Extracts from H. G . Wells (1) Imperialism and the Open Conspiracy (2) After Democracy (3) The Shape of Things to Come (4) Science and the World Mind.

Selections by Peter Myers.

Date April 30, 1999; update May 19, 2009. Minor corrections August 20, 2020.

My comments inside quoted text are shown {thus}.

Write to me at contact.html.

You are at http://mailstar.net/hgwells.html.

H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell were the two highest-profile leaders of the World Government movement in the twentieth century, aside from Lenin and Trotsky. Wells candidly expressed his views in his non-fiction writings, the most explicit of which is The Open Conspiracy; however, to reach the general public, he used novels, which always had the same moral. Working for the One World cause was, as he put it, his religion. The British Labour Party, under Tony Blair, is very much in the Wells mould, and leading Labour MP Michael Foot has written a new biography of Wells, which mentions all the books discussed here, but omits to mention their advocacy of World Government; nor is this term listed in the index of Foot's book.

Foot, like Wells, gives the impression that Wells opposed Soviet Communism, but it would be more accurate to say that he opposed the Stalinist faction. Trotsky he supported, and his Internationalism is really Trotskyism in a disguised form. In 1929, he sent Trotsky a message of support (Dmitri Volkogonov, Trotsky, p.321).

Wells on migration in a borderless world: #when they are free to move

(1) H. G. Wells, Imperialism and the Open Conspiracy. Faber & Faber, London, 1929; bold emphasis added.

{p. 18} ... to-day ... 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 lo 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 world-wide. And since at one time there can be only one complete world-wide state upon our planet, 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

{p. 19} 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 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 plainly it is 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 an interpretation of current history is a necessary basis for any rational political activity, and I challenge them, if this general interpretation I have given is wrong, to ask themselves and, if possible, inform this conference of intelligent people in

(2) H. G . Wells, After Democracy. London, Watts & Co., 1932; bold emphasis added

WHAT I WOULD DO WITH THE WORLD

{p. 196} 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 whch 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 thc 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 sub-tropical 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? {at this point, the Dictatorship leads to Communism, as Marx envisaged a Dictatorship of the Proletariat leading to Communist "withering of the state"} 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 forward. 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 {in practice, they are "forgetting" about the history of Civilisation altogether} - 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 {sounds like Troptsky's Permanent Revolution}. 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 assemby, 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 issue ? 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 existing 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 {i.e. U.N. Committes?}. They would no longer be sovereign powers to that extent, but that is not saying they are to be forcibly extinguished or {end of extract}

(3) Extracts from H. G . Wells, The Shape of Things to Come: the Ultimate Revolution, (hardback) London, Hutchinson & Co., 1933; (paperback) Corgi books NY 1979; bold emphasis added.

This "novel" is a futuristic political thriller about convergence between the USSR (which Wells thought went off the rails when Trotsky lost to Stalin) and the West.

Page numbers are for the hardback edition, with approximate equivalents for the paperback edition.

{p. 288; pbk p. 327} decade of economy, a decade of wartime destruction and a decade of chaos and decay. The meteorological services were no longer operative. All this had to be restored. The definite abandonment of every type of railroad was accepted as a matter of course. Railways were buried at Basra for ever. And the restoration and reconstruction of production in a hundred essential industries followed also as a necessary consequence of these primary resolutions.

The more the reader scrutinizes the agenda, the more is he impressed by the mildness of the official title of the gathering: 'A Conference on Scientific and Mercantile Communications and Associated Questions'. It is clear that the conveners resolved to press on with their task of world reorganization as far as they possibly could, without rousing the enfeebled and moribund political organizations of the past to obstruction and interference. The language throughout is that of understatement; the shape of the projects is fearlessly bold. A committee of experts had prepared a very good general survey of the natural resources of the planet, including those of the already suspicious Russia, and the conference set itself unhesitatingly to work out the problems of a resumption of production generally, with an entire disregard of the various proprietary claims that might arise to challenge the realization of these schemes. There was no provocative discussion of these claims; they were ignored. The Air and Sea Control evidently meant to take effective possession not only of all derelict ports, aerodromes, coal-mines, oil wells, power stations and mines, but to bring those in which a certain vitality still lingered into line with its schemes by hook or by crook, by persuasion or pressure. Its confidence in its solidarity with the skilled men working these latter establishments was absolute. Such a solidarity would have been inconceivable thirty years before. Financial adventure had been washed out of the minds of the new generation of technicians altogether. They simply wanted to 'get things going again'. Ideas of personal enrichment were swamped in their universal conviction that their class must now either work together and master the world or leave it.

So with a modest air of logical necessity, of being driven rather than driving, the Conference spread its planning far beyond the material and mechanism of world intercommunication.

{p. 289; pbk p. 328} What is this reconstructed transport to carry? How is it to be fed - and paid for? About the air-ports everywhere were tracts and regions sinking back to that primordial peasant cultivation which had been the basis of all the barbaric civilizations of the past. The question of the expropriation of the peasant and the modernization of agricultural production was taken up at Basra where Lenin and Stalin had laid it down, defeated. The Conference was lucidly aware that upon the same planet at the same time you cannot have both an aviator and a starveling breeding peasantry, toiling endlessly and for ever in debt. One or the other has to go, and the fundamental objective of the Conference was to make the world safe for the former. The disappearance of the latter followed, not as a sought-after end but as a necessary consequence. And the disappearance of as much of the institutions of the past as were interwoven with it.

In the ideas of their relations to each other and to the world as a whole, these Basra technicians were all what the nineteenth century would have called socialistic. They were so fundamentally socialistic that they did not even raise the question of socialism. It is doubtful if the word was ever used there. They took it for granted that this Control that was growing like a limitless polyp in their minds would be the effectual owner and exploiter of all the aeroplanes, routes, industrial townships, factories, mines, cultivations that were falling into place in their Plan. It would have seemed as unnatural to them that a new Ford or a new Rockefeller should arise to own a factory or a mine personally as that anyone should try to steal the ocean or the air. There it was for the common good, and just as much was industrial plant for the common good.

All these men, it must be remembered, almost without exception, were men of the salaried type of mind. They had been born and brought up in a tradition in which money was a secondary matter. From the beginning of the mechanical age, the men of science, the technical experts, the inventors and discoverers, the foremen and managers and organizers, had been essentially of the salariat. Some few had dabbled in finance and grown rich but they were exceptions. Before the World War indeed these sort of men had been accustomed to accept the acquisitive and gambling types, the powerful rich and owning people, as a necessary

{p. 300; pbk p. 340} of hands for industrial work or unemployment. But this process had been reversed after 1940. From that date onward there was a drift back of workers to the land, to live very incompetently and wretchedly.

The abolition of the self-subsisting peasant had been the conscious objective of Lenin and Stalin in Russia. The cultivator, with increasing ease, was to produce fundamental foodstuffs far beyond his own needs and to receive for his surplus an ever increasing variety of helps, comforts and amenities. Millions of the cultivators in 1910 were cultivating entirely for the market; they produced cotton, hemp, rubber or what not, and were as dependent on the provision shop for their food as any townsman. The social crash had ended all that. In the Famished Fifties, as Morowitz says, everyone was 'scratching for food in his own patch'. In the Sixties the common way of life throughout the world was again immediate production and consumption. Only under the direction and stimulus of the Transport Control did the workers upon the soil begin to recover the confidence and courage needed to produce beasts only for sale and crops only for marketing.

The ambition of the Modern State Fellowship was to become the landlord of the planet and either to mine, afforest, pasture, and cultivate directly or to have these tasks performed by responsible tenants, or groups and associations of tenants under its general control. But at the outset it had neither the personnel nor the power to carry out so fundamental a reconstruction of human affairs. The comparative failure of the two Five Year Plans in Russia had been a useful warning against extravagant propositions.

The Modern State did not mean, as the old saying goes, 'to bite off more than it could chew'. Its chief missionaries were its traders. They were more abundant than, and they did not need the same amount of training, as Modern State schoolmasters and propagandists. They were offering contracts and prices to existing or potential food growers, cotton growers, rubber planters and operable mines; the Control did its best to guarantee sales and prices to any surviving factories, and it trusted to the selective power it had through transport, the new monetary issues, research and technical education to strengthen

{p. 301; pbk p. 341} its grip as time went on and enable it to establish a general order in this world-wide mélange of bankrupt producers and impoverished customers it was restoring to activity.

At first it made no enquiry as to the ownership of goods that were brought to its depots; it paid cash and observed its contracts; it attempted no discriminations between man and man so long so long as they delivered the goods and traded square. Its nuclei and schools were still propagandist schools in 1975 and quasi independent of the trading, transport and industrial organizations that endowed them. But this was only the first stage in the Modern State undertaking. The next was to be more difficult.

The student of history must always keep in mind the importance of lifetime periods in social and political change. Between 1935 and 1975 was only forty years. Everywhere old systems of ideas were still dominating men's brains and still being transmitted to the young. Old habits of thought, old values, old patterns of conduct, that had been put aside, as it were, just as jewels and fine clothes and many polite usages had been put aside, during the days of dire need and immediate fear, returned with returning self-respect. During the famished fifties the full creative scheme of the Modern State won its way to dominate the imaginations of at most a few score thousand minds, whose scientific and technical education had prepared them for it. After that the propaganda had been vigorous, but still, even after the Conference of Basra in 1965, the number of brains that could be reckoned as primarily Modern State makers probably numbered less than a couple of hundred thousand.

The subsequent propaganda was still more swift and urgent, but the new membership was not always of the same thorough quality as the old. The society wanted the services of every man or woman it could incorporate with its Fellowship, but it did not want an inrush of half-prepared adherents, refugees from moral perplexity equiring guidance, ambitious careerists. Every new religion, every church, every organized movement has known this conflict between the desire for expansion and the dread of dilution. On the one hand the Modern State recalled the headlong shallow mass conversions of Christianity and Islam, which had reduced those great faiths to a mere superstitious veneer upon barbarism,

{p. 320; pbk p. 363} government concerned. The new Bavarian government, the Windsor Parliament and the government in Rome were all 'arranging to take over' these things within their territories. They were becoming more explicit about it every year. They persisted in regarding the interlocking Controls as a dangerous international Trust.

This was the burthen of the national missions of observation and enquiry which were stewing in the sunshine outside the doors of the Conference - 'in a state of tentative menace', as Williams Kapek put it.

The minor delegations representing groups of owners and organized local interests had this much in common with the national missions, that they proposed more or less frankly to resume possession of properties the Controls had taken hold of and revived, or to impose burthensome charges. They varied like the inmates of a zoological garden in scale and power, but they had one quality in common; an obstructive litigiousness.

In the frankness of its privacy behind its closed doors, the Conference sized up these antagonisms and discussed their treatment. 'There are just three lines of treatment possible,' said Ryan brutally. 'We can treat with 'em, bribe 'em, or rule 'em. I'm for a straight rule.'

'Or combine those ingredients,' said Hooper Hamilton.

The method of treaty-making and a modus vivendi was already in operation in regard to Russia. There indeed it was hard to say whether the Communist party or the Modern State Movement was in control, so far had assimilation gone. And the new spirit in the old United States was now so 'Modern' that the protests of Washington and of various state governors against the Controls were received hilariously. Aeroplanes from Dearborn circled over the capital and White House and dropped parodies of the President's instructions to dissolve the Air and Food Trust of America. All over that realist continent, indeed, the Controls expanded as a self-owned business with a complete disregard of political formalities. But the European situation was more perplexing.

'Most of these European sovereign governments are no more than scarecrows,' said William Ryan. 'There's no living people behind them any longer. Leastway, no living people that

{p. 321; pbk p. 364} matter. Call their bluff on them and you'll hear no more about them.'

It was Shi-lung-tang who argued against defiance and stated the case for bribery.

Bribery in his suave exposition, bribery combined with treaties and tact, became a highly moral amelioration of direct action. He asked the Conference to realize how specialized and rare as yet was its new forward-looking habit of mind. When all the work of the propaganda and schools had been accounted for, it was doubtful If a twentieth part of the race accepted or if a tenth understood, even in the most general terms, the difference between minds trained to creative conceptions and minds brought up in an atmosphere of defensive acquisitiveness and property acccumulation. It would take three or four generations to convert the world to a forward-looking attitude. Either the Modern State movement had to seize power openly now and inaugurate a tyranny that would have to last as long as it took to turn round the great majority of intelligences into the new direction, or it had to propitiate, compromise and persuade these outer masses - upon their own lines.

'These people will never see things as we see them,' he insisted, making strange gestures and repeating his words to emphasize their importance. 'They have to live and die, on their own lines.. It is not just to impose too much on them. It is only as they die out that the Modern State form of mind can hope to be in a dominant majority. Their mental vices are incurable. Meet them half-way, make things easy for them. You will save the world three generations of suffering and bitter conflict.'

He unfolded his Machiavellian project. A greedy acquisitiveness was part of the makeup of every energetic old-world type. They were as incurably voracious as dogs. And yet we made good friends and helpers out of dogs. Their loyalties were at best gang loyalties; they were none the less greedy because they did at times hunt in packs. But they had no fundamental hostility to the Modern State. It was only when the Modern State thwarted their established habits of behaviour that they snarled at it and began to fear it. They could never make a solid front against the Modern State. They could always be played off against each other, one against another; they could be neutralised. The

{p. 322; pbk p. 365} lesson of Russia's harsh repression of her bourgeoisie and professional classes in the Twenties and Thirties was a warning against the miseries and social damage of too sudden and forcible an attempt to change ideals of behaviour. Let the Modern State go softly and more kindly.

He went on to detailed suggestions. With Russia, Spain and America, bribery need play but a minor role. The ruling mentality in these countries was now such that the present working agreements would pass naturally into assimilation in a little while. Elsewhere there was really no permanent harm in recognizing the old claims to sovereign and proprietary rights, and securing such a hold upon leading men that they would keep their hands off the Modern State propaganda and schools and be content with handsome subsidies from the Control services and industries. It would be cheaper than war. 'If they want a little war now and then among themselves - '

In spite of Shi-lung-tang's smiling face, there was audible disapproval at this point.

When he had done, his case for tact and insinuating corruption was knocked to pieces by Rin Kay. 'If we were a Society of Moral Supermen,' he said, 'we might venture to be as disingenuous as this. But Mr. Shi-lung-tang forgot that every Fellow in the Modern State society had two enemies: the acquisitive man outside and the acquisitive man within. The point their Chinese friend missed was the fact that it was much more natural to adopt the behaviour patterns of the old world than to acquire those of the Modern State. The old dispositions were something that was; the new dispositions were something that had to be made and sustained. The inner life of a Modern State Fellow was a sustained effort to be simple and serve simply. That should take him all his time. He could not afford to be intricate and politic. We have a difficult enough task before us just to do what we have to do, plainly and honestly. We cannot afford to say and do this and mean that.' William Ryan supported that with vigour, but Hooper Hamilton spoke long and elaborately on the other side. The spirit of the society was plainly with Kay.

M. L. Tagore, an economic botanist, introduced a new line of thought into the discussion, or rather he revived the line of thought of nineteenth-century mystical liberalism. He said he was

{p. 323; pbk p. 367} equally against bribery, insincere treaties or any use of force. He was old-fashioned enough to be a democrat and a believer in the innate wisdom of the unsophisticated man. And also he believed in the supreme value of truth and inaggressiveness. We must not outrage the sense of right in man, even if that meant the abandonment of our immediate objectives. We had to persuade him. And we had no right to assume that he did not hold himself to be right because his conception of conduct differed from ours. Let the Modern State society go on with the scientific organization of the world, yes, and let us go on with the propaganda of its doctrines in every land. But let it not lift a hand to compel, not even to resist evil. He appealed to the missionary successes of early Buddhism and Christianity as evidence of the practical successfulness of spiritual urgency and physical passivity. He concluded in a glow of religious enthusiasm that did not spare him the contemptuous criticisms of the social psychologists who fell upon him tooth and nail so soon as he had done.

These speeches, which are to be found in full in the Basra Conference Reports, vols. 371 and 372, were the three salient types of opinion in that gathering. The immense majority were for the active line, for frankness and rule. A not inconsiderable minority, however, wavered behind the leadership of Hooper Hamilton. They felt that there were elaborations and refinements that did not find expression in the more aggressive speeches, that the use of force could be tempered by tact, and that lucidity towards an objective was compatible with kindliness and concession.

In a number of speeches some of them tried to express this rather elusive conception of compromise; some of them were not too skilful as speakers, they went too far in the opposite direction, and on the whole they tended to drive the movement towards a harder assertiveness than it might otherwise have expressed. The problems of the Russian system and America were abundantly discussed. Russia now was represented only by technicians, and there was abundant evidence that the repressive influence of the Og-pu had waned {as happened under Gorbachev}. Ivan Englehart was again a leading figure. He assured the Conference that there would be no trouble from Moscow. 'Russia,' he said, 'is ready to assimilate. Is eager to assimilate.'

Arden Essenden spoke late in the general discussion; he

{p. 324; pbk p. 368} spoke with a harsh enthusiasm and passionate faith; he carried all the younger men and most of the older ones with him, and he shaped the ultimate decisions. {this implies that this speaker is a vehicle for Wells himself.}

Some of his phrases are, as people used to say, 'historical'. He said, 'The World-State is not a thing of the future. It is here and now. It has always been here and now, since ever men said they had a common God above them, or talked, however timidly, of the brotherhood of mankind. The man who serves a particular state or a particular ownership in despite of the human commonweal is a traitor. Men who did that have always been traitors and men who tolerated them nursed treason in their hearts. In the past the World-State had been torn up among three-score-and-ten anarchies and a countless myriad of proprietors and creditors, and the socialists and cosmopolitans, the true heirs of the race, were hunted like criminals and persecuted and killed. {note the religious origin; it does not come from Plato. The early USSR gave high place to "cosmopolitanism", but in Stalin's later years, "cosmopolitan" became a word for indirectly referring to Jews}.

'Now, through the utter failure of those robbers even to maintain their own social order and keep at peace among themselves, the world has fallen into our hands. Power has deserted them, and we, we here, have power. If we do not use it, if we do not use it to the fullest, we are traitors in our turn. Are we to tolerate even a temporary revival of the old system? In the name of reason, why? If their brains have got into the wrong grooves - well, we can make fresh brains. Are we to connive with and indulge this riff-raff that waits outside our doors? Go out and look at them. Look at their insincere faces ! Look at their furtive hands. Weigh what they say. Weigh the offers they will make you !

{the riff-raff are presumably the "common people". Note the similarity to Plato's philosopher-kings. Although Wells terms his movement the Open Conspiracy, Karl Popper warned in his book on the Open Society that Plato's republic was the blueprint for modern totalitarian states. The messianic fervour, however, comes not from Plato but from the Jewish idea of an earthly utopia. Could some people have confused one with the other? Plato's envisaged his republic as being on a relatively small scale: in his book The Laws, he describes a small utopian republic called Magnesia, with only 5040 households; the idea of a utopia covering the whole world is Jewish - it does not come from Plato.}

To us to-day that seems platitudinous and over emphatic, but it conveyed the sense of the Conference and it led directly to the general decisions with which its proceedings concluded. The most significant of these was the increase of the Police of the Air and Sea Ways to a million men {i.e. a World Army}, and the apportionment of a greatly increased amount of energy to the improvement of their equipment. There was also to be a great intensification and speeding up of Modern State education and propaganda. Provision was also made for the enlistment of auxiliary forces and services as they might be needed for the preservation of order; these auxiliaries were to renounce any allegiance except to the Transport or other Control that might enlist them. The Controls were reorganized, and a central committee {as in the USSR}, which speedily became known as the

{p. 325; pbk p. 369} World Council, was appointed by them to act as the speaking head of the whole system. The ideas of treaties and contracts with exterior administrations and of any diplomatic dealings with dissentients were abandoned. Instead it was determined that this central committee, the World Council, should openly declare itself the sole government of the world and proceed to make the associated Controls the administrative organization of the planet.

Accordingly a proclamation was prepared to this effect and issued very widely. It was broadcast as well as printed and reprinted from a multitude of centres. It was 'put upon the ether' everywhere to the exclusion of other matter. For now the world had its wireless again in as great abundance already as in the early Thirties. So simultaneously the whole planet received it. It whipped up the waiting miscellany at Basra into a foam of excited enquiry. All over the world city crowds or solitary workers received it open-mouthed. At first there was very little discussion. The effect was too stunning for that. People began to talk after a day or so.

We give it as it was issued: a singularly poor piece of prose when we consider the magnificence of its matter. It seems to have been drafted by Arden Essenden, with some assistance from Hamilton and amended in a few particulars by the Council.

'The Council for World Affairs, constituted by the Air and Sea Control and its associates, declares:

'That between 1950 and 1965 this planet became derelict through the incapacity of its ostensible rulers and property owners to keep the peace, regulate production and distribution, and conserve and guide the common life of mankind;

'That chaos ensued, and

'That it became urgently necessary to build up a new world administration amidst the ruins.

'This the Air and Sea Control did.

'This administration has now been organized about a Central Council for World Affairs, which is making this statement to you.

'It is the only sovereign upon this planet. There is now no other primary authority from end to end of the earth. All other sovereignty and all proprietary rights whatever that do not conduce directly to the general welfare of mankind ceased to exist during the period of disorder, and cannot be revived.

{p. 326; pbk p. 370} 'The Council has its air and sea ways, its airports, dockyards, factories, mines, plantations, laboratories, colleges and schools throughout the world. These are administered by its officials and protected by its own police, and the latter are instructed to defend these organizations whenever and wherever it may be necessary against the aggression of unauthorized persons.

'In every centre of population there are now Modern State nuclei and Control agents conducting the educational work of the Council and in reasonable contact with the local economic life, with local enterprises, local authorities and individuals not yet affiliated to the Modern State organization. The time has come for an these various quasi-independent organs of business and administration to place themselves in orderly relations to the new Government of the Whole World.

'We are constituting a Bureau of Transition, for the simplification and modernization of the business activities, the educational and hygienic services, production, distribution and the preservation of order and security throughout our one home and garden, our pleasure ground and the source of all our riches - the earth, our Mother Earth, our earth and yours {an indication that the Green movement is a key part of Wells' World Government}.

'Without haste or injustice and without delay, with a due regard to your comfort, your welfare and your wishes, the Bureau will set itself to bring your life into sound and permanent correlation with the one human commonweal.'

'It is usurpation !' cried a voice, when the declaration was put to the vote as a whole. 'You decide upon Force,' said Shi-lung-tang. 'I did my best -' 'But this means War !' cried Tagore. 'No,' said Arden Essenden 'There is no more War. This is not War - nor Revolution. This is the recognition of a Revolution and Government again.'

§ 10. The Life-time Plan

It is still a debatable question how far that hard decisive declaration of the Socialist World-State at Basra was not premature. There are those who consider it the most timely of acts; there are

{p. 327; pbk p. 371/2} some who believe it should have been made as early as the first Conference in 1965. The discussion became involved with the intellectual and moral conflicts that went on under the Air Dictatorship. It mingles with the controversies of to-day. But certainly, from 1978 onward, the Modern State movement lost something of its pristine mental freshness, lost openness, lost much of that almost irresponsible adventurousness that had flung the network of transport and trading controls so swiftly about the earth. 'We have swallowed the world, but now we have to digest it,' said Arden Essenden. The old defiant repudiation of the past was re-placed by a firm and sometimes rather heavy insistence upon the order of the future.

There was nowhere any immediate uprising in response to the proclamation of a World Government. Although it had been plainly coming for some years, although it had been endlessly feared and murmured against, it found no opposition prepared anywhere. Thirteen years had wrought a profound change in Soviet Russia and the large areas of China in association with Moscow. The practical assimilation of Soviet Transport and Communications was almost tacitly accepted. The details of the amalgamation were entrusted to committees flying between Moscow and Basra. All over the world, wherever there was any sort of governing or managing body not already associated with the Modern State System, it fell to debating just how and to what extent it could be incorporated or how it could resist incorporation. Everywhere there were Modern State nuclei ready to come into conference and fully informed upon local or regional issues. The plain necessity for a systematic 'renucleation' of the world became evident. The 'Section of Training and Advertisement' had long since worked out the broad lines of a modus vivendi between the old and the new.

That modus vivendi is called variously The Life-time Plan or - with a memory of that pioneer effort in planning, The Five Year Plan of the Russian Dictatorship - The Thirty Year Plan {compare Wells' 20-year dictatorship of the world, which he envisages in After Democracy, p. 196 (see above)}. Independent businesses that respected certain standards of treatment by the workers, which would accept a certain amount of exterior control, technical and financial, and which maintained a certain standard of efficiency, were to be accorded not simply tolerance but a reasonable protection. Even if their methods were

{p. 328; pbk p. 373} suddenly superseded by new devices, they were to be kept running until they could be wound up, their products were still to be taken by the Controls. This was far better treatment than was ever accorded superseded producers under the smash-and-grab conditions of the competitive system. In the same way whenever possible the small owning peasant or the agricultural tenant was not dispossessed; he was given a fixed price for his output counselled or directed in the matter of improvements and so merged by bearable degrees into the class of agricultural workers. This, as Rupert Bordinesco put it (Brief Explanation: Historical Documents Series 1969), gave them 'time to die out'. Because it was an integral part of the Life-time Plan that the new generation should be educated to develop a service mentality in the place of a proprietary mentality. There were to be no independent merchants or independent cultivators under twenty in 1980, none under thirty in 1990 and none under forty in 2000. This not only gave the old order time to die out; it gave the new order time to develop the more complex system of direction, mechanism and delivery it needed soundly and healthily. The lesson of the mental discords and tragic disproportions in the headlong development of the first Russian Five Year Plan - disproportions as monstrous and distressful as the hypertrophies and atrophies of the planless 'Capitalist System' of the nineteenth century - had been marked and learnt.

It did not trouble the World Council that to retain millions of small businesses and tens of millions of small cultivators the whole world over for so long meant a much lower efficiency of production. 'These older people have to be fed and employed,' wrote Bordinesco 'and now they will never learn or be able to adapt themselves to a novel routine of life. Help them to do their job a little better. Save them from the smart people who want to prey upon them - usurers, mortgagers, instalment salesmen, intimidators, religious or secular; and for the rest - leave them in peace. '

The Brief Explanation also drew a moral from the 'Period of Glut' in the Twenties, which preceded the collapse of the Thirties when the whole World was full of unconsumed goods and unemployed people. This, Bordinesco pointed out, was the inevitable consequence of an unregulated progressive system of

{p. 329; pbk p. 374} private enterprise. 'There is no sense in throwing a man out of an employment, however old-fashioned, unless there is a new job for him. There is no sense in bringing children into the world unless there is education, training and useful work for them to do. We have to see that each new generation is arranged numerically in different categories of training and objective from those of its predecessor. The Russians learnt this necessity in their great experiment. As we progress towards a scientific production of primary substances the actual proportion of agricultural workers, miners, forest wardens, fishermen and so forth in the community must fall. So also the proportion of ordinary industrial workers must fall. The heavy industries will precede the light in that. A certain compensation will be caused by a steady rise in the standard of living and particularly by what De Windt {De Windt seems to be Karl Marx} called 'the rebuilding of the world', new cities, new roads, continually renewed houses everywhere.' This was foreshadowed to a certain extent by the French plan for 'Outillage National' and the German housing schemes in operation as early as the late Twenties, plan and schemes ultimately strangled by the budget-balancing fanatics.) But even that diversion of energy from the production of basic materials and small commodities to big structural undertakings would not suffice to use up the continually released human power in the community. At this point appeared what Bordinesco called the 'enlarging categories' which were to consume more than they gave. There had to be increasing numbers of people engaged in education in the developing and ordering of knowledge in experimental science, in artistic production, in making life more abundant and ample. To that expansion no limit could be set.

'We men have a lease of this planet,' runs the Brief Explanation, 'for some millions of years. It is foolish not to press on to better life but it is more foolish to hurry frantically and cruelly. The history of the past two centuries is one sustained warning against the disemployment of men and women for whom there is no other use. Before we teach, our teachers have to learn; before we direct comprehensively, we must have experience in direction. We must always be attempting a little more than we can do, but we must not be attempting the impossible. We must advance without needless delay, but without waste, hurry, or cruelty. Do not be fearful or jealous of the advent of the new conditions. No

{p. 330; pbk p. 375} honest worker, man or woman, has anything to fear from the coming of the Modern State.'

§ 11. The Real Struggle for Government Begins

But the rulers of the new World-State, as their enlargements of the Air and Sea Police made manifest, were under no illusion that the new order could be established in the world by declarations and 'Brief Explanations', and hard upon its proposals for conferences and assimilations came the organization of its local constabularies and the regulations that made the reorganized nuclei the sole means of communication of independent local authorities, businesses and individuals with the central Controls. In nearly every part of the earth the nuclei had prepared a personnel of sympathizers and auxiliaries, varying in character with local conditions, outside the ranks of the Fellowship. The khaki uniform of the street and road guardians, differing very little then from the one familiar to us today, appeared as if by magic all over the world, and the symbol of the winged disc broke out upon aeroplanes, post offices, telephone and telegraph booths, road signs, transport vehicles and public buildings. There was still no discord with Russia; there the blazon of the wings was put up side by side with the old hammer and sickle.

Nowhere at first was there any armed insurrectionary movement. We realize from this how complete had been the collapse of the organized patriotic states of the World War period. They had no national newspapers, no diplomats, no Foreign Offices any more. There had been no paper for the former and there had been no salaries for the latter. Lacking vocal organs, nationalism as such was silenced. There were, however, protests, in a considerable variety of ineffectiveness, from local self-appointed bodies, and much passive resistance and failure to comply. But even the removal of the winged sign was infrequent, and usually where that occurred nothing further ensued when the air police came whirring out of the sky to replace it.

This phase of tacit acquiescence was, however, only temporary, until the opposition could gather itself into new forms and phases and discover methods of organization. The elements of antagonism were abundant enough. The Fascist garrison in Rome,

{p. 331; pbk p. 376} claiming to be the government of all Italy, was one of the earliest to make its challenge. It had a number of airmen, unlicensed for various reasons by the Transport Control, and it now sent a detachment of its Black Shirts to occupy the new aeroplane factory outside the old Roman town of Turin, and to seize a small aerodrome and whatever air material was to be found in it at Ostia. The winged disc at these two places was replaced by the national fasces. A proclamation was made and disseminated as widely as the restricted means of publication permitted, calling for an assembly of the old League of Nations and reviving a long-defunct phrase of President Wilson's, 'the self-determination of peoples'. The King of Italy, after a diligent search, was found inoffensively farming in Piedmont, and the long-closed palace of the Quirinal was reopened and made habitable for him.

The new air police had been waiting with a certain impatience for a provocation of this sort. It had been equipped with a new type of gas bomb releasing a gas called Pacificin, which rendered the victim insensible for about thirty-six hours and was said to have no further detrimental effect. With this it now proceeded to 'treat' the long-resented customs house at Ventimiglia and the factory and aerodrome in dispute.

At Ostia the police planes found a complication of the situation.

An extraordinary ceremony was in progress in the aerodrome. Three new aeroplanes had just been brought thither from the Turin factory, and they were being blessed by the Pope (Pope Alban III).

For the still vital Catholic Church had always been given to the blessing of implements, shops, boats, bridges, automobiles, flags, guns, battleships, new buildings and the like. It was a ceremony that advertised the Church, gratified the faithful, and did no perceptible harm to the objects blessed. And this particular occasion had been made something of a demonstration against the World Council. The Pope had come; the King and the reigning Duce were present. Sound films made only a few minutes before the arrival of the air police show a gathering as brilliant, with its uniforms and canonicals, as anything that might have occurred before the World War. Choristers in cassocks and charming little lace collars chant, acolytes swing censers; the venerable Holy Father

{p. 338; pbk p. 382} evolved by Raven from his inner consciousness is the fact that there are several passages in which he seems to argue with himself, and that the quiet unhurrying assurance of the earlier and later narratives is not sustained in these middle parts.

I do not think it was mere chance that pulled him up precisely at the point when he came to the gassing of the Pope and the martyrdom of Saint Odet of Ostia. I think that this incident struck him as cardinal, as marking a supremely significant corner which humanity was turning. It was something that had to happen and it was something he had never let his mind dwell upon. It ended a practical truce that had endured for nearly three centuries in the matter of moral teaching, in the organization of motive, in what was then understood as religion. It was the first killing in a new religious conflict. The new government meant to rule not only the planet but the human will. One thing meant the other. It had realized that to its own surprise. And Raven, with an equal surprise, had realized that so it had to be.

Nearly a year earlier the one World-State had been declared at Basra. There already it had been asserted plainly that a new order must insist upon its own specific education, and that it could not tolerate any other forms of training for the world-wide lives it contemplated. But to say a thing like that is not to realize its meaning. Things of that sort had been said before, and passed like musical flourishes across the minds of men. The new government did not apprehend the fullness of its own intentions until this unpremeditated act of supreme sacrilege forced decision upon it. But now it had struck down the very head of Catholic Christianity and killed an officiating priest in the midst of his ministrations. It had gripped that vast world organization, the Catholic Church, and told it in effect to be still for evermore. It was now awake to its own purpose. It might have retreated or compromised. It decided to go on.

Ten days later air guards descended upon Mecca and closed the chief holy places. A number of religious observances were suppressed in India, and the slaughter-houses in which kosher food was prepared in an antiquated and unpleasant manner for orthodox Jews were closed throughout the world. An Act of Uniformity came into operation everywhere. There was now to be one faith only in the world, the moral expression of the one world community.

{this sort of thing actually happened in the USSR in the early years. Note that Wells expresses no misgivings about it, above or below. Also note the religious basis of the One World movement. It itself is a religion, a totalitarian one that cannot tolerate rivals.}

{p. 339; pbk p. 383} Raven was taken unawares, as the world of 1978 was taken unawares, by this swift unfolding of a transport monopoly into a government, a social order and a universal faith {this is why the 1946 Baruch Plan, for an International authority controlling Atomic Energy, coupled with abolition of the Veto to dissident powers in the Security Council, was surreptitiously also a plan for World Government}. And yet the experiment of Soviet Russia, and the practical suppression of any other religion than the so-called Communism that had been forced upon it, might well have prepared his mind for the realization that for any new social order there must be a new education of all who were to live willingly and helpfully in it, and that the core of an education is a religion. Plainly he had not thought out all that such a statement means. Like almost all the liberal-minded people of our time, he had disbelieved in every form of contemporary religion, but he had tolerated them all. It had seemed to him entirely reasonable that minds could be left to take the mould of any pattern and interpretation of life that chanced upon them without any serious effect upon their social and political reactions. It is extraordinary how such contradictory conceptions of living still exist side by side in our present world with only a little mutual nagging. But very evidently that is not going to be accepted by the generations that are coming. They are going to realize that there can be only one right way of looking at the world for a normal human being and only one conception of a proper scheme of social reactions, and that all others must be wrong and misleading and involve destructive distortions of conduct {it is by this means that Communism becomes Totalitarian, and such a danger to every older religion and culture}.

Raven's dream book, as it unfolded the history of the last great revolution in human affairs to him, shattered all the evasive optimism, al the kindly disastrous toleration and good fellowship of our time, in his mind. If there was to be peace on earth and any further welfare for mankind, if there was to be an end to wars, plunderings, poverty and bitter universal frustration, not only the connective organization of the race but the moral making of the individual had to begin anew. The formal revolution that had taken place was only the prelude to the real revolution; it provided only the frame, the Provisional Government, within which the essential thing, mental reconstruction, had now to begin.

That precarious first world government with its few millions of imperfectly assimilated adherents, which now clutched the earth, had to immobilize or destroy every facile system of errors, misinterpretations, compensations and self-consolations that still

{p. 342; pbk p. 386} Essenden that they do to the earlier dictators. He played the 'strong man' role half a century too late. The pattern of development, they decide, had been fully provided by De Windt {Marx, in this futuristic "novel"} and his fellow theorists. Essenden, they insist, did not so much lead as 'speak first', and with a needless haste, when the general decision was imminent. He induced the committee to strike too soon and too harshly at the old religious and political traditions that seemed to stand in the way of the Modern State. He found some of his colleagues slow in grasping things that seemed obvious to him. He was impatient and overbearing.

Quite early after the declaration of world sovereignty there were altercations in the committee meetings between him, on the one hand and William Ryan and Hooper Hamilton on the other. Shi-lung-tang also becomes an inexplicable thorn in Essenden's side, an enervating influence full of insidious depreciation. We find Rin Ray intervening with a gentle firmness in these disputes and Englehart fretting openly at their dissensions.

This new world government, one must realize, was carrying on under conditions that were often saturated with emotion There was still much uncertainty in the outlook; and this perhaps let in adventure and romance. The World Council was in effective possession of world power, but not in unchallenged possession. Even in 2000 C.E., nineteen-twentieths of mankind were still unassimilated to the organization. If the world was not rebellious it was mutinous, and there were plenty of alert and intelligent people in opposition, estranged people or people shaped to forms of thought altogether uncongenial to the reconditioning of human affairs on Modern State lines.

It was inevitable that these disharmonies between the leading figures at the centre of things, and the similar veins of discord that broke the solidarity of the Fellowship with a thousand intricate streaks and patches of weakness, should find echoes and misinterpretations in the greater world outside the machine. That greater world was still prepared for heroes and villains, ready for blind partisanships and storms of suspicion. It wanted drama in its government. A legend came into being which exaggerated a supposed want of sympathy on the part of Essenden for the 'priggishness' and 'petty tyrannies' of the various Controls. He was supposed to be nobler stuff. He was credited with the

{p. 343; pbk p. 387} intention of taking things into his own hands altogether and ruling the world in a more generous and popular spirit. As the history puts it 'An autocrat has always been the imaginative refuge of the crowd from hard and competent aristocracy.'

That Arden Essenden {seems to be Wells himself, in this futuristic "novel"} ever plotted to realize these dreams there is no evidence at all. No word, much less any deed, is on record to show that he was unfaithful to the Modern State. But there can be no doubt that he felt that he was a fine figure and very necessary to the World Republic. He felt, as Stalin had done before him, that men could not do without him.

And then abruptly women come back into the history. We find a love intrigue flung across the stream of history. I did not notice until I came to this part of the world story how small a part women had played in the drama that began with the World War. In most countries they had been emancipated and given equal political rights with men before that disaster. That achieved, they vanish out of the picture throughout four decades of violence. There were indeed women leaders in the early stages of the Russian Revolution, but none filled a decisive role. And for all the leadership women exercised between the Twenties and the Eighties they might have been every one of them in kitchen, nursery, hospital, or harem. They lost what little political significance they had when queens went out of fashion. A considerable proportion of the Modern State Fellowship was feminine, but no women occupied decisive positions in the scheme. There were none on the World Council. They were doing vitally important work, educational, secretarial, executive, and the like, but it was ancillary work that did not lead to individual distinction.

But at this point the historian of the year 2016 breaks his inadvertent taboo and two women's names appear, the names of Elizabeth Horthy and Jean Essenden and we find the threads of human destiny running askew about a story of passionate love and passionate misbehaviour.

Elizabeth Horthy, who caused the downfall and execution of Arden Essenden, was evidently a woman of splendid appearance and unfaltering conduct. She was an air pilot, and she seems to have liked to wear her uniform on occasions when most women would have been in a robe. She knew, says the history, what suited her. She was tall and evidently beautifully made; she

{p. 358; pbk p. 405} The political structure of the world developed in this fashion:

After the chaos of the war (1949-50) and the subsequent pestilence and 'social fragmentation' (1950-60) there arose, among other attempts to again reconstitute a larger society, a combine of the surviving aviators and the men employed upon the ground plant of their trade and transport. This combine was called The Transport Union. It does not appear to have realized its full potentialities in the beginning, in spite of the forecasts of De Windt (De Windt=Marx).

It initiated various conferences of technicians and at last one in 1965, when it was reorganized as The Air and Sea Control and produced as subsidiary organs The Supply Control, The Transport (and Trading) Control an Educational and Advertisement Control, and other Controls which varied from time to time.

It was this Air and Sea Control which ultimately gave rise in 1978 at the Second Conference of Basra to the World Council. This was the first declared and formal supreme government of the world. The Air and Sea Control then disappeared, but its subordinate Controls remained, and coalesced and multiplied as ministries do in existing governments, under the supreme direction of the World Council.

There was no further change in essential political structure between 1978 and 2059, but there was a great change in the spirit and method of that supreme government, the World Council. A new type of administrator grew up, harder, more devoted and more resolute than the extremely various men of the two Basra Conferences. These younger men constituted what our historian calls here the Second Council, though it was continuous with the first. There was a struggle for power involving the deaths of several of the earlier councillors, but no formal change of regime; there continued to be a World Council constituting the supreme government of the world. This Second Council is also referred to as the Air Dictatorship in its earlier years, and later on as the Puritan Tyranny. These are not exact constitutional terms but loose descriptive phrases. The membership of the World Council changed by individuals coming and going, but its character remained singularly uniform for over forty years. It grew more elderly in spite of a few youthful accessions. In 2045 its average age was 61.

The Second World Council endured until a Conference at

{p. 359; pbk p. 406} Megeve in Savoy (2059) reconstituted the world government on lines which are drawn out fairly plainly in the following chapters.

And now for the relations of this series of governing bodies to the World-State Movement.

The ideological developments that inspired these changes were initiated by a group of writers of whom De Windt {seems to be Karl Marx} was the outstanding figure. He built up the project for a World-State in all its essentials in a book on Social Nucleation published in 1942. The intrinsic quality of this book has been entirely overshadowed by its importance as a datum point in history. It is a slow laborious book {Karl Marx's Capital?}.

It was the seed of the Modern State Movement which furnished the plans of the Air and Sea Control. The Modern State Movement was never a formally constituted government nor anything in the nature of a public administration; it was the propaganda and development of a system of ideas, and this system of ideas produced its own forms of government. The 'Movement' was initially a propaganda and research, and then a propaganda, research, and educational organization. Its active full members were called Fellows; it had a class of dormant members, whose relationship to the active category varied under different conditions and at different periods; and it had a class of neophytes or apprentices, as numerous or more numerous than its active Fellows. It ultimately incorporated the mass of adult mankind (and womankind) in its Fellowship.

It was never divided up into regional bodies. Its Fellows were acceptable at any local centre they happened to visit. Naturally it began mainly as localized nuclei, but those localizations were merely for convenience of propaganda, teaching, and local purposes. The effective subdivision of the Fellowship was into faculties and these again were subdivided into sections and departments. There was to begin with a faculty of scientific research, a faculty of interpretation and education, a health faculty, a faculty of social order, a supply and trading faculty, a number of productive faculties, agricultural, mineral and so on. There were splits and coalescences among these faculties. Their splits and coalescences had a frequent relationship to the splits and coalescences of the Controls, because it was obviously a mental convenience for a faculty or faculties to correspond with one or more Controls.

{p. 360; pbk p. 407} The faculties and their subdivisions, their sections and departments, possessed electoral central councils, but there never seems to have been a general directorate of the Modern State Movement after the early days in which it was one simple system of propaganda and enquiry nuclei; its nuclei almost from the outset differentiated naturally into faculties, each viewing human affairs from its own angle; the movement as a whole did not require a continuing directive council; there were only conferences when concerted action between diverse faculties was desirable.

There never seems to have been any difficulty in the way of a man or woman belonging to two or more faculties at the same time, and this greatly facilitated the melting of one faculty into another. The Modern State Movement was an 'open order' attack on social structures; it was a solvent and not a mould. The moulds were the Controls.

The faculties and their sections, departments, and so forth developed very unequally; some dwindled to insignificance, and some on the other hand grew to unanticipated proportions and created their own distinctive organization and machinery. This was particularly the case with the social psychology department of the faculty of science, which annexed the whole faculty of training and advertisement by a sheer community of subject. This social psychology department of the faculty of science was given the legal and responsible direction of the Educational Control.

This body of social psychologists and their associates became a great critical and disciplinary organism side by side with the World Council, which ultimately, as will be explained in the following chapters, it superseded.

The world then ceased, it seems, to have any single permanent government at all. It remained under a series of primary Controls dealing with each other by the method of conference, namely the Controls of transport, natural products, staple manufactures, population (housing and increase), social sanitation (police and medicine), education (these two latter were later merged as the Behaviour Control) {thus Behavoiurism is a means of social manipulation}, and the ever expanding activities of scientific research and creative work. So the world which had once been divided among territorial Great Powers became divided among functional Great Powers.

Later a Bureau of Reconciliation and Cooperation seems to

{p. 361; pbk p. 408/9} have grown up, which decided upon the necessity and method of inter-Control conferences. It was something rather in the nature of a Supreme Court than of a ruling council.

Most of the old faculties of the Modern State Movement dissolved into technical organizations under these Controls, with the one exception of that former department of the science faculty the department of social psychology, which by 2106 had become, so to speak, the whole literature, philosophy, and general thought of the world {what a terrible prospect; does Wells think that all past Civilisation is worthless?}. It was the surviving vital faculty of the Modern State Movement, the reasoning soul in the body of the race.

In the end it becomes something like what the early nineteenth century used to think existed under the name of Public Opinion, the consensus of active thought and imagination throughout the world. It is plain that by 2I06 this rule by a pervasive intelligence had become an unchallenged success. It was all that was left by way of King, President, or Supreme Government on earth.

This assembling and clearing-up of statements which are otherwise scattered rather perplexingly through the text under consideration will not, I hope, annoy such readers as have already grasped what I have summarized here. I will now return to that text itself.

§5. The Text Resumes: The Tyranny of the Second Council

The Air Dictatorship is also called by some historians the Puritan Tyranny. We may perhaps give a section to it from this point of view.

'Puritan' is a misused word. Originally invented to convey a merely doctrinal meticulousness among those Protestants who 'protested' against the Roman version of Catholicism, it came to be associated with a severely self-disciplined and disciplinary life, a life in which the fear of indolence and moral laxity was the dominant force. At its best it embodied an honourable realization: 'I shall do nothing worth while and nothing worth while will be done unless I pull myself together and stiffen up my conduct.' lf the new Air Dictatorship was schooling the world with considerable austerity, it was certainly schooling itself much more so.

The code of the first makers of the World-State had been a

{p. 362; pbk p. 410} simple one. 'Tell the truth,' they insisted; 'maintain the highest technical standards, control money and do not keep it, give your powers ungrudgingly to the World-State.' That seemed to leave them free for a good deal of refreshing self-indulgence, and it did. They ate, drank, and were merry, made love very freely, envied and competed with one another for power and distinction, and set no adequate guard upon the growth of rivalries and resentments. Our history has glanced at the fall and death of Essenden, but this is only one episode in the long and complicated history of the private lives of the first world committee. Slowly the details are being elucidated and analysed by a body of historical students. Except that the victims are dead, and cannot hear, the results are as pitiless as the old Christian fancy of the Recording Angel and his Book on Resurrection Day.

They appear as very pitifully human; their sins happened to them, they were taken unawares in phases of fatigue, by resentment, by sensuality or flattery .Women were attracted by their prestige and offered the reassurance of love to their weaker moments. In many cases the moral downfall was due to the very limitlessness of the devotion with which they first gave themselves to their world task. They worked without rest. Then they would suddenly find themselves worn bare, bankrupt of moral energy. They had made no proper balance between the public task and the inward desire. Outbreaks of evil temper would follow, or phases of indolence or gross indulgence. The Fellowship was disconcerted; the outer world ran with scandal. 'These Fellows,' said their critics, 'are no better than the pretenders and rascals of the old regime. Rin Kay, the wise, is consumed with affection for his little friend, and Ardasher of the experimental aeroplanes makes his young men dangerous stunts to please a girl. Morovitz is collecting Persian miniatures quite unscrupulously and Fedor Galland spends half his time now making a garden at Babylon.'

The ambitious young men who were little boys when the first conference at Basra was held were educated by teachers who were none the less harshly zealous because they were doing relatively inconspicuous work and had no little friends nor miniatures nor gardens to amuse them. These teachers had a lively sense of their leaders' defects and of their own modest but real moral superiority. The youngsters under their teaching were saturated with

{p. 363; pbk p. 411} constructive enthusiasm, but they were trained also to judge and condemn the weaknesses of their tired and spent predecessors. They learnt that the brightness of this new world that had been made for them was in danger from the very men who had made it. The technically more skilful and intensive teaching that had been given them had made them more self-conscious and wary in their behaviour, and far more capable of managing the detail of their lives. They were simple in principle and hard in detail. They had a modern wisdom about diet and indulgence; they regarded lack of fitness as a crime.

The difference is evident in Historical Pictures, where one usually sees the older generation dressed either carelessly or picturesquely and often either self-consciously or gracelessly posed, while the younger men and women in the simpler and plainer clothing that was coming into fashion carry themselves like athletes. Austerity has become a second nature to them. Devotion and the sacrifice of the individual they carried to such a pitch that, for instance, it was considered unseemly for them to have portraits made, and there was no record kept of the names of the chairmen and of the movers of motions in the central committee during their ascendancy. It has needed special research to rescue some of the names of this second generation of world rulers, who set up the puritan Tyranny and made the Socialist World-State secure. One of the Moving spirits was certainly Han H'su and another Antoine Ayala.

They ousted their predecessors with any coup d'etat, one by one, through sheer superiority in energy and working power. The great revolution was over; the World-State was in being. But it was not secure. It was a time for just such continuous detailed work as only a naturally able and energetic type with a hard training could hope to do. They were not selected by any voting or politics to fill the Council, they were selected by their own staying and driving power. The milder or subtler types could not keep the pace and fell into less authoritative positions. The influence of certain teachers and groups of teachers was very considerable. Three schools, the Unamuno Foundation at Coimbra, the Columbia University of New York, and the Tokio Social College, accounted for more than a third of the World Council in 20I7.

For nearly forty years the new Council, with occasional

{p. 364; pbk p. 412} renewals, worked and kept a whole generation of men and women working. As Aldous Huxley (I894-2004), one of the most brilliant of reactionary writers {Huxley's Brave New World was a parody of Wells' Utopia; see Huxley's book Brave New World Revisited; note Wells' joke about Huxley's longevity}, foretold of them, they 'tidied up' the world.

There can be no denying the purification and rarefaction of the human scene that was achieved during their sway. They tightened up the disciplines of the Modern State Fellowship, and nevertheless the proportion of the Fellowship increased until it bade fair to become the larger moiety of adult mankind. The mental habits of the Fellowship, its habitual bearing, extended through the whole population. The Tyranny, says Vordin, altered the human face for ever. It closed the mouth and made the lips firmer, made the eyes steadier and more candid, opened the brow, altered the poise of the head, obliterated a number of wrinkles and habits of expression. Portraits of the earlier and later time confirm this generalization. One type of odd-character after another became rare and began to disappear from the human comedy. Rascals and recalcitrants grew old, sat in the sun for a time rather protestingly and vanished. They took many disagreeable and some whimsical casts of countenance with them. Sexual prostitution ceased and eliminated a characteristic defiance from feminine carriage. The trader found he had nothing to trade with and came into the employment of the Supply Control. Gambling, horse-racing, sport, generally went out of fashion, and those queer oblongs of pasteboard, 'playing cards', retired to museums, never to emerge again. Every one of these vanishing interests or practices took its own scores of social types, of 'reaction systems', to use the modern phrase, away with it. Faces ceased to be masks.

Every year the world grew safer for the candid. The need for cunning and wary self-restraint diminished enormously, the habit of making a face a 'mask'. Humanity was extroverted. A lively self-forgetful interest in eternal things becomes more and more patent. The 'worried' look of the introspective habit of mind disappears. 'Everyone must know plainly,' said the new rulers. 'Men must be perplexed no more.' The old religions could not emulate the moral prestige of the new cult, and even the resentments of the persecution that deprived them of their last shreds of educational influence could not preserve them. For nearly forty years this rule of the new saints, this resolute simplification and smoothing out of life, went on.

{p. 365; pbk p. 413} History becomes a record of increasingly vast engineering undertakings and cultivations, of the pursuit of minerals and of the first deep borings into the planet. New mechanisms appeared, multiplied, and were swept away by better mechanisms. The face of the earth changed. The scientific redistribution of population began. Yet there was little likeness to the world of to-day, as we know it. No age in human history has left us such strange and uncongenial pictures.

Costume was not unpleasant during this period, because of its simplicity; the human figures in the scene at least are tolerable; but these scientific Puritans also produced some of the clumsiest architecture, the most gaunt and ungainly housing blocks, the dullest forests, endless vistas of straight stems, and the vastest, most hideous dams and power-stations, pylon-lines, pipe-lines, and so forth that the planet has ever borne. But at any rate they flooded the Sahara and made the North African littoral the loveliest land in the world. The productivity of mankind was now advancing by leaps and bounds, in spite of the severe restraint presently put upon the introduction of fresh labour-saving devices; and yet these Puritans were consumed by an overwhelming fear of leisure both for themselves and others. They found it morally necessary to keep going and to keep everybody else going. They invented work for the Fellowship and all the world. Earth became an ant-hill under their dominion, clean and orderly but needlessly 'busy'. So harshly had they reacted against the weaknesses of their seniors and so unable were they to mitigate their own self-imposed severities.

Let us cast up the good mankind can attribute to this strange phase of sternness and grim repression. For all the faint masochist and sadistic flavour of its closing years, the good was beyond all measure greater than the evil. 'The obliteration of out-of-date moral values' (the phrase is Antoine Ayala's) 'and the complete establishment of a code of rigorous and critical self-control, of habitual service, creative activity, cooperation, of public as well as private good manners, and invariable truthfulness, were achieved for all time. We grow up so easily now into one free, abundant, and happy world that we do not realize the effort still needed even in the year 2000 to keep life going upon what seem now to us the most natural and simple lines possible. We find it almost impossible to

{p. 366; pbk p. 414} imagine the temptations to slacken at work, loiter, do nothing, "look for trouble", seek "amusement", feel bored and take to trivial or mischievous time-killing occupations, that pursued the ill-trained, under-vitalized, objectless common citizen before 2000 C.E. Still more difficult is it to realize how subtly these temptations were diffused through the mass and how hard they made a well-directed life. We have to trust the psychological experts about that.'

The New Puritans 'disinfected' the old literature, for example. It is hard to see that now as an urgent necessity. These old stories, plays, and poems seem to us to convey the quaintest and most inexplicable systems of motivation conceivable, and we cannot imagine people being deflected by them; they might as easily be led astray by the figures on a Chinese screen or an Hellenic sarcophagus; but before the persecution those books were, as one censor called them, 'fever rags'. They stood then for 'real life'. They provided patterns for behaviour and general conduct. That queer clowning with insults and repartees, that insincerely sympathetic mocking of inferiors, that denigration of superiors, which constituted 'humour' in the old days, strikes us as either fatuous or malicious. We cannot understand, for instance, the joy our ancestors found in the little blunders and misconceptions of ill-educated people. But then they also laughed at the cripples who still abounded in the world! Equally distasteful now is most of their 'romance' with its false stresses, its unnecessary sacrifices and desperations. 'Romance', says Paul Hennessey, 'is essentially the violent and miserable reaction of weak spirits to prohibitions they cannot fairly overcome.'

We find the books glorifying war and massacre, and the tangled masses of suggestion that elaborated the innate hostility and excitement caused by difference of racial type, so unconvincing that it is difficult to believe that they ever gripped. But they did grip and compel. They drove innumerable men to murders, lynchings, deliberate torture. They dressed the foulest and cruellest of crimes in heroic colours. There had to be a break with these traditions before they could be seen as we see them now. It needed the heroic 'priggishness' of the Air Dictatorship, putting away the old literature and drama for a time, suppressing the suggestion systems of the old religions and superstitions, jailing and segregating men and women for 'hate incitement' {thus Wells, the leading intellectual, who takes advantage of Free Speech under the Old Order, endorses the "temporary" suppression of Free Speech in his New Order},

{p. 367; pbk p. 415} ruthlessly eliminating sexual incitation from the lives of the immature and insisting upon a universal frank sexual hygiene, to cleanse the human mind for good and all and inaugurate the unconstrained civilization of to-day. There was no other way to renaissance.

Joseph Koreniovsky has called the Puritan tyranny 'the cold bath that braced up mankind after the awakening'. Man, he says, was still 'frowsty-minded' and 'half asleep' in the early twenty-first century, still in urgent danger of a relapse into the confused nightmare living of the Age of Frustration. You may can it a tyranny, but it was in fact a release; it did not suppress men, but obsessions. None of us now can fully realize the value of that 'disentanglement from tradition', because now we are all disentangled.

And next to this ruthless 'mental disinfection' of the world, and indeed inseparable from it, we must put the physical disinfection of mankind to the credit of the Air Dictatorship. Between 2000 and 2040 every domicile in the world was either destroyed and replaced, or reconditioned and exhaustively disinfected. There was an immense loss of 'picturesqueness' in that process, and we shiver nowadays when we look at pictures of the white bare streets, the mobile rural living-boxes, the bleakly 'cheerful' public buildings, the plain cold interiors with their metallic furniture, which everywhere replaced the huts, hovels, creeper-clad cottages and houses, old decaying stone and brick town halls, market houses, churches, mosques, factories and railway stations in which our tough if ill-proportioned and undersized forefathers assembled about their various archaic businesses.

But between the same years the following diseases, the names of which abound in the old histories, and the nature of which we can hardly imagine, vanish from the human records: catarrh, influenza, whooping cough, sleeping sickness, cholera, typhus, typhoid, bubonic plague, measles, and a score of other infectious scourges. (only yellow fever remained as a serious infection after 2050. That demanded the special effort of 2079 for its extirpation.) Syphilis, and indeed an those diseases known as venereal, were stamped out completely in two generations; they were afflictions so horrible and disgusting that their description is not now considered suitable for the general reader.

{p. 368; pbk p. 416} There was a similar world-wide attack on plant diseases and distortions, but of that the student will learn in his Botanical History. The psychologists who are rewriting human history have still many open questions to settle about the training and early influences that gave the world this peculiar group of rulers, and so the account of its hardening and deterioration remains incomplete. They admit that the Tyranny was in essence a liberation, but they insist that it left vitally important desires in the human make-up unsatisfied. Old traditions and mischievous obsessions were rooted in these desires, and the Tyranny had not been content with an eradication of the old traditions. It had denied the desires. It had pulled up the soil with the weeds. It had exalted incessant, even if pointless, activity above everything else in life.

Overwork, a strained strenuousness, has been a common characteristic of the rulers of mankind in the past. It shows through the Edicts of Asoka, for example, and particularly in Rock Edict VI (Asoka, D. R. Bhandarkar, 1932, Classical I historical Studies, 2I-II8). 'I am never satisfied,' runs the Edict, 'with the exertion or with dispatch of business. The welfare of the whole world is an esteemed duty with me. And the root of that, again, is this, namely, exertion and dispatch of business.' A great majority of the successful Caesars and Autocrats from Shi-Hwang-Ti to Hitler have the same strenuousness - Alexander the Great perhaps was the chief exception, but then his father had done the work before him. Mussolini, the realizer of Italian Fascismo, in his Talks to Ludwig (Historical Documents Series 100,319) betrays an equal disposition for single-handed accomplishment and an equal disinclination to relinquish responsibility.

All the chief figures of the Air Dictatorship betray, upon scrutiny, signs of the same drive to do too much and still to do more. They display all the traits of a collective weary conqueror, unable to desist and think and adapt himself. They went on ruling and fighting when their victory was won. They had tidied up the world for ever and still they went on tidying. After their first real successes they manifest an extreme reluctance to bring new blood into the responsible administrative task. They had arisen to power as a group by their usefulness, because they were unavoidably necessary to those original founders of the World-State

{p. 369; pbk p. 417} whom they first served and then by sheer insistence upon performance pushed out of authority and replaced. The three virtues in a ruler according to Han H'su were punctuality, precision, and persistence. But it was a dictum of Paidrick Lynd's that 'indolence is the mother of organization'. They had none of that blessed gift of indolence. When the legacy of work that the first world revolution had left them was exhausted, they brought things at last to the necessity for a final revolution through their sheer inability to organize a direct succession to themselves or to invent fresh undertakings.

That final revolution was the most subtle of all the substitutions of power that have occurred in human affairs, the most subtle and so far the last. The dictatorship could suppress overt resistance; it could impose obedience to its myriads of injunctions and rules. But it could not suppress the development of general psychology nor the penetration of its own legislative and administrative activities by enquiry and criticism.

The department of General Psychology had grown rapidly until it had become the most vigorous system of activities in the scientific faculty of the Modern State Fellowship. In its preparatory stages it had taken the place of the various 'Arts' and Law curricula of the old regime. It was the modernization of the 'humanities' {their ruination}. The founders of the World-State had given this particular department of the scientific faculty almost as great a directive and modifying power over both the Educational and Legal Controls as it exercises to-day. Even then it was formally recognized as the responsible guardian in the theory of Modern State organization. It more than realized the intentions of De Windt. It became the thought, as the World Council had become the will, of mankind acting as a whole {i.e. Political Correctness has been imposed, and a "Group Soul" has been created; De Windt=Marx}. And since the education and legal adjustment of the World-State was thus under the direction of a department of research continually advancing, they differed diametrically in character from the education and teaching of the old-world order.

The student cannot keep this difference, this flat contrast, too clearly in mind. He will never understand the historical process without it. The old Education existed to preserve traditions and institutions. Progressive forces arose as a dissent from it and operated outside its machinery. In the eighteenth,

{p. 370; pbk p. 418} nineteenth, and early twentieth century education was always a generation or so behind living contemporary ideas and the schoolmaster was a drag on mankind. But the New Education, based on a swiftly expanding science of relationship, was no longer the preservation of a tradition, but instead the explanation of a creative effort in the light of a constantly most penetrating criticism of contemporary things. The new schoolmaster showed the way, and the new education kept steadily ahead of contemporary social fact. The difference of the New Law and the Old Law was strictly parallel. If a man of the year 1900 had been told of a progressive revolution led by lawyers and schoolmasters inspired by scientific ideas, he would have taken it as a rather preposterous joke, but to-day we ask, 'How else can the continuity of a progressive revolution be sustained ?'

The failure of the German revolution of 1918 and the relapse of that unfortunate country into the puerility and brutish follies of Hitlerism was entirely due to the disregard of the elementary principle that no revolution could be a real and assured revolution until it has completely altered the educational system of the community. Every effective old-world revolution was a revolt against an established education and against the established law.

The role of the modern Education Control in preserving, correcting, and revivifying the progressive process in human affairs had already been manifested by the supersession of the leading personalities of the Basra Conference in the World Council by their successors who became the Air Dictatorship. Now these men in their turn found the instruments of government becoming recalcitrant in their hands and obeying the impulse of unfamiliar ideas. They had cleared and cleansed the site while social science had been preparing the idea of the new structures that were to stand upon it, and now they found themselves confronted by an impulse towards creation and enrichment entirely discordant with their habits of administration. Their subordinates began to send back the instructions given them as 'insufficient and not in accordance with the psychology of the workers' - or other people - 'concerned'. Schemes were condemned by those to whom they were entrusted as unnecessarily toilsome or needlessly ungracious. Workers took matters into their own hands and demanded more pleasant processes or more beautiful results. The committee was

{p. 371; pbk p. 419} disposed at first to insist upon unquestioning obedience. Thereupon the Education Control produced a masterful argument to show 'the social harmfulness of unquestioning obedience'.

There could be no greater contrast in the world than that between the older revolutionary crises in human affairs and this later conflict of wills. The old revolutions were at best frantic, bawling, sentimental affairs in which there was much barricading of roads and destruction of property; people were shot abundantly and carelessly and a new regime stumbled clumsily to responsibility on the ruin and reversal of its predecessor. Such revolutions were insurrections of discontent against established institutions. But this last revolution was the cool and effectual indictment of the world executive by a great worldwide educational system. It was not an insurrection; it was a collateral intervention. The new order arose beside its predecessor, took matters out of its hands and replaced it.

The need for an intolerant militant stage of the World-State had passed. The very reason for the disciplines of the Puritan Tyranny had been dissolved away in the completeness of its victory. But the last men to realize this were the old men who now sat trying to find tasks to keep humanity out of mischief in the bureau of the World Council.

§6. Aesthetic Frustration: The Note Books of Ariston Theotocopulos

It is a growing custom of historians, and we have already followed it freely, to vivify their general statements by quotations from contemporary descriptive writers. As histories have disentangled themselves from their primitive obsession about rulers and their policies, they have made a more and more extensive use of private memoirs, diaries, novels, plays, letters, sketches, pictures and the like. Once upon a time washing bills and memorandum books were below the 'dignity of history'. Now we esteem them far above acts of parliament or diplomatic memoranda. And certainly there is no more convenient source of information about current ideas and feeling under the Air Dictatorship than the cipher Note Books of that gifted painter and designer Ariston Theotocopulos (1997-2062). For thirty-seven

{p. 386; pbk p. 438} systems, Christianity, Jewry, Islam, Buddhism and so forth, which right up to the close of the twentieth century were still in active competition with the Modern State movement for the direction of the individual life and the control of human affairs. While these competing cultures remained in being they were bound to become refuges and rallying-shelters for all the opposition forces that set themselves to cripple and defeat the new order of the world.

We have told already how that issue was joined, and shown how necessary it was to bring all the moral and intellectual training of the race into direct and simple relations with the Modern State organization. After 2020 there is no record of any schools being open in the world except the Modern State schools. Christianity where it remained sacerdotal and intractable was suppressed, but over large parts of the world it was not so much abolished as watered down to modernity. Everywhere its endowments had vanished in the universal slump; it could find no supply of educated men to sustain its ministry; the majority of its churches stood neglected and empty, and when the great rebuilding of the world began most of them vanished with all the other old edifices that lacked beauty or interest. They were cleared away like dead leaves.

The story of Islam was closely parallel. It went more readily even than Christianity because its school organization was weaker. It was pinned very closely to the teaching of Arabic. The decadence of that language shattered its solidarity much as the disuse of Latin disintegrated Western Christianity. It left a few-score beautiful mosques as Christianity left a few-score beautiful chapels, churches and cathedrals. And patterns, legends, memories remained over in abundance, more gracious and lovely by far than the realities from which they were distilled.

{now Wells lauches into Judaism. He spends more effort demolishing it than any other religion, partly because he thinks it the most persistent, partly because his own One Worldism is a secular derivative from Judaism. Their very closeness makes Wells' Communism a rival of religious Judaism. The Sydney 2000 Olympic Games' opening and closing ceremonies were scripted like religious liturgies, but along New Age lines, featuring, for example, Greek priestesses. The Protocols of Zion claims that atheism, and New Age religions, are only temporary measures, measures to destroy the major non-Jewish religions, after which, with the building of the Third Temple, mankind will be turned to Judaism. Whether Wells is right or the Protocols is right, is one of the more fascinating questions facing investigators of the various factions of the One World conspiracy.}

There had been a widespread belief in the tenacity and solidarity of Judaism. The Jews had been able to keep themselves a people apart, eating peculiar food and following distinctive religious practices, a nation within the nation, in every state in the world. They had been a perpetual irritant to statesmen, a breach in the collective solidarity everywhere. They had played a peculiar in-and-out game of social relationship. One could never tell whether a Jew was being a citizen or whether he was being just a Jew. They married, they traded preferentially. They had their own standards

{p. 387; pbk p. 439} of behaviour. Wherever they abounded their peculiarities aroused bitter resentment.

It might have been supposed that a people so widely dispersed would nave developed a cosmopolitan mentality and formed a convenient linking organization for many world purposes {this, of course, is the Nazi claim. But Catholics are as dispersed as Jews; why does Wells envisage this linking as done by Jews, not Catholics?}, but their special culture of isolation was so intense that this they neither did nor seemed anxious to attempt {this may apply to the religious Jews, but how to explain the domination of Lenin's regime by the secular Jews?}. After the World War the orthodox Jews played but a poor part in the early attempts to formulate the Modern State, being far more preoccupied with a dream called Zionism, the dream of a fantastic independent state all of their own in Palestine, which according to their Babylonian legend was the original home of all this synthesis of Semitic-speaking peoples. Only a psycho-analyst could begin to tell for what they wanted this Zionist state. It emphasized their traditional wilful separation from the main body of mankind. It irritated the world against them, subtly and incurably.

On another score also the unpopularity of Israel intensified in the early twentieth century. The core of the slump process was manifestly monetary. Something was profoundly rotten with money and credit. The Jews had always had and cultivated the reputation of a peculiar understanding and cleverness in monetary processes. Yet in the immense difficulties of that time no authoritative direction came from the Jews. The leading minds of the time who grappled with the intricate problems of monetary reconstruction and simplification were almost all Gentiles. It was natural for the common man to ask, 'Where are the Jews ?' It was easy for him to relapse into suspicion and persecution. Were they speculating unobtrusively? It was an obvious thing for Gentile speculators to shift suspicion to this race which gloried in and suffered by its obstinate resolve to remain a 'peculiar people'.

And yet between 1940 and 2059, in little more than a century, this antiquated obdurate culture disappeared. It and its Zionist state, its kosher food, the Law and all the rest of its paraphernalia, were completely merged in the human community. The Jews were not suppressed; there was no extermination; there were worldwide pogroms during the political and social breakdown of the Famished Fifties, but under the Tyranny there w as never any specific persecution at all; yet they were educated out of their oddity and racial egotism in little more than three generations.

{p. 388; pbk p. 440} Their attention was distracted from Moses and the Promise to Abraham and the delusion that God made his creation for them alone, and they were taught the truth about their race. The world is as full as ever it was of men and women of Semitic origin, but they belong no more to 'Israel'.

This success - the people of the nineteenth century would have deemed it a miracle - is explicable because of two things. The first of them is that the Modern State revolution was from the first educational and only secondarily political; it ploughed deeper than any previous revolution. And next it came about under new and more favourable conditions. In the nineteenth century the family group had ceased to be the effective nucleus in either economic or cultural life. And all the odd exclusiveness of the Jew had been engendered in his closed and guarded prolific home. There is an immense collection of fiction written by Jews for Jews in the early twentieth century, in which the relaxation of this immemorial close home-training and the clash of the old and modernizing generations is described. The dissolution of Israel was beginning even then.

The task of making the mind of the next generation had been abandoned almost unconsciously, for Jew and Gentile alike, to external influences, and particularly to the newspaper and the common school. After 1940 this supersession of home training was renewed in an extensive form. The Modern State movement had from the outset gripped the teachers, re-created popular education after the dark decades upon its own lines, and arrested every attempt to revive competing schools. Even had he desired it the Jew could no longer be peculiar in the food either of his body or his mind.

The complete solidarity of mankind in 2059, the disappearance of the last shadows of dislike and distrust between varied cults, races, and language groups, witnesses to the profound truth of what Falaise, one of De Windt's editors, has called the Mental Conception of History. The Age of Frustration was essentially an age of struggle to achieve certain plainly possible things against the resistances of a muddled human mind. The Declaration of Megeve was not simply an assertion of victory and freedom for the race, it was the demonstration of its achieved lucidity.

As the curtain of separatist dreams, racial fantasies and hate nightmares thinned out and passed away, what was presented to

{p. 388; pbk p. 441} that awakening human brain? A little sunlit planet, for its external material, bearing what we now realize is not a tithe of its possible flora and fauna, a ball crammed with unused and unsuspected resources; and for the internal stuff of that brain almost limitless possibilities of mental achievement. All that had been done hitherto by man was like the scribbling of a little child before eye and hand have learnt sufficient co-ordination to draw. It was like the pawing and crawling of a kitten before it begins to see. And now man's eyes were open.

This little planet of which he was now at last in mentally untroubled possession was not simply still under-developed and waste; its surface was everywhere scarred and disfigured by the long wars he had waged so blindly for its mastery. Everywhere in 2059 the scenery of the earth still testified to the prolonged war, the state of siege to establish a unified mastery, that had now come to an end. If most of the divisions and barriers of the period of the sovereign states had disappeared, if there were no longer castles, fortifications, boundaries and strategic lines to be traced, there were still many indications that the world was under control and still not quite sure of its own good behaviour. The carefully planned system of aerodromes to prevent any untoward developments of the free private flying that had been tolerated after 2040 was such an indication, and so was the strategic import plainly underlying the needlessly wide main roads that left no possible region of insurrection inaccessible. From the air or on a map it was manifest that the world was still 'governed'. The road system was like a net cast over a dangerous beast.

And equally visible still was the quality of recent conquest in the social and economic fields. As Theotocopulos complained, the Second Council overdid its embankments. It was distrustful even of the waters of the earth. Its reservoirs and rivers had, he says, 'a bullied air'. If the jostling little fields and misshapen ill-proportioned farms, the untidy mines, refuse-heaps, factories, workers, slums and hovels and all the dire squalor of competitive industrialism had long since disappeared from the spectacle, there was still effort visible at every point in the layout of twenty-first century exploitation. The stripping and burning of forests that had devastated the world so extensively in the middle decades of the preceding hundred years had led to strenuous reafforestation.

(4) H.G. Wells, Science and the World Mind, London, The New Europe Publishing Co., 1942; bold emphasis added.

{p. 16} school - tie who still aspire to monopolise government.

We have in the England of to-day two kindred things that you would have failed to find even in a rudimentary form in the England of Queen Elizabeth - namely, advertisement and propaganda. Our school histories tell us nothing of the rapid development of mass production, mass selling and advertisement-carried newspapers in the past half century. They would offend great business organisations if they did. Yet it is a thing that every youth should understand It is only now, in the full tide of totalitarian war, that we realise how tremendously this - this percolation of responsiveness - affects the entire human outlook. On the one hand, we have certain systems of old and seasoned humbug, organised commercial humbug, the humbug of soulless religious bodies, the humbug of rank and privilege, all far gone in decay; and they are in conflict with a crude realism of violence, of intimidation, of cruelty and lying. A war between humbug and brutalisation. That conflict corresponds only very roughly with the formal boundaries of the belligerents. Not completely. Athwart the battle there is the struggle of an intelligent minority to extract a rational conception of life

{p. 17} from the confusion. That is the state of the world-mind at the present time {i.e. a Group Soul, for which Wells speaks}, and that is why the ultimate decision of human destiny lies in this propaganda war.

Now I will allude only very briefly to the plain common sense of the human situation. Manifestly, if there is to be any peace on the earth henceforth, there must be a federal control of the air and of the material of international transport. Next we have to rescue our planet from devastation by ruthless political and mercenary appropriation, and that we can do by adopting Mr. Gifford Pinchot's project for the Federal Conservation of World Resources. Thirdly, we have to impose as a fundamental law upon earth a plain Declaration of Human Rights that will ensure for every man a fair participation in these resources, and a sense of responsible ownership in our planet. These are the obvious threefold imperatives that stare Homo sapiens in the face.

These triple imperatives are so plain that I will not insult my readers by arguing about them. But what is not so plain is the reason why these imperatives are treated as platitudes or unattainable absurdities by the mass of people everywhere, and why we seem powerless to get them over to the world-mind. The

{p. 18} immediate answer is that there is no world-mind as yet, but only a vast dementia; that directly you pass out of our comparatively enlightened circles, you pass into all unprogressive incoherence, a clamour, that cannot realise the fate that closes in upon it. And that is why I am asking you now to scrutinise the nature and quality of a possible world-mind, and to ask yourselves whether we scientific workers and writers, who have a certain claim to be considered the intellectual prompters of mankind, have really done our full duty in this matter of human inter-communication.

Now I propose to invoke a ghost - here and now - to take part in this discussion. But it will not be the ghost of anyone past and gone. This ghost is a far more formidable spirit than the poor, uneasy, unburied, unavenged wraiths from former times. The ghost who is with us now, who stands beside me now, challenging our pretensions, appealing to our energy and courage, is the New World Order, whose very existence depends upon us.

'You talk,' says our Visitant, 'of a New World Order. Plainly that is impossible without a world-mind. And a world-mind demands a language in which men can exchange ideas from one end of the federation to another. What are you doing about that?'

We are doing so little about that, that even in an assembly of scientific workers, when we begin to discuss it, we shall probably revive a lot of nonsense that we ought to have jettisoned long years ago.

For example, people can still repeat in a sleepy, mechanical way that this minimum of rational world order will rob this wide world of some beautiful variety that exists at the present time. 'Such dreadful monotony!' they say.

I ask them to look at the world at the present time and realise how imaginary this pretended variety is. All over the world, from China to Peru, they will see the mass of young men wearing almost exactly the same uniforms, undergoing the same drill, and every city undergoing a parallel transformation with antiaircraft batteries, blimps, underground shelters and so forth. And wherever they go, east or west, they will find that chain-shops, controlled stores and standardised production have already been reducing mankind to the same dead level of everyday living. They live in the same sort of houses, wear the same sort of clothes, eat the same flabby foods and upset themselves with the same advertised medicines.

{p. 24} Japanese Esperantist to travel to Peru or Norway or South Africa and discourse with one or two kindred specialists. But it will not help him in the least to talk to the other people in the country. It is like belonging to a world chess association. It reminds one of those mysterious moths who find their mates across enormous distances. But what it has to do with general human inter-communication I have never been able to discover. It becomes plain that we, whose business it is to provide schemes and patterns and ascertained facts for the world as a whole, might long ago, if we had that disposition to pull things together which is characteristic of the more effective sciences, have cleared up this discursive confusion of all these artificial language projects, have worked out the social conditions that made them hopeful or hopeless, and settled what, if anything, we had to put before our now very impatient visitant.

Parallel with these exercises of the human mind, there is a widespread disposition to consider the possibility of using one of the existing world languages, in a simplified, extended and mitigated form. A very considerable amount of discursive and uncoordinated work has also been done upon this proposition. The Basic English experimentation, with which we associate the names of Ogden, Richards and others, has been extremely valuable in this field. On the whole, the weight of opinion is in favour of using English as the substantial basis of a world language - I do not say as a world language, but as the substantial basis of a world language. Its world-wide extension at the present time, its freedom from inflections and grammatical complications, its capacity for assimilating alien words are all in its favour. Against this we have to see that obstinate and unadventurous upper-class conservatism which still plays so large-a part in British educational traditions, which is intensely classical and exclusive in its spirit, and which is not simply unhelpful, but stoutly obstructive to any such extension.

It is plain for one thing that before the English language can be proffered to the World of the Future, its spelling has to be reformed. It is not simply plain now; it has been plain for some time; but here we are now with the Urgent Future present in our midst, and what have we got ready for it? Here again is an immediate demand for us to pull things together, and insist upon some definite decisions.

{end}

Michael Higger, in his book The Jewish Utopia, explains that whereas Plato's Republic "is chiefy concerned with what will hold the ideal city together", "The rabbis, on the other hand, are mainly interested in that ideology which would hold the whole world, or the Universal State, together." (p. 5).

Higger writes that "A Jewish Utopia begins where Wells leaves off" (p. 6). That means, that the Zionists would assist the implementation of Wells' plan, then turn it into their own: : jewish-utopia.html.

These books are out of print. To purchase a book Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells which is probably similar, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0803252137/qid=974577750/sr=1-1/t/104-1659122-1959116

H. G. Wells saw the end of World War I as an opportunity to create a new world. He supported both Lenin, and the attempt to create a World Government at the Treaty of Versailles. He also advocated the creation of a Jewish state. His ideas for a united world drew on Jewish thought, in discussions with David Lubin and Israel Zangwill.

Wells & Bertrand Russell continued to work for World Government: Open Society, Open Conspiracy.

H.G. Wells' plans for World Government: The Open Conspiracy.

H. G. Wells, founder of the Green Left: szilard.html.

Write to me at contact.html.