New worlds for old: A plain account of modern socialism

by H. G. Wells

§ 1.

Such a group of ideas and motives as Socialism, fundamentally true as it is to the needs of life, and arising as it does from the inevitable suggestion of very widely dispersed evils and insufficiencies, does not spring from any one source, nor develop along any single line. It appears as a smouldering fire appears, first here, then there, first in one form of expression and then another, now under this name and now under that.

The manifest new possibilities created by the progress of applied science, the inevitable change of scale and of the size and conception of a community that arises out of them, necessitate at least the material form of Socialism—that is to say, the replacement of individual action by public organization, in spite of a hundred vested interests. The age that regarded Herbert Spencer as its greatest philosopher, for example, was urged nevertheless, unwillingly and protestingly but effectually, through phase after phase of more and more co-ordinated voluntary effort, until at last it had to undertake a complete system of organized free public primary education. There the moving finger of change halts not a moment; already it is going on to secondary education, to schemes for a complete public educational organization from reformatory school up to professorial chair. The practical logic of the case is invincible.

So, too, the public organization of scientific research goes on steadily against all prejudices and social theories, and, in a very different field, the plain inconveniences of a private control of traffic in America and England alike, force the affected property owners whose businesses are hampered and damaged towards the realization that freedom of private property, in these services at least, is evil and must end. As the proofs of these pages pass through my hands comes the news of Mr. Lloyd George’s settlement of the dispute between railway directors and employés by the establishment of a method of compulsory arbitration. Then, again, the movement for public sanitation and hygiene spreads and broadens, and the natural alarm of even the most conservative at the falling birth-rate and the stationary infantile death-rate is evidently ripening for an advance towards public control and care even in the relation of child to parent, the most intimate of all personal affairs.

Inevitably all such movements must coalesce—their spirit is one, the spirit of construction—and inevitably their coalescence will take the form of a wide and generous restatement of Socialism. Nothing but a broader understanding of the broadening propositions of Socialism is needed for that recognition now.

Socialism, indeed, does not simply look, it appeals to the constructive professions at the present time, to the medical man, the engineer, the architect, the scientific agriculturist.

Each of these sorts of men, in just so far as he is concerned with the reality of his profession, in just so far as he is worthy of his profession, must resent the considerations of private profit, of base economies, that constantly limit and spoil his work and services in the interests of a dividend or of some financial manœuvre. So far they have been antagonized towards Socialism by the errors of its adherents, by the impression quite wantonly created, that Socialism meant either mob rule or the rule of pedantic, unsympathetic officials. They have heard too much of democracy, too much of bureaucracy, and not enough of construction. They have felt that on the whole the financial exploiter, detestable master as he often is, was better than the rule of either clamour on the one hand or red tape on the other. But, as I have been seeking to suggest, mob rule and official rule do not exhaust the possible alternatives. Neither ignorant democracy nor narrow bureaucracy can be the destined rulers of a Socialist State. The only conceivable rule in a Socialist civilization is through the operation of a collective mind that must be by its nature constructive and enterprising, because only through the creation of such a mind can Socialism be brought about. A Socialist State cannot exist without that mind existing also, and a collective mind can scarcely appear without some form of Socialism giving it a material body. Now it is only under an intelligent collective mind that any of the dreams of these constructive professions can attain an effective realization. Where will the private profit in a universal sanitation, for example, be found, in the abolition of diseases, in the planned control of the public health, in the abolition of children’s deaths? What thought of private gain will ever scrap our obsolescent railroads and our stagnating industrial monopolies for new clean methods? So long as they pay a dividend they will keep on upon their present lines. The modern architect knows, the engineer knows we might build ourselves perfectly clean, smokeless magnificent cities to-day, as full of pure water as ancient Rome, as full of pure air as the Engadine, if private ownership did not block the way. Who can doubt it who understands what a doctor, or an electrical engineer, or a real architect understands? Surely all the best men in these professions are eager to get to work on the immense possibilities of life, possibilities of things cleared up, of things made anew, that their training has enabled them to visualize! What stands in their way, stands in our way; social disorganization, individualist self-seeking, narrowness of outlook, self-conceit, ignorance.

With that conception they must surely turn in the end, as we Socialists turn, to the most creative profession of all, to that great calling which with each generation renews the world’s “circle of ideas,” the Teachers!

The whole trend and purpose of this book from the outset has been to insist upon the mental quality of Socialism, to maintain that it is a business of conventions about property and plans of reorganization, that is to say, of changes and expansions of the ideas of men, changes and expansions of their spirit of action and their habitual circles of ideas. Unless you can change men’s minds you cannot effect Socialism, and when you have made clear and universal certain broad understandings, Socialism becomes a mere matter of science and devices and applied intelligence. That is the constructive Socialist’s position. Logically, therefore, he declares the teacher master of the situation. Ultimately the Socialist movement is teaching, and the most important people in the world from the Socialist’s point of view are those who teach—I mean of course not simply those who teach in schools, but those who teach in pulpits, in books, in the press, in universities and lecture-theatres, in parliaments and councils, in discussions and associations and experiments of every sort, and, last in my list but most important of all, those mothers and motherly women who teach little children in their earliest years. Every one, too, who enunciates a new and valid idea, or works out a new contrivance, is a teacher in this sense.

And these Teachers collectively, perpetually renew the collective mind. In the measure that in each successive generation they apprehend Socialism and transmit its spirit, is Socialism nearer its goal.