This elementary fact has of late been recognized by most modern parliaments in the payment of their members. Government should be recognized as a profession and rewarded as such. The late Mr. W. T. Stead’s alternative to Democracy was an “Autocracy tempered by Assassination.” There is another alternative, viz., Bureaucracy tempered by Emigration. It is the system practised in such institutions as Proprietary clubs. Members are not worried to elect committees and honorary officers. If they are satisfied with the management they remain in the club. If they are not, they join some other club. The same process on a larger scale led to the foundation of the American colonies and the United States. It is largely at work at the present day, but is complicated by all sorts of restrictions and difficulties, the divergence of languages being one of the most serious obstacles. As intercommunication increases, the natural tendency to go where one can be happiest—ubi bene, ibi patria—will no doubt come increasingly into action, and will be a wholesome check upon the extravagances of cranky legislatures.
But I doubt whether there is any tendency at all of governments to become less effective. Almost every advance of science and invention makes the maintenance of public order and security easier. The tracing of criminals by wireless telegraphy and broadcasting is a striking illustration of the aid science can give to the police. Almost everywhere science and invention are on the side of the established order. Although every researcher and inventor is, in a sense, a revolutionary, in that his work is likely to produce immense changes in human activity, his general outlook tends towards aristocracy, since he is imbued with the sense of the immense differences in the personal equipment of individuals, which no equalitarian sentimentality will ever wipe out.
The Farther Outlook.—So far, we have looked but little ahead, a century at most. The prophet’s task becomes more arduous as the time is extended. Historical guidance fails us. Familiar landmarks get blurred and disappear. We are in danger of getting lost in a bog of unreal speculation. Yet the task has often been essayed, and it is necessary and desirable that it be essayed now and again. Let me make my own humble attempt, in the light of what knowledge I have acquired and what great thoughts I have encountered in many lands and languages, and in discussions with many thinkers.
We must extend our time scale from centuries to millennia, and from millennia to geological eras. Above all, we must take into account not only the rapid advance of science and invention, but the constant acceleration of that advance.
The consequence of that constant acceleration is that new developments and achievements succeed each other with bewildering rapidity. Hardly have we got accustomed to the idea of telegraphy without wires when radio-telephony becomes an accomplished fact, and within a few years there is a rich crop of listeners with their wireless receiving sets counting by the million. An entirely new form of publicity comes into being, and a speaker on Savoy Hill is able to speak to an audience of millions and sway them by his voice more effectively than he can do by cold print in the newspapers.
And this is only a beginning. Communication will become closer and more general. Already the earth is a network of lines and cables, linking continent to continent. Soon a speaker will have the earth for his sounding board and his hall of audience, and the privilege of addressing the human race will be prized above a coronation. Human sight and hearing will extend its range enormously, not only in space, but in time also. For the cinema film and improvements in the recording of sound will make it possible to make minute and comprehensive records of past sights and sounds for future reproduction, so that nothing of any value may be lost.
Other progress will go hand in hand with the rapid development of “signalling” communications, such as telegraphs and the like. The transport of goods and passengers will rapidly gain in speed, comfort, and safety, until the whole earth becomes accessible to all. It will not only become accessible, but also habitable. The tropics, the original cradle of the human race, will once more be reclaimed from our most formidable enemies of the insect-world and the ever-present bacterium. The higher organism will assert its much-contested supremacy over those minute organisms which owe their influence to mere numerical superiority. Our descendants will pay an afternoon’s visit to Timbuctoo or Mount Ararat, much as we should visit the British Museum or the Lake District. Everybody will be a globe-trotter, but the “globe” will not be confined to the ordinary tourist resorts. It will include every part of the world, even the Poles. And wherever they go they will find friendly voices, long familiar in the home through the service of radio-telephony. There will, of course, be an international auxiliary language, understood everywhere, a language artificial in its structure—every literary language is largely artificial—but utilizing those roots which have already become part and parcel of all cultured languages. This will not mean the displacement or loss of native languages which have proved their title to survival by their literature.
War will not cease for perhaps a century or more. But it will finally cease when the truth has sunk in that war is a loss to every belligerent and to the whole world. Human rivalry and competition will take other forms. There are many ways of killing men, women and children, besides suffocating them with chlorine. If a tribe is to be exterminated, nobody will be killed, but all its members will be painlessly sterilized by X-rays or some such modern means, so that the next generation will know them no more. It will be more humane than the Biblical expedient of “dashing their children against a stone.”
The mass of interconnections between human nations and individuals will be like a closely-woven fabric. Even now, the digging up of a city road reveals a tangled network of water pipes, electric mains, gas pipes, and drain pipes suggestive of the dissection of an animal body. It is but a faint foreshadowing of what is to come. The substratum of life will become more and more complete as conscious life becomes simpler.
Nobody is conscious of the appalling complexity of his anatomical organization when using his body as a well-poised instrument of thought and intercourse. “The simple life” is not the old-fashioned country life of England or the primitive life of savage humanity. Real simplicity is constituted by the life in which most things are done by pressing a button, and a man can travel across a continent in such comfort that on arrival at his destination all memories of his journey are dimmed or lost, and he can hardly recall having travelled at all.