The Salvation of the World à la Wells
Social Forces in England and America, by H. G. Wells. [Harper and Brothers, New York.]
Like many philosophers, Mr. Wells is concerned mainly with the need of a new human race. All profound reformers want that. The method of achieving this desirable result is, however, the rock of turning. It probably isn’t necessary to say that our present reformer is not one of those blind apostles of effortless immediacy. Such transmution was respectable when Botany Bay was a popular seaside resort for radical poets and philosophers. They of today realize something of the immensity of the developmental process. Their hopes are often so remote that they seem almost despair, but still time is trusted with a reliance on science for the urge toward human perfectibility. Of such the leader is H. G. Wells.
Clearly the conviction that civilization needs a new race is well founded. All ideals, all ideas, civilization, culture are and have always been the products of a pitiful minority. The tendency at present is toward making the desire of the majority supreme. The majority do not cleave toward ideals—not even toward establishing their own glory. Rousseau imagined that millions loved righteousness; Jefferson made such beliefs the basis of the country’s documents of incorporation. The idealists were manifestly mistaken. Men have never been drawn toward the ideals they have professed. Truth, justice, equality have never been valued when sex, property, or power were opposed. The virtues came in the early days from “Thus saith the Lord,” and they come today, if they come at all, from “Thus saith a Strong Man.”
Mr. Wells guesses that there are fifty thousand reading and thinking persons in England—keepers of the citadel. The fifty thousand are practically England. Perhaps his estimate is too low. John Brisben Walker says that in the United States the number of persons able to think independently about political and social matters has increased from a few score to about two hundred and fifty thousand within thirty years. The fact is, albeit, that the world has been fashioned always by this very small minority. Furthermore the present creation is not one in which there is reason for great pride.
The essay on the Great State is especially fine in this connection. Wells’s idea of the Normal Social Life and of the constant divergence of a minority is altogether clarifying for the watcher from any vantage, but it is in his discussion of the labor unrest that the reader in Colorado discovers the prophecies he most needs. For illustration this:
The worker in a former generation took himself for granted; it is a new phase when the toilers begin to ask, not one man here and there, but in masses, in battalions, in trades: “Why, then, are we toilers, and for what is it that we toil?”
The ruling minority in Colorado has been confronted with this question during the coal strike. So far no response has been given save the impromptu utterances of a hideous rage and fright at the thought of awakening workers.
Wells answers his own questions. He replies as Colorado will sometime if Colorado is to persist. It is in this tone:
The supply of good-tempered, cheap labor—upon which the fabric of our contemporary ease and comfort is erected—is giving out. The spread of information and the means of presentation in every class and the increase of luxury and self-indulgence in the prosperous classes are the chief cause of that. In the place of the old convenient labor comes a new sort of labor, reluctant, resentful, critical, and suspicious. The replacement has already gone so far that I am certain that attempts to baffle and coerce the workers back to their old conditions must inevitably lead to a series of increasingly destructive outbreaks, to stresses and disorder culminating in revolution. It is useless to dream of going on now for much longer upon the old lines; our civilization, if it is not to enter upon a phase of conflict and decay, must begin to adapt itself to the new conditions, of which the first and foremost is that the wage earning laboring class, consenting to a distinctive treatment and accepting life at a disadvantage, is going to disappear.
That is the truth which men hate most to hear. It is the doctrine which “Mother” Jones preaches and for which she has been imprisoned regardless of laws and constitutions.
But this reasonableness of Wells appeals as little to the left wing of the socialists as it does to conservatives. The I. W. W.’s have no patience with the detailed delays suggested and Wells is as irritated with the losses in civilization to which a violent revolution is likely to lead. He sets forth his feeling in a discussion of the American population, a curious phrase, necessary on account of his distaste for the word people. In speaking of the possibility of a national revolutionary movement as an arrest for the aristocratic tendency now so pronounced he says:
The area of the country is too great and the means of communication between the workers in different parts inadequate for a concerted rising or even for effective political action in mass. In the worst event—and it is only in the worst event that a great insurrectionary movement becomes probable—the newspapers, magazines, telephones, and telegraphs, all the apparatus of discussion and popular appeal, the railways, arsenals, guns, flying machines, and all the materials of warfare, will be in the hands of the property owners, and the average of betrayal among the leaders of a class, not racially homogeneous, embittered, suspicious, united only by their discomforts and not by any constructive intentions, will necessarily be high.
It is true almost. There are always enough of the Gracchi family present to supply the minimum number of weapons essential. To the truth of this the revolutionary movement in Mexico is a witness and Colorado itself could tell tales.
Social Forces, a too collegiate title, sums up satisfactorily Wells’s important opinions. The book isn’t really a whole: some of the essays are journalistic and some are old. It lacks nearly everywhere the fierceness of The Passionate Friends. In this book Wells is in his dinner coat, comfortable and well fed. He is respectable—horrible admission—but he is still prophetic.
In a sense, too, Social Forces is a warehouse. There one may find stored the rough materials which on occasion are hammered into the poignancies of Marriage or Tono-Bungay. As a vista into a masterhand’s workshop the book has its intense psychological interest, but most of all it is text for salvation of the world.
William L. Chenery.