell how I would abolish war, what sort of abolition I contemplate. To my mind, war will be effectively abolished only when the sovereign states of the world relinquish so much of their national sovereignty as to place the control of theirrelations one to another in the hands of a federal world authority, a Peace Council. So long as they are free to make war they will do so. This Peace Council would not be anything so elaborate in its constitution as the League of Nations, but it would be given much more power. I do not know whether I should trouble at first to assemble representatives of more than, say, the eight or nine greater governments in that Council. The others would gravitate in later. This Council would be plainly a super-government, which would pool the Foreign Offices and diplomatic services of its constituents. It would also be a permanent Disarmament Committee; it would pool the military, naval, and air establishments of the federated nations into one international force, and proceed to reduce that force to the dimensions of a world police.

Do not tell me that no power, no independent.country would stand that. Remember that for the purposes of this talk I am World Dictator with a tenure of twenty

{p. 195} yearsl. I am not talking of what people or nations or governments will or will not stand. I am talking of

what I would dictate. I am telling you what I consider desirable and what I would do if I could override governments as some day, I hope, the commonsense of mankind will override governments. I should pool, not only the foreign offices and diplomatic services of the world, but also the arsenals, dockyards, war offices, navies, and air forces of the world, and cut them down. It would be an immense task, but not so very much greater than the scrapping and disbanding that went on after the War. There would be a methodical, progressive amalgamation, scrapping, disbandment, paying off, and pensioning off of these vast establishments. At the end of my twenty years of power the world would be free, of course, to restore them and put these mighty organizations together' again-if it could.

But my Peace Council and that real and genuine permanent Disarmament Commission could not stand by themselves. It is nonsense-such nonsense that only eminent politicians have the impudence to talk it-to contemplate disarmament and the abolition of war while leaving nations engaged, as they are engaged now, in the most strenuous and subtle economic and financial struggles. If you agree with the policy of dictatorship so far, you will agree tol my second parallel project, which will be to set up, side by side with my World Peace and Disarmament Council, a second body for the reorganization of our financial and economic life

{p. 196} on a world scale. It is really nothing more than what our statesmen and men of affairs are feeling their way towards to-day-too timidly and slowly, I fear-with their Debt conferences, the Bank of International Settlements, and so forth. As World Dictators, you or I can travel faster. They have to go slowly because they have to follow the spread of new ideas. We Dictators can lead ideas. My World Economic Council would make a Twenty Years' Plan for the reorganization of the world's production and distribution. It would not smash down all the tariff walls at once - that might lead to frightful convulsions-but it would set about reducing them methodically, organizing the transport of the world by sea and land and air as one system, assigning types of cultivation and manufacture to the most favourable regions, possibly shifting workers to new regions of employment, irrigating deserts, and restoring forests. It would obviously be a Council with a big personnel; I should get every disinterested industrial and agricultural organizer I could find to join its staff and organize a great system of technical schools, and research colleges to train the next generation of directors and managers. We should make a new map of the world for the purposes of the Council, a map which would pay very little heed to the old out-of-date political divisions of the world. We should mark out copper districts and coal districts, corn lands and pasture lands, forest belts and cotton lands, instead of kingdoms and states. We should study the mountain ranges and watersheds with a view to water distribu-

{p. 197} tion and transport, we should try to keep people speaking the same language together because that would be more convenient, and, since mountains and seas and economic habits have always played a certain part in distributing humanity and determining its local characters, we might find when our map was drawn out that many of its lines would, after all, follow existing boundaries. Of course that new mapping for economic convenience is absolutely essential if we are really out to end war. By the end of my Dictatorship everything would be grown where it was most conveniently grown for production and distribution , and I should hope to have not a single custom house left in the world. Goods would be moving as easily and cheaply about our planet, from producer to consumer, as now they shift from one end of a big modern factory to another.

There would have to be one money in the world. That is a matter now of considerable urgency, and the first task almost of my Dictatorship (or yours) would be to see to that. It is manifest to everyone now that the existing cash and credit system is breaking down. It is ancient and worn out. It is rotten. The industrial life of the world is being strangled in an immense tangle of debts. Almost my first administrative act would be to state the plain fact of the case-and declare the world bankrupt. That means-I am afraid that here I must cut some corners-that debts have to be written down. The only practical way in which a community or a world can make a settlement of excessive debts is to depreciate the currency in which they

{p. 198} are reckoned. A bankrupt is bankrupt relatively to the rest of the community. He pays so much in the pound and we discharge him. But what we have to do with here is not a relative bankruptcy but a general bankruptcy.' The people of the earth, the industries of the people of the earth, cannot pay their way. And for a whole community which cannot pay its way the only way of writing down its debts is to write down the currency by which those debts are reckoned. In other words, prices have to be put up. Production is being paralyzed by prices too low to yield a profit and pay rent, interest on loans, and wages, and producers are therefore unable to pay debts or consume. So we stagger through distress towards catastrophe.

But here we are confronted to-day by the difficulty that these affairs are not under one single control, but under a number of separate governments, with timehonoured, but now stupid and dangerous, traditions of competition and conflict. It is easy to say that currency should be depreciated and prices inflated, but very hard to carry that out in any but a futile, dangerous local way. The great states of the world have not even a common money by which to measure their relations, through which they could effect this necessary debt-relieving operation. And they are not all equally insolvent. Some are deeper in trouble than others, and at different phases of misfortune. Disaster is worldwide, but it has different aspects in different countries. Money means different things in different countries.

For nearly a hundred years before the War, because

{p. 199} of the great gold production of Africa, Australia, California, and the Klondyke, the golden sovereign was practically a world coin._ But now, for reasons too complex to examine in such a talk as this, the gold standard is failing us. A crazy competition for gold is in progress between the leading states of the world, credit

staggers drunkenly, and great masses of humanity are falling into the direst need and distress, because of the fragmentary, incoherent way in which the world's book-keeping is done. In times of catastrophe vigorous measures are needed. At the outset of my Dictatorship I should restrict the issue of money to one central world authority; I should fix the exchange value of existing currencies to one another and to this new currency; I should gradually call in the old currencies altogether. And my central monetary authority would see to it that the ratios of the new world money to the old standards of reckoning secured just that inflation of prices and just that diminution of the burthen of debts needed to restore productive activity to the world. A single world currency and a world-controlled credit system, it seems to me, constitute a necessary preliminary to that rationalization of economic life which is the only sure. foundation of World Peace and prosperity.

Remember I am telling you what I should do were I World Dictator. So I sound rather dogmatic. But I do not expect you to accept this conclusion of mine.. Only-if my answer is wrong, what is your answer? I have put before you the broad lines on which I believe the peace and prosperity of mankind can be established.

{p. 200} Set my answer aside-that does not let you set my question aside.

There are other points in that question I have still to say a word about. Given peace on earth and abundance for all, will there not be a rapid and indeed a frightful increase of population and a great clash of races? Here again I must answer in a sentence or so. As World Dictator I should see to it that the kind of knowledge which leads to a restriction of population is spread throughout the whole world. That secured, I do not think mankind need fear over-population. Nor do I think the races of mankind are going to devour one another. There is not going to be any great overrunning of peoples. The climatic regions of the earth determine the character of their human populations. The negro did not capture tropical Africa; tropical Africa made him and gave herself to him : for keeps, I think. The brownish peoples again hold the subtropical world by virtue of their superior adaptation to that world; similarly the whites the rainy temperate zone, and the Mongols dry Asia. So it seems to me. There may be a lot of marginal admixture; there may be replacement with altered conditions : but my World Dictatorship at any rate will be untroubled by the nightmare of racial swarmings. Men in the coming future will find that when they are free to move wherever they choose about our planet they will for the most part stay in the habitats congenial to them. When they know how to limit their increases they will limit them. The great migrations of the past have been hunger marches, and

{p. 201} my economic controls and my population controls will have put an end to such disturbances.

And how am I going to fix this new world rule of mine so that peace and prosperity will remain when the World is released from my Dictatorship? By an immense reorganization of education. Because, as I am sure you know, for all practical purposes education is. nothing more nor less than fitting the natural man, his ideas and his will, to the social state in which he has to live. You cannot change education without presently producing corresponding changes in social life; you cannot make any real and permanent change in human life unless you educate the young for it. I have always been a believer in education-the right sort of education-and my faith increases with the years. My Dictatorship will be essentially an Educational Dictatorship. Every great change in political, social, and economic life demands a corresponding educational change. , For the better part of twenty years the schools and colleges of the world will march foyward. For the better part of twenty years I shall have the young forgetting their old narrow, bloodstained histories and learning of the great adventure of mankind-and not only the young; I should enormously extend adult education. By the time my Dictatorship is done the new economic life, the new and simpler money, the achievement of world unity, will be understood by nearly everybody in the world under forty, and by a large majority over that age. They will all know what they are doing. By the time when my retirement falls

{p. 202} due the restoration of our present map of Europe and our present way of living would be almost as practicable as the restoration of the Heptarchy or the Stone Age.

But it may be objected to what I am saying that I am really proposing to push the existing sovereign militant governments of the world aside and providing no substitute. Well, what if I am? Do we want a world parliament or a world president, a world flag, or indeed anything of that sort? It seems to me that nothing in that form is required. A world control would be necessarily different from an existing government, because it would not be militant. A world control means a stupendous simplification of human affairs. There would be a world economic control board, a central police control which would arise naturally out of that peace and disarmament board I talked about at first, and a great world organization sustaining education, scientific research, and the perpetual revision of ideas. These boards would carry on (and they are really all that is needed for carrying on) the essential business of this planet. Why should there be a world parliament ? It would have to meet in the tower of Babel-and what would there be for it to do ? Would there be world elections? About what? Would there be great world politicians and leaders of the world people ? Upon what issues?

But it may be asked, Who will make the ultimate decision ? There must be a king or an assembly, or some such body, to say " Yes " or " No," in the last resort. But must there be ? Suppose your intellectual

{p. 203} organization, your body of thought, your scientific men., say and prove that this, that, or the other course is the right one. Suppose they have the common-sense of an alert and educated community to sustain

them. Why should not a dictatorship-not of this man or that man, nor of the proletariat, but of informed and educated common-sense-some day rule the earth? What need is there for a lot of politicians and lawyers to argue about the way things ought to be done, confusing the issues? Why make a dispute of world welfare? What need is there for some autocrat to say " Yes or " No" when a course is known to be sound and right? . You do not let politicians and rulers run the engineering enterprises of mankind, you do not make public health a political question. Why should professional squabbles of that sort mess about with the world's economic life, or world education, or keeping the peace?

But let me be quite clear about exist m*g governments, flags, and so forth. There is no need to abolish such things. I am no red-handed revolutionary, no destructive firebrand tearing down venerable things. All I should do, as World Dictator, would be to deprive these governments of the power and means of making war, relieve them of supreme financial and economic control, and take the general direction and protection of education and scientific research throughout the world out of their hands, by requiring them to be set up, or by setting up competent overriding bodies. They would no longer be sovereign powers to that extent, but that is not saying they are to be forcibly extinguished or

{p. 204} robbed suddenly of the respect tradition accords them. If they are useful in their attenuated forms, they will survive; if they are useless, they will fade out harmlessly.

There., briefly, is my answer to my own question. That is what I would do with the world, and what I believe could be done with the world now. And in this way I think life might be made beyond comparison fuller and happier than it is. You may think my plan is bold or wild or Utopian or undesirable or impossible. But you would have thought it much wilder and more impossible a year or so ago, before you began to learn about the Russian Five Year Plan. A time may come when such a project as this will seem obvious to everyone. And whatever you think of my answer, I beg of you to consider my questionwhich poses in effect this riddle-" What are you and I and the others up to-if we are not merely drifting upon the stream of fate? "

Reject my answer. Reject this idea of federal world controls-controls of money and credit, controls of trade and education and scientific organization, controls to keep the peace. Then find another answer to the questions that confront us. The question I have put to you is only a device for getting the complex of human difficulties into a compact and answerable form, to simplify it down to a personal challenge to you.

What has to be done about war?

What has to be done about the world's faltering and failing economic life?

{p. 205} What of money and credit-which are plainly no longer working properly?

What of population and race?

What of education?

Those who have answers, those who even attempt answers to these questions, are playing a part in human destiny. But those who have no answer and make no attempt to get one are just human animals, to be chased about by events, luckily or unluckily, until they die.

{p. 206} CHAPTER XIII

THE WORLD OF OUR GRANDCHILDREN

A Talk broadcast to U.S.A., November 1930

I HAVE been asked to discuss " the world of our grand-children." That means discussing the sort of world we are making for our grandchildren. With my third grandchild just launched into the world, I am naturally quite disposed to discuss it. What sort of world are. we making for our grandchildren?

That sort of question has an infinite number of possible answers, and any of them may be as right as any of the others. It is all a matter of ifs. And the ifs are so endless that a reasonable answer may vary from a world of nearly inconceivable disaster and misery to a world full of happy and magnificent living. First there is the alternative whether or not mankind is likely to get into another great war. The director of these talks has a qualm when I seem like turning to what he calls " peace propaganda." He asks me to avoid it. He thinks his hearers are tired of hearing and thinking about it. Still, war is one of the most important of those ifs on which my answer depends. If you won't hear or think about it now, you will probably have to feel a lot about it later on. But if

{p. 207} you won't hear about it now, I see no good in talking about it, and so, for our present purpose, I shall assume that the world is going to escape war-without even bothering to give that danger any attention at all, and we will put another great war quite out o our picture.

There remains nevertheless an enormously varied multitude of possibilities before us. I am going to choose among the brightest and best of all these possibilities. Because I am going to assume that by the time of our grandchildren our world will not only have settled the war problem, but also that it will have solved the second

great riddle that now confronts and worries mankind.

What do I mean by that second great riddle?

I mean the economic riddle. I suppose to-day there is more want and worry in the world than there has been for many years. We are going through a bad time. This is as true of America -as it'is of the Old World. Increasing multitudes of people are out of work, and they do not know how to get work. At a higher level of social fortune people are distressed by loss of c . apital and by a deepening sense of insecurity. A creeping paralysis seems to have come upon business. Great stocks remain unsold and there is nothing doing. And we are all together in not having any clear ideas of j ust what has brought about this situation and how it is going to turn out.

It is a very paradoxical situation. In the world now there is more than enough to give every soul alive a reasonable life. There is too much corn-it can't get

{p. 208} sold-too much wool, too much cotton, too much rubber, too much iron and steel and copper and tin and so on and so on. We have all the stuff we could ask for. And more. But, on the other hand, there are swarms of under-paid or unemployed folk who can't use up these things because they have no money. There is the stuff and they can't touch it.- On the one hand plentiful supply, on the other urgent need-and a mysterious inability to bring them together. That's the fantastic paradox of work and business to-day.

Don't think I have a solution, neat and pat, to that riddle. All I am going to suggest now is that there is probably a solution, and that that solution will be found. And before I can go on to the world of our grandchildren I want to tell you of a certain glimmering of a solution I have observed.

What is the core of this extraordinary situation in the world to-day? We have made production more and more efficient. We can produce the same quantity of stuff with fewer and fewer hands. We produce more and more, and we employ fewer and fewer hands to do so. One great American business man seems to me to have put the situation in a phrase-and it is in that phrase that I find the solution glimmering and a hint of'the kind of world that lies ahead of us.

He said, " We have brought mass production to the highest level. We can produce everything for everybody. But none of us have yet given much attention to mass consumption. Now we have to begin thinking about that."

{p. 209} Well, let us begin thinking about that.

What did he mean by mass consumption ? I suggest he didn't mean very much, and that he knew he didn't mean very much. It was at first little more than an empty but hopeful phrase that came into his head to balance mass production. Meaning, I think, can be put into that phrase. Much meaning. It is a phrase capable at last of carrying quite a load of meaning. Suppose that by the time of our grandchildren it has got filled up with meaning, and suppose also that it has been found to carry the solution of our present difficulties.

Consider first that familiar phrase, mass production.

That means, for example, that instead of one little man with one little workshop sitting down to Make an automobile, taking a year or so in the process, and turning out a poor little patched-up, filed-down, and very imperfect machine at last, thousands of men are assembled in a great industrial organization to turn out so many automobiles every working hour.

And so on with other things, from canned food to razor-blades.

We all know that. Very well, now let us try to turn that same proposition round into terms of consumption. What is the equivalent ? Instead of one little man with one little family hoarding and saving to get himself a poor little house, we shall have to imagine a community setting about to get itself a big modern, commodious, picturesque, varied, healthy town with streets, houses, parks, gardens, theatres, hotels, restaurants, and fac-

{p. 210} tories complete, all in the latest style and with every conceivable gadget supplied. Not piecemeal, but as a whole. " Community buying "-that, 1 take it, is one way of putting meaning into that phrase, mass consumption.

Now here a talker on the air has a great advantage over his hearers. - They can't interrupt. They can't answer back. But 1 quite understand that a number must now be burning to say, What is this nonsense about community buying ? How can a community buy houses, furniture, automobiles, and all the other articles of mass production?

I don't want to deny the complex social and economic puzzles of that problem. 1 don't propose to state, much less to solve them now. I am not giving you a cut-anddried plan-I am putting an idea before you. I am merely going to assume that these difficulties of detail and application can be and will be solved by the time our grandchildren are running the world.

We have learnt combined production, and we have still to learn combined buying. We are living in a world where production is modernized, while buying is still in a state of medixval scrappiness. That is my point.

Community buying. Even now we are all of us community buyers. For certain things. I buy battleships on the community plan. You buy battleships in the same way. But if we can buy battleships and submarines and airships as a community, I refuse to believe that we cannot equally well buy whole towns of per-

{p. 211} fectly equipped, gracefully and conveniently grouped houses-or boots and good clothes for all the children of the world, and a multitude of other such things in the same way. Collectively we could buy everything we could collectively produce. That is the great idea I am putting to you now.

Let me put it to you how I see it.

Within a mile of my London home there are scores of thousands of people living in nasty old tumbledown houses, with no proper bathrooms and no proper windows, houses ten times older than the oldest automobile in the world, back-mimber houses shabby beyond description, paper peeling from the walls and the woodwork decaying-old, out-of-date, tenth-hand houses which are hired piecemeal floor by floor or even room by room. Most of the people who live in them are shockingly under-clothed-and oh, so badly fed ! They buy their clothes bit by bit; they live on scraps. Every separate menage is a pitiful little one-man or one-family concern. Why should not we as a community take these people, whether they like it or no, and buy for them better houses, better clothing, better food? They've got to live with us in the world somehow. And we've got the stuff for it. There could be house and covering and food of a sound quality for all of them. Mankind has the stuff in stock now-decaying unsold. I don't propose to pauperize these people. I only propose to give them better value for their poor little bits of money, pick them up and clean them up and make the district decent, and then put them back again.

{p. 212} I know all sorts of arguments can be brought against this idea. I know it is a frightfully difficult thing to scheme the details of such a transition from our present way of doing business to that way of doing business. But man lives to solve difficulties, and I do not believe that the world that has produced the Ford factories will not presently devise parallel methods on the consuming side. At any rate I am going to assume that by the time of our grandchildren this problem also will be solved, and that they will be living in a world not only freed from the danger of war and the burthen of war preparation, but freed also, by communal buying to balance against mass production, from the worst of the economic bothers in which we struggle so distressfully to-day. And so released, what sort of face will the world of our grandchildren be showing?

- If you look at it fairly, a contemporary town is still a frightful jumble of old junk-stale, dingy old junk. There is always some little piecemeal change going on, of course-a house here or a house there being rebuilt or a road torn up. Every town in the world is hideously patched-.if you saw a man wearing pants patched like a modern town is patched you'd scream with laughter. We never get our towns really new. We have to wait for the laggards. You cannot go a hundred yards from where you are without seeing houses that ought to be cleared away. You cannot go a hundred yards without seeing people wearing clothes that ought to make You feel uncomfortable. Things needn't be like that.

Architects and engineers will tell you all that there

{p. 213} might be in a house up to date. They've got things worked out, even now, for cities with perfect services of light and heat, for the complete prevention of smoke, for roads even and perfectly graded. They have lovely new materials and colours, and a thousand new devices to make buildings light and open and wonderful, and mostly they can't use them. They will tell you scores of lovely things they'd like to do to a town. We can never live in such towns because we have not invented any method of community buying to get them quickly. We shall die first. Any improvement in battleships we get quickly enough, but for improvements in houses and schools we have to wait for generations.

Then any people who make textiles and clothing will tell you of the most delightful stuffs and garments they could supply if only they knew a way of getting them to the people who want to wear them.

And so on.

My generation is going to die before a tithe of our present-day possibilities Of health and happiness are used, but maybe some great wave of common-sense will sweep over the world before our grandchildren's time. They will find out how to buy homes as we buy battleships, and they will be living in houses and cities even more lovely than the ones we-if we were not the fools we are-might be living in to-day. In these fair cities they will have all the abundant, wholesome, and delightful food that could be grown to-day-but which at present we cannot grow because we don't know yet how to distribute it. To-day common people in our

{p. 214} streets are certainly far better clothed than they ever were before; they have fresher materials and finer colours and a better cut. The change in this respect even in my lifetime has been immense; but it is nothing to the change that might be. Bad distribution-petty trade-is holding us up. Suppose our grandchildren get all these possibilities. Our medical science and our health organization, we will assume, have also been developed as a common interest. So that these lovely and wonderful cities and this beautiful clothing I foresee will be sheltering and covering healthy bodies. And healthy bodies mean happy minds. What will this refreshed and happy generation ahead of us be doing with their minds? . . .

They will be thinking, they will be learning, they will be making. . . .

But I will not go on, I have no time now to get on to Utopia. This vision has been evoked in my mind by that phrase, mass consumption, that idea that we might buy joy all instead of each individual buying in expensive scraps for himself. That phrase has excited my mind. Perhaps it will excite yours. Anyhow, that is the gist of what I have to say to you now : these two phrases, mass consumption-community buying. What do you think of them as fertilizing phrases ? Isn't there a clue in it? What do you think of it as a door towards hope out of the pessimism and business sluggishness of the present time?

{p. 215} CHAPTER XIV

OUR WORLD IN FIFTY YEARS' TIME *

WHAT, I have been asked, will our world be like in fifty years' time? The question is as attractive as it is absurd. Myriads of unpredictable things may occur to thrust events in this direction or that.

It is a much more difficult question to answer now than it would have been fifty years ago, because it is plain we are living in less steadfast times.

Fifty years ago the world was divided among firmly established and stable governments sustained by powerful traditions; the system of mechanical developments which formed the substance of Progress went on steadfastly; it was easy to foretell automobile, aeroplane, the abolition of distance, the concentration at the centre of great cities, and the dfflusion of suburbs. Radio was already working in the laboratories. ' Its appearance on the street was only a question of time. The recovery of the United States was plainly going on-the growth of a mighty great Power on the new railway net between Atlantic and Pacific and the industrialization of the north and east. The dividing up and struggle for Africa were obviously coming. The Franco

* Published in John o'London's Weekly, October 1931.

{p. 216} German revanche or a counter-attack was as manifest a certainty. There was nothing to stop the merry game of armament, and so the War in -the Air also was as inevitable as the year after next. Prophecy was indeed an easy game in those days. A writer had to be blind to the obvious if he did not score a fairly high percentage of hits when he turned his attention to the future.

But things are not like that to-day. Instead of progress there is crisis everywhere. There is no government, not even the American, which has now the manifest fixity of the " great powers " of the 'eighties. There is a growing scepticism whether any existing govern-, ment is as necessary as it ought to be. All contemporary governments have been outgrown-physically and mentally-by the needs of mankind.

The abolition of distance, foretold fifty years ago, is achieved. That has made all the governments in the world misfits. Seventy odd sovereign governments, all acting independently and competitively, all jammed together by that " abolition of distance," are trying to carry on the affairs of our race, which now, under the' new conditions created by that same Progress the prophets of the eighteen-eighties noted and foretold, would be far more conveniently and successfully dealt with as one world business.

Human life has become a world-wide thing, but governments remain cramped and partial things. More and more people are coming to realize this. Yet none of us knows clearly how to change over to a more comprehensive and securer way of running the world.

{p. 217} While we puzzle over the-riddle, armaments go on, and the old-and now utterly stupid-tradition of malevolence between sovereign governments and their cc peoples " is maintained. International politics still consist largely of idiotic attempts on the part of these seventy-odd governments, amidst which our affairs are entangled, to get the better of their rivals, to maintaina flaming prosperity within their borders while restricting and injuring the welfare of all other peoples. The old game goes on because the world lacks the mental energy to, call it off . So we are all drifting through needless and wasteful economic war towards actual military war. Some years ago I wrote that the salvaging of civilization was a race between education and catastrophe. Nowadays I am forced to add a qualification. Catastrophe indeed travels briskly; tariffs strangle, trade ; gold-the life-blood of trade-is being hoarded against some fresh day of reckoning; armaments increase; the friction between States intensifies. The new air-war is being prepared. The new gas-war is being prepared. But education has not even started yet. There is no race. It looks like a walk-over for catastrophe.

In the schools of Britain, America, France, Germany, Italy, Japan to-day, the school teachers are still casting minds into the old forms of national conceit and patriotic hatred. They are doing the fundamental work of mental armament. There are few exceptions. And the hundreds of millions of "modern democracy" show as much ability to protect their minds from subjugation and arrest the advancing disaster, which will enslave,

{p. 218} torture mutilate and destro the reater ro ortion of them, as a train-load of hog bound for Chicago.

Most people realize that there has been a profound industrial depression since last October, but few realize how near the economic life of civilization came to absolute smash in the secret eventful days that preceded President Hoover's announcement of a year's holiday for war debt payments. And that announcement, hailed everywhere as an immense relief, and followed by a hectic revival of business, made nothing more than a temporary alleviation, a breathing space, in the march of events. It touched nothing of the essential forces,. the

blind suspicions andrivalries between nations, the strangulation of enterprise by debts and the gold standard, and the failure to develop methods of mass consumption to balance mass production, that are carrying us all to disaster.

Gladly would the prophet prophesy pleasant things. But his duty is to tell what he sees.

He sees a world still firmly controlled by soldiers, patriots, usurers, and financial adventurers; a world surrendered to suspicion and hatred, losing what is left of its private liberties very rapidly, blundering towards bitter class conflicts and preparing for new wars. The economic machine is stalling in every country in the world. The decline is going on under our eyes. Production is diminishing, trade is declining; presently we shall find even our present educational and hygienic services too costly for our existing methods of payment and cut them down to new low levels of inadequacy.

{p. 219} Few people realize yet how flimsy and vulnerable are the liberties and securities, the plenty and the leisure, we still enj oy. But it is more probable than not that in fifty years' time men may be less secure, less well fed, and clothed and housed less comfortably, than they are to-clay, and that in that retrogressive age it may already have become as difficult and dangerous to travel from San Francisco to London or Paris as it was to go from London to Moscow in the thirteenth century.

The prophet must say what he sees. To me-to put it plainly-it is as if I were watching a dark curtain fall steadily fold after fold across the bright spectacle of hope with which the century dawned. Its fall is not inevitable; it is still preventable; nevertheless it continues to fall. I do not see any adequate effort to prevent its fall. Efforts are being made, but they are limited and insufficient. The way towards a great world State of power, freedom, and general, happiness is still plainly open to mankind. We have been brought to the very borders of the Promised Land of Progress. And the amount of visible human determination to cross those borders and escape from the age-long sequences of quarrelling, futility, insufficiency, wars, and wasted generations that fill the bloodstained pages of history, the amount of visible effort to open now a new volume in the adventure of life, is-contemptible.

No one is justified in accepting defeat until defeat is altogether complete. The present lassitude, the present oafish drift of Homo sapiens towards fresh disasters, could be challenged and arrested by an adequate Renais-

{p. 220} sance of human courage and creativeness. There is no inevitability in the approaching catastrophe. I confess I see no signs whatever of any such awakening as might save us, but who can tell what may be happening among the young, among the intelligent and wilful, outside one's range?

It would need nothing superhuman to avert the, decline. No triumphant Devil is destroying us. We are being destroyed by the mean, dull fool in our general composition. We are not being beaten in an honourable struggle; we are loitering and rotting down to disaster. A few thousand resolute spirits, the tithe of a tithe of the misdirected heroism that went to waste in the Great War, a few score million pounds for a world campaign for the new order, might' still'at the present time turn the destinies of mankind right round'from mercenariness, narrowness, and cruelty, towards a new life for our race. Professor Einstein has said that it needs only two per cent. of the populations of Europe and America to say plainly, that they will resist any war that may be contrived for them, to put an end to the foolery of militarism for ever. I agree. I would go further, and say two per cent. in the five leading countries in the world. And to that I would add something even more obvious. It needs only that the governments of Britain, the United States, France, Germany, and Russia should get together in order to set up an effective control of currency, credit, production, and distribution-that is to say, an effective " dictatorship of prosperity," for the

{p. 221} whole world. The other sixty odd States would have to join in or accommodate themselves to the overruling decisions of these major Powers. It is as simple a business as that, which our presidents, potentates, statesmen, kings of finance, and so forth, are unable to carry through. Which they do not even realize they could carry through. With human decay and disaster plain before them

They just fumble along. The bands play and we "troop the colours." The party men twaddle about debts and security. They cant patriotism. They love their countries so-with such a deadly embrace that they would rather see them starve than let them cooperate with nasty foreigners. They do their best to reassure the world, and do, it seems, succeed in reassuring the world, that this skimped, anxious, dangerous life we lead is the best that can be done for us. These rulers and leaders and statesmen of ours get in front of the cameras at every possible opportunity to put their fatuous selves on record, while Death, the Ultimate Creditor, and Collapse, the final Stabilizer, add up their inexorable accounts.

But given that wave of sanity, that sudden breeze of clear-headedness, that sudden miraculous resolve to stop this foolery, and what sort of world might we not have before another half century has passed?

Everyone alive might be by then a citizen of the whole world. What does that signify in actual fact? All of us would then be free to go where we would about this fascinating and sometimes so lovely planet, which

{p. 222} would have become our own. For most of our lives we should be released from toil. All the nece . ssities of the human population-food, abundant transport, clean, fresh, and beautiful housing and furniture, adequate health services, education, social security-could be supplied now under modern conditions by

something between twelve and twenty years of not too arduous work on the part of everyone. The town, the country- side would be undergoing constant revision and im- provement; the world city would be constantly more gracious and pleasant; the world garden constantly more beautiful. The layout of industry could be as exciting as a game. These are not the -assertions of an " imaginative writer "; they are possibilities proved up to the hilt by economists and by the scientific examina- tion of these matters. Some fifteen or twenty years of growth, education, and preparation there would have to be for everyone born into the world, and the rest of life after that stint of economic service would be free for creative work, for graceful living, for movement and experience. There is no need now why the vast majority of us should still be prisoners kept in this or that narrow country by restrictions upon migration and unable to move because of our poverty, and in subjection to this or that form of drudgery that could have been rationalized out of existence years ago. There is no need why any human being now should be under-clad or ill-clad, badly housed or sickly. All that sort of thing is materially unnecessary now. The whole world could be run as one concern and yield a universal well-being.

{p. 223} And it is no good mincing matters when it comes to saying why we have not this universal well-being at the present time. Most of our rulers and directors are, to put it plainly, narrow-minded, self-centred, mentally indolent, pompous, and pretentious creatures of the past. They are unwilling to put their minds through the humble and strenuous mental toil needed to raise the standard of their work, and we others are fools enough to tolerate this mismanagement. These ruling and controlling people have got enough for themselves; they stick to the controls like barnacles, they live in relative comfort and immense dignity, chiefly engaged in the defence of their own conceit, and they do care a rap what happens to the mass of us, and the mass of us lacks the spirit, will, and understanding to call them to account. A thousand million human beings are leading lives of want, limitation, humiliation, and toil; scores of millionas are in immediate danger of of the futile tortures of war, and these dull, self-protective folk, at the head of things and in control of things, do nothing of what they might do, and pose for our respect and admiration with infinite self-complacency.

But in another fifty years after that Renaissance - if, after all, it should occur-things will be different.

For an ignorant world we shall have a soundly educated world, aware of its origins, capable of measuring and realizing its possibilities, and controlling its destinies with an ever-growing sense of power. Every human being born into that world of plenty, born, into a clean, convenient, uncrowded, healthy home, will

{p. 224} learn from the beginning of the varied loveliness of the life before it, and of the expanding drama of human. achievement in which it has to play its part. Its distinctive gifts will be noted and developed. It will realize what can be expected of itself. It will be taught another history than that of kings and conquerors and armies, and better games than setting up rows of soldiers in order to knock them over again. It will do its fair and definite share in the productive or other necessary services of mankind, and for the rest it will be released to accomplish whatever possibilities it has of innovation, happiness, and interesting living.

That wide, fine life is within reach of mankind, it is there for the taking. But mankind is not taking it. The curtain is falling. When the Promised Land is cut off for ever, Homo sapiens will be readily convinced there never was a Promised Land. The last thing we human beings will produce is concerted effort; only under the spur of greed or panic do we produce that. We shake our heads sagely at the " dreamers..' As long as possible we will go on living the close, ignoble lives of thieves, bullies, and drudges to which we are accustomed, that dear old slummy, needy, down-atheel human life, so pathetic and touching and all that. We will snuffle our satisfaction that we are not in any "fantastic Utopia." And when presently the rifles are put into our hands again, we shall kill. The whips will be behind us and the " enemy "' in front. Brave old world! The Old History will go on with us, because we had nof the vigour to accept the new.

{p. 225} CHAPTER XV

CRYSTAL GAZING: 1932 *

THE editor has asked me to pose as a prophet, to peer into my magic crystal and say what is going to happen in 1932. I evade his question. I am setting out to write about 1932, but, if I may make a quite unnecessary confession, my crystal has no more magic than any other crystal; it is just a way of concentrating on a question, and what is really going to happen this year is hidden as completely from me as from every other human being. The probabilities seem to me to be more abundant and various than they have ever been at any New Year I can remember. ' The crystal is more clouded and darkened and disturbed. And, it happens, I am not doing my peering on New Year's Eve. " On account of the necessity of going to press," says my editor, asking for an early report. . . . So I am writing two months before publication-in October 1931.

Will 1932 be a great date in history? I hope not. I am afraid that if some out-of-the-way vast event or group of vast events occurs, it will be in the nature of a catastrophe. A.D. 1932 may be a very black year

* Nash's Magazine, January 1932.

{p. 226} indeed for mankind. But if there is nothing exceptionally astounding and terrible to fix 1932 as a cardinal date, then I think New Year's Day 1933 may be a fairly hopeful anniversary. I think if we can carry on without either some dire social convulsion or the onset of harsh suppressions, until January ist, 1933, we shall have got through the worst of the immediate dangers that threaten our civilization.

Nobody denies those dangers now. That is one thing to the good. The whole world is afraid. A few years ago it

was impossible to convince people that the social framework in which we live was not absolutely fool-proof, as the phrase goes. We had a childish delusion of world stability. It was tacitly assumed that governments might do any silly thing, that people might do, any silly thing, and that the routines of life would still go on very much as they do now. Suffragettes felt free to disorganize the machinery of law and order. It would all come right again. Speculators could work the market and get away with profits in the sure conviction that trade and distribution could never be finally overturned. Any criticism of the common practices of business men,_ financiers, and the recognized party-politicians was regarded as long-haired, high-browed, wild-eyed, unsettling, mischievous stuff, that sensible men,disregarded if they could, or beat up, shot up, stifled, or jailed if it became too insistent to disregard. And the world floundered along very happily in that disregardful way, for a cycle of years. Those days of happy, careless assurance have passed.

{p. 227} We have all been bumped out of that optimistic Eden, to face a singularly harsh-looking world. We have played the market to a giddier height than ever, and this time it does not swing,back. It just goes on heeling over.

The facts of the case, displayed in the bleak, clear light of our present anxieties, are not now so very difficult to state. Three strands of perplexity interweave in the rope that now, in a singularly noose-like form, is draping itself about the neck of Homo sapiens. First there is the paradox of organized production. That can be put very simply. All the material needs of mankind can be satisfied now by a continually diminishing number of workers, and this unforeseen efficiency and abundance of cultivation and manufacture make it impossible under our existing arrangements for the accumulating multitude of excess workers that has been released from toil, to consume *anything at all. The old theory was that dislodged labour found new jobs. Accumulated capital found fresh uses, and plenty led on to more plenty. It is not so. There are no new jobs. Enterprise faints under a load of debts. Plenty, we discover, under our system of private profit and private employment, starves the world.

That alone would be a perplexing riddle confronting mankind. But, quite apart from this difficulty, the world's money and credit system has got out of gear through a clumsy handling of gold. Our money and credit system grew up rather than was planned, and it has, we are coming to realize, grown up wrong. It is

{p. 228} not working. Its mechanism has stalled. We trusted Providence or Evolution in the matter, and we have been let down.

Moreover, and this is the third element in the outlook, man has accumulated and continues to accumulate a vast store and organization of destructive war material, which, unless he disperses it, will certainly go off before very long in a culminating series of explosions. Man maintains these accumulations because he lives under a tradition of warfare between free and independent " sovereign " states. His imagination has been moulded in that form and he n s a great difficulty in readjusting it. He has always had that tradition, he has never bothered to examine it, and this is where it has brought him. He has been overtaken by inventions that have jammed together these sovereign states of his and made it possible for them to inflict the extremest injuries upon one another. In the past these states were always more or less at war, because that was what being a sovereign state means and has always meant. It can mean nothing else. A sovereign state is a portion of humanity at issue with the rest. All through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these states were training armies and fleets in preparation for possible conflicts; they were lying and cheating each other at the solemn, silly, diplomatic game of ruin-my-neighbour, and they were trying to impoverish and outdo each other by the weapon of tariffs and by scrambling for colonies and overseas conquests. The only reason why they have not destroyed each other so

{p. 229} far has been the comparative ineffectiveness of their weapons in the past, and the difficulty they had in getting at each other. But now the weapons have been improved enormously, and they can get at each other to the pitch of complete social and p hysical destruction, and they seem disposed to do so. They carry on a war not merely of trenches, but of tariffs, not only by war office plans of campaign but by monetary operations. The silly cruel game of " Foreign Policy " has now become a gigantically destructive one. And it is always going on. Sovereign states always have been at war with each other, either furtively and diplomatically or openly and outrageously. But never until now has it been possible for them to make a clean job of it as communities-to commit at the same time murder and suicide outright. Now it is.

The monetary muddle, the failure to balance pro-duction and consumption, and this now quite obviously obsolete tradition of running human affairs as a system of hostilities between sixty-odd sovereign governments, are the three strands in the rope that 'tightens round the neck of Homo sapiens. It is all as plain as daylight nowadays. There is nothing new I in these statements I am making. These facts have been said and demonstrated ten thousand times in the past year. One need not peer in a crystal f or them. They are plain for everyone to see.

And equally plain are the broad lines of the solution of the human problem. The solution is in its elements possible, definable, and explicable. The only things

{p. 230} that stand in the way of its application are the inattention, the bad mental habits, the private ends, the divisions, impatience, suspicions, and maliciousness of men. It is absurd to pretend we do not know what has to be done. What has to be done is self-evident. The difficulty is to get it done. The question at issue is whether we shall let each other get to work on this common task. By 1932 the danger and the solution will have become manifest to the greater number of intelligent persons alive, and sufficient things will happen in that year to test how far our race has the wit, will, and individual generosity and self-sacrifice needed to undertake that evident

solution. Humanity as a race is going to be tried out in 1932.

Just as the threat is threefold, so also are there three main strands in the solution. Money, credit, finance, the machinery of payment, and measures of obligation, need rationalization upon world lines. Too much has been left to accident, too much that is calculable has been left incalculable, and vast freedoms, opportunities, and temptations have remained exposed to the cunning, boldness, and greed of the baser kind of active, clever people. Mankind has been carried to prosperity during the past eighty years by discoveries of gold, and by a happy succession of inventions and suchlike chances. And our race has been,plunged into confusion and panic almost abruptly by a stupid manceuvre of - hoarding. The haphazard progress could not have lasted anyhow, but it might have gone on for some time longer if it had not *been for that. Mankind has fallen over a gold

{p. 231} brick. It is surely asking for nothing superhuman to demand a frank and open conference of the leading states of the world so that they may jointly establish a modern, flexible world currency, and organize a restraint upon speculation and financial gambling and cheating sufficiently effective to dissolve away that first entanglement, the monetary entanglement. Nor is it inconceivable that the second interwoven strain of danger, the war threat, should not be equally amenable to the expressed common-sense of our race. In a world of nineteen hundred million only a few score thousand ferocious and crazy-minded people really desire war. The rest regard war with hatred and terror. Then away with our patriotisms and sovereignties so far as these things make war probable 1 The world is in urgent need of monetary, economic, and political federation. Are we going in 1932 to set about doing what we all see so clearly has to be done? Or are we not?

The third strand is less closely interwoven with the other two, but quite equally with them it demands a world agreement, before it can be attacked. Production has outrun private consumption, and the only way to restore the disharmony between the two is for the community, embodied in cities, states, and nations, to consume-by replanning, rebuilding, cleansing, and glorifying the world. This involves, as indeed all three factors in the world cure involve, a profound but altogether possible revolution in our ways of living and doing business with one another. Have we the vitality to go through with such a revolution?

{p. 232} Those are our interrogations for New Year's Day 1932. We can put them in another form and ask: Is Homo sapiens indeed a mental defective, a creature of fear, greed, habit, impulse, and dull inhibitions, hopelessly divided against itself, or is he now a sane animal capable of acting fearlessly in the presence of these facts that challenge him so imperatively? The year before us will produce all the events needed for an, answer.. Either those necessary world-conferences and federal-boards, the essential frame of a reconstructed world, will have been assembled before twelve months are out, or we shall be realizing that 1932 was appointed by the Fates as the date when the Collapse of Western Capitalism became evident and indisputable. Either Homo sapiens will have pulled himself together or , plainly, he will have begun to tear himself to pieces.

That much I can say on the evidence of the facts about us; but when I peer into my crystal to determine which alternative it will be, I see nothing but a darkness of whirling clouds, crowds and politicians and patriots, speculators busy, workers uneasy, unemployed restive and angry, newspapers streaming from the presses by the million and spinning about in blinding snowstorms-and certain gleams of light. I cannot penetrate that storm of present events. I cannot guess whether these gleams of hope will increase. I cannot see whether the factories will be growing busy again by 1933 and the scaffoldings of great enterprises rising already over streets, crowded and happy with hope new-born, or whether those same streets will be littered

{p. 233} with dead and wounded under the fire of machine guns and the armoured cars of the revolt or the reactionit scarcely matters which-hurrying to arrest and murder its antagonists. In one region of my crystal vision I see Russia and Asia struggling towards a new economic order. They attempt magnificently there, but I do not believe their effort can continue if the great world. of modern capitalist enterprise on which they still depend for so much of their machinery, technical ability, and scientific knowledge, collapses. They cannot do without the rest of the world. The reconstruction of capitalism, the cleansing, rationalization, and renascence of the vaster fabric of the Atlantic civilization is the main task before us. Russia is not two hundred out of the nineteen hundred millions of mankind. She will live or die as a modern, mechanized community, with the life or death of the main body of our race. We shall know when the year is out, and we shall not know before, whether we can pass Homo as sane andworthy of a future, or whether we must certify him incurably demented, tragically incapable of managing his own affairs, and doomed now to a rapid progress through violence and disorder to complete self-destruction.

Those are not empty phrases. They are charged with the accumulating anxieties, frustrations, and sufferings of nineteen hundred million human beings. The imagination fails before the prospect of that planetary dibakle.

{p. 234} CHAPTER XVI

A Memorandum on the World Situation, Prepared originally for Private circulation, in June 1932

THE broad facts of the present world situation are fairly plain. All human affairs are infinitely complex in detail, just as the human body is infinitely complex in its physiology. That does not prevent us from making sound working diagnoses of social or bodily conditions.

There are three main factors in the present difficulties of civilized mankind. The first and most urgent is the financial breakdown. The second and most fundamental is the revolution in economic method. The third and most perplexing is the political fragmentation of the world. Can we find any indications for our immediate

treatment of this triple malaise? Let us first consider the factors severally and in order.

The financial methods of the world have never been organized into a system. People talk glibly of the Capitalist System. There never has been any ordered social mechanism worthy of that name. There has been a process and development of economic methods during the past three centuries which have changed

{p. 235} continually and which have yielded an enormous increase in human productivity.- Inseparable from this has been a tremendous development of scientific knowledge and technical efficiency. But there has been no plan in it, no definition of what it was and where it began and ended. Since the Capitalist System never has existed as a system, it is absurd to speak of. it as breaking down. The most important aspect of this three hundred years from the financial-economic point of view has been the extraordinary liquidation of property through joint-stock enterprise (share-holding) and novel credit methods. The Stock Exchange is a new and now vital organ in the social body of mankind. It is the most characteristic aspect of what is called Capitalism. It has existed only for about three centuries, and, from the biological point of view, it and modern banking are still in a crudely experimental state of development. We are realizing that these new crude organs can be as dangerous as they are powerful.

They are, so to speak, the most menacing centres, at present, in the suffering corpus of Homo sapiens.

It is being realized now that a rapidly developing and expanding economic system needs a rapidly developing and expanding credit and currency system if it is to live and grow healthily. That need is being realized now only because throughout the past three centuries a number of causes have conspired to satisfy this need unasked. just as a healthy child growing up in fresh air may scarcely dream there is such a thing as air, so, almost as unconscious of its circulatory system., the

{p. 236} modern world grew up. The influx of fresh supplies of precious metal---new silver since the discovery of America and in the latter half of the nineteenth century new gold-is the most striking and picturesque of these causes. It may stand here in'this memorandum for itself and also for all the associated and contributory enhancements of the mechanism of payment and exchange. And we will use the word inflation here for such a free and ample increase of circulation. It is not the strict technical meaning of " inflation," which is linked to the rising and falling of prices. But in a rapidly expanding economic system there may be a vigorous enhancement of credit and currency-inflation in the looser sense-without any corresponding rise in prices whatever.

The history of human economic relations since society began tells continually of a struggle between owner and creditor on the one hand and the dispossessed, the needy, and the enterprising on the other. Ownership, unless it is mitigated by laws and customs, tends to lock up and enslave; it passes very easily from exploitation to restriction and strangulation. The drift of ownership rule in the old world was towards peonage and serfdom; in our new world it is towards expropriation and a growing destitute class-the proletariat, as socialists use the word. The development of money and its associated credit methods in the last three thousand years greatly increased the debt-developing possibilities of the human social, organization. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

{p. 237} could be rewritten, indeed, as a history of a struggle with debts. The good fortune of our civilization in the past three centuries, in happening upon an unpremeditated releasing inflation, has hitherto kept our minds off the debt problem. We have now to face it.

It becomes glaringly evident that that particular run of luck is over. The habitual reliefs, whatever they were (they are analyzed in The Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind), are not working. The world deflates. The deflation is proceeding with terrifying swiftness. The payment of debts is daily becoming more difficult and reluctant. We (humanity at large) .,.are paying our debts to insufficiently consuming creditors or to hoarding creditors. At present- we are in a state of over-production; the world is full of un- c 1 onsumed goods; it is in a phase of congested wealth. But this is only a temporary phase, a carry-over from the last period of vigour. The present discouragement of production must tend to diminish and at last kill production. Under existing conditions no one will go on making or growing things at a loss. . The accumu- lated stores will pass sluggishly into consumption or they will rot. There may then be a resumption of trade, but upon a shrunken scale; it will not avert the general downward process. The next sta te of mankind as a whole will be insufficiency and famine, in a generally impoverished and probably diminished world.

Plainly the first thing to do now is to restore the circulation-to inflate, as we have here defined the word. That must be the " first-aid " method. The recogni-

{p. 238} tion of this is spreading rapidly. In a little while we shall all be inflationists. It is too obviously necessary not to be attempted. We shall go on trying to do, deliberately and intelligently, what good luck has been doing for our civilization for the past three centuries.

I will not complicate this memorandum here by a summary of the possibility of inflation through a managed currency. I will not discuss methods of inflation at all. I will content myself with asserting. that a controlled inflation is a practicable process, if only certain obstacles, which I will presently discuss, can be overcome.

But now let us take up the second factor in this diagnosis.

This second factor is something quite new in human experience. It is the economic riddle produced in an

individualistic competitive society by the astounding advances in technical efficiency that have been made, more particularly since the beginning of the twentieth century. In my Work, Wealth, and Hafijbiness of Mankind I have shown with some fulness how it has come about that an ever-diminishing proportion of the population can produce all and more than the whole population can buy and consume. In the past the simple rule-for all except the strong and the fortunate-was that he who would not work should not eat. That was a perfectly reasonable condition to exact. There would be no food for him unless he worked, and there was work waiting to be done everywhere. But now we can get the food so easily that we do not want the work.

{p. 239} The obvious remedy, say the shallow hopeful, lies in shorter hours, more pay to spend, and a fuller, better-equipped life. Exactly. But our system of profitseeking, competitive businesses will not allow that to happen. A lucky business in benevolent hands may do that sort of thing for a time, but only until competition overtakes it. Pay wages above current rates, work your factory for shorter hours and fewer days than is possible, and presently your competitors will have put you out of business. For decades of prosperity the United States, still the most modern in structure of any existing society, has swung along with vigour on the assumption that there was always a job round the corner for everyone who was not a shirker. The Americans know better now.

This trouble, this second factor, goes deeper than any question of money and credit. Inflation is an urgently necessary first-aid measure. But inflation is no permanent answer to the paradox of increasing unemployment due to increasing abundance based on technical efficiency. To stop suffocating a patient is not to cure him. The answer to this second riddle lies in the evocation of what we may call the collective employer. This so-called Capitalist System, if it is not to enter upon a phase of collapse, has to face up to a new idea -the idea of collective buying and collective employment over large areas of economic life. It can only carry on with that. The collective employer need not worry about under-selling by a sweating competitor. It can embark upon enterprises that give no dividend

{p. 240} to a creditor, but only general welfare. A municipality or a state can re-house its people, educate them, improve its plant, its transport, and so forth almost indefinitely-subject to the third group of considerations to which we now come.

Just as there has been a rapid realization of the present urgent need of inflation by people to whom the idea would have been dismaying ten years ago, so also there is an increasing recognition that collective buying and Public employment are the logical complements of mass production and technical rationalization. I doubt if there is much need of argument now to support these world-wide desiderata.

But this brings us to the third main factor in our problem, and it is here that the intractable living difficulties- of the situation are to be found. That factor is what we have termed the fragmentation of human controls. That is where the real. danger of a collapse of civilization lies.

If it were not for this third factor there would be nothing to dismay us in the present situation of man-kind. The readjustment of the monetary and credit organization of the world, the transfer of certain broad concerns in its economy from the quasi-individualistic methods of the present time to collective control, constitute a group of administrative problems hardly more serious than the rehabilitation of a stalled machine. The task is hardly more formidable than, let us say' the restoration of a Rolls Royce or a Lincoln or an Hispano-Suiza car which has been stuck in the mud for

{p. 241} some weeks, which has choked engines, a damaged chassis, a bent wheel, the carburetter foW, and one or two minor parts missing. That would be a troublesome but entirely practicable job to attempt. No spirited mechanic, whose life depended upon it, would refuse to undertake it. The problem created by the present economic breakdown is certainly not more formidable than that. So far as it is a breakdown of method and mechanism, it is entirely within the compass of our courage and resources.

But the third factor opens up a tangle of difficulties far more dismaying. They are difficulties that it is unthinkable should be overcome for good and all in any such restricted time as the rate of the financial and economic breakdown leaves us. Their complete 'removal from the path of human progress means such changes in the ideas and education of mankind as would demand -at the very least many scores of years for their accomplishment. The present crisis will certainly not wait for that.

I have used the words "political fragmentation" to express this third factor in our distresses. The world has. become one economic system in about a centurY; a number of once practically autonomous economic systems have undergone coalescence and have so expanded into one another that separation has become impossible, while the expansion of governments has undergone no corresponding unification. Economic interdependence has been accompanied by no adequate increase of political interdependence. We are living

{p. 242} socially and politically in a patchwork of traditions and anachronisms. We are only now waking up to a realization of the monstrous danger of this discord.

I have compared the financial and economic breakdown to the breakdown of a neglected car,` and I have spoken of a mechanic who would not be dismayed by the task of recovery. But unhappily the analogy does not hold so far as the mechanic goes. We have the disorganized mechanism right enough, but alas! there is no mechanic. Instead there is a crowd that might be compared, with a certain justice, to old coachmen ' postillions, amateurs, what you will, all claiming control of different parts of the machine and with a time-honoured tradition

of mutual hostility. They are so obsessed by their ancient and antiquated animosities that none of them will listen for a moment to the advice of the intelligent onlookers, the economists. They will not let the mechanic cure it. They are not doing anything to recover the car. Indeed their disputes are constantly making its plight worse.

The way in which this discordance of political institutions and world-needs works to hold our hands back from the necessary remedial economic measures may be illustrated by considering how it prevents any useful competently controlled inflation at the present time. (The word "inflation" is being used here in its looser, more popular sense.) -The problem is like raising the level of the water of a lake. If the bottom of the lake is raised all together, that is quite a practicable thing to attempt. But if we have a number of areas of the

{p. 243} lake bottom under different controls, and some of these controls insist on depressing their areas while others raise theirs in variable degrees, the result is that the water pours from the raised to the sunken areas so that the lake may be either raised, depressed, or broken up into pools and islands. This is a very good image of what happened in the years after the War. There was no concerted world policy about money and credit; there was inflation here and deflation there, and there were disastrous floods and whirlpools of trade, culminating in our present world-wide disorganization and depression. Quite a similar parallelism is to be found if we consider What will happen if one state attempts large measures of public employment while another sits down to sweating (but employing) its own population to sustain cut-throat competition with its neighbours. It is now clearly recognized that the proper economic control of the world can only be attacked hopefully as one world business; there is no time even to think of creating any Super-State or world authority to deal with it, and the essential problem before us, therefore, is to discover if anything (and if so what) can be improvised to meet the present crisis and hold up human affairs until more enduring structural arrangements are possible.

We want some force that will jump political boundaries and operate in a world-wide manner.

The only force conceivable that will. do this now is a widespread, clear consciousness of the immediacy of our danger and of the primary necessity for a general

{p. 244} moderated inflation to relieve the burthen of debt and for public undertakings to relieve unemployment, both protected from the raids of speculators and from lapses into international and internal. competitiveness. Such a consciousness might conceivably be made sufficiently powerful-since it is not based upon any facts and reasonings that are now in any way abstruse-to bring all the world, or sufficiently large areas of the world, into a real and understanding co-operation for the salvation of our tottering civilization. How could we set about it ?

We have to-day quite unprecedented means for bringing ideas, stated boldly and simply, into the minds of millions-the wireless, the cinema, the modern Press. No one has yet been able to estimate what vast changes in the public will might be effected by the concerted, and concentrated fire of these distributive machines. Is such concerted action possible? The men who can ,say Yes or No in these organizations probably do not number more than a few thousands all told. Many are accessible to reason, and'all are amenable to one sort of pressure or another. They know each other to a considerable extent. Is it impossible to swing them into common action together in this case of world emergency? Are they necessarily and incurablyregarded as a whole-in a state of idiotic dementia? Must they always direct opinion in a score of divergent directions? Is there no escape from the rigidities of tradition except complete disaster?

In relation to what are they to swing together? The

{p. 245} great campaigm for an appeal for world-wide economic co-operation demands formulation and leadership. And here again arises a question of what is possible, to which the answer can be found only by trial. There are a number of prominent figures in the world who can make statements that will be respected and listened to throughout the earth. (Consider, for example, the King of England, the Prince of Wales, the President of the U.S.A., the heads of various states abroad, various leading statesmen; all these can speak with a resonance which no financial expert, no " outsider," however intelligent, can command.) Is it impossible that a group of these Big Voices should speak severally, but to the same effect, on this need for world action of a definite sort, concerted world action, to restore the sinking economic vitality of our situation? Hitherto it has been the custom of these exponent figures to observe and follow rather than lead opinion, but altered circumstances, with their new demand for leading, alter our use for these immensely prominent figures.

The lines of that concerted world action can be expressed in phrases easily comprehensible to the run of mankind. They are:

(1) A watched and regulated general inflation - as world-wide as possible - for the lightening of debts and the release of enterprise.

(2) A bold expansion of public employment and collective buying.

{p. 246} (3) A readjustment of tariff barriers to control the fluctuations of economic pressure that may ensue upon the above general operations, and to protect the countries acting in concert, should there be any dissentient powers, from the detrimental economic and financial proceedings of such recalcitrant powers.

(4) It would follow naturally, upon the statement of such a general policy of recuperation, that the associated powers should combine in mutual reassurance by disarmament in respect to one another and in arrangements for their common protection against exterior violence.

These paragraphs 3 and 4 are subsidiary to and follow upon the essential issues as stated in the principal paragraphs (i) and (2). The former embody the unifying and creative conceptions; the latter evoke secondary systems of precaution necessitated by the present fragmentation of human controls.

Is it impossible to carry the substance of this memorandum to the not overwhelmingly numerous persons who could realize its conceptions? Is it impossible for them, or any of them, to escape sufficiently from the habits and traditions associated with their commanding positionsl to play a leading part (even at some personal sacrifice) in arresting that collapse of our civilization which is already manifestly going on?

Unexampled prosperity and happiness are within the reach of our race, and it staggers on the edge of what

{p. 247} may be irrevocable disaster. Every year, every month of indecision increases the inevitability of that disaster.

One final paragraph of explanation may be added here. It is not suggested that the world can be saved by utterances merely, or that a world-wide propaganda of certain general ideas can be effective in itself. But these things would produce such a clarification and orientation of the general mind that the detailed realization of these broad principles becomes possible. At present every rational financial and economic project is subject to resistances and qualifications that make it hopeless. The conversion of the common man to a sane economic faith, and his helpful acquiescence in the broad measures foreshadowed here, are the necessary initiatory condition of world recovery. The rest follows naturally on that.