A year of prophesying

by H. G. Wells

8.3.24

If the world had suddenly become rational in November 1918, I suppose there would have been a conference of all the Powers of the world to atone for their common sins and restore their common welfare. But as the world is some thousands of years yet from rational collective conduct we have the treaty of the Victors, the Demi-League of Nations, and all the post-war disorder, waste, and misery that still unfold upon us. The League is unsoundly planned; it stands on rotten foundations; it is poisoned by the delusion that sovereign States are real enduring human things instead of being arrangements entirely provisional and largely hallucinatory, and it does not represent more than a portion of mankind. Still, there is talk of at last bringing in Russia and Germany, and it will be interesting to see how the people who have got hold of it will set about tinkering up an arrangement with the German people and the Russian Soviet States.

In Britain and America there are considerable organisations for the glorification of the League of Nations. In Britain, in the countryside especially, the League of Nations Union has become a social feature, rather like a more liberal Primrose League; it has pleasant meetings, parties, bazaars, tennis tournaments, fêtes with sack races, and so forth, and no parliamentary candidate can afford to neglect it; but it has no ideas worth speaking about of how the problems of a world organisation are to be approached. It just glorifies, simply and loyally. At the beginning of the League of Nations Union a few of us made a desperate attempt to establish a Research Department in the organisation. We felt there were a lot of things we didn’t know and that had to be known about the psychology of international co-operation, a lot of questions about scope and method that wanted hammering out, and that the time was short before action was thrust upon us. It was, however, impossible to get anything effective done. Few of our colleagues realised that there was anything in the business that could not be settled at once by anyone with a good heart and a clear, loud voice; that Research Department faded out in the platitudinous blaze of Lord Grey’s great meeting in Westminster; and then Mr. and Mrs. Wilson came to Europe, and upon the wave of their coming this present League of Nations, such as it is, a ramshackle raft of political misconceptions, achieved its magnificent launch. Future generations will study its incredible constitution in a desperate attempt to realise the full mental slovenliness of our times. Personally, I am for a world conference to take it down and build something better, but that is because I have a simple, straightforward mind. What everyone will consider more practicable and more politic will be to alter it bit by bit and worry it round, tortuously and expensively, towards the form of a League of Mankind against Nations, that it ought to have been from the beginning.

Now how are Germany and the Union of Soviet States coming into the League? Are they to come in as Boss States, like the British Empire, with a parcel of accessory faggot votes representing Dominions and Possessions, or are they to come in on a footing with Hayti, the Hedjaz, Abyssinia, and so forth? Will they come in as the equals of Abyssinia? I would like to know the ideas of the Prime Minister upon this question. I do not think the present constitution of the League of Nations allows them to come in on any tolerable terms at all. That being so, it follows that any attempt to bring in either or both of these great masses of people will involve a special conference to reconstruct the League; the League will have to liquidate and reconstruct itself. Both Germany and Russia, that land of new ideas, may have some bold proposals to make. In Britain we have had little but fulsome praise or angry exposure of the League since it was set up at Geneva. In America it has been talked about endlessly, but I do not know if it has been thought about at all. In France there are signs of an awakening to the needs of a reconstructed League. M. Bertrand, of the Quotidien, calls for a League that shall represent peoples and not Governments, and proclaims that the first article of the Republican Credo. The time is at hand when the League might be very beneficially altered, given a better balance, and made more serviceable to mankind.

One cardinal evil could be attacked and at least minimised: the absurd pretence that anything with the legal status of a sovereign State is a nation, a people, a thing with a distinctive soul and an individuality, entitled to full and equal consideration in the counsels of mankind. It is to this we owe the intolerable absurdity that while such highly individualised people as the Scotch and Welsh have no voice as such in the world’s affairs, a trumped-up State like the Hedjaz votes and speaks on an equality with Holland or Denmark, and that while one group of black barbarians is solemnly welcomed as Abyssinia (that age-long friend of Poland) the far better educated and altogether more civilised Zulu and Basuto peoples must be represented by a tenth of the coat-tails—it works out at about that, I believe—of Lord Cecil. If nations and races are all to be represented, then India is full of them, from the Veddahs upward; if sovereign independence is the standard, then India has no rightful place at Geneva. But if we recognise fully that the League we need is to serve the purposes not of nations but of mankind, then we shall cease to be embarrassed either logically or practically by political oddities or ethnological rarities.

Let us consider in its crudest form a possible alternative. Should the League of Nations be put upon a population basis and should its members have a card vote after the pattern of a British Trade Union Congress, in which each representative has votes in proportion to the number of workers he represents? This would give an undesirably heavy voting power to the quasi-representatives of great barbaric illiterate populations. In world affairs an illiterate population can have no will because it can have no knowledge. But supposing voting power were given in proportion to the number of literates in a population or to the number of University students. Then we should at least get some sort of approximation to the relative intelligence and power of the various States. And suppose that subject to this definition of voting power every State sent just as few or just as many representatives to the Assembly and appointed them or selected them and distributed its votes among them as it thought fit. And suppose the council were appointed, not by nations, but indifferently by the vote of the Assembly. Then at Geneva we should really be getting towards something like a representation of the civilisation of the world or of the civilisation of as much of the world as took part in it. We really should have a body with authority behind it, capable of handling something more than the petty arbitrations and the necessary small arrangements of international affairs, of which the present propagandists of the League of Nations make such boasts.

It is amazing how unable people seem to be to realise the full danger of an assembly entirely dominated by the idea of competitive nationalism, and the urgent necessity of getting away from that idea, however great the mental exertion required. For suppose presently Mr. MacDonald is successful in getting in Russia and Germany, and suppose the League begins to handle such larger questions as disarmament, European currency, tariffs, and so forth, then just as the interests involved become greater, so much the more nationalist will the spirit of the delegates and representatives become. The League gatherings under the present constitution will certainly become battlegrounds of great nationalist interests. The dear little smaller States will be drawn into groups and alliances about the greater States. They will not be able to help themselves. Their votes will be cowed and bullied or bribed votes. So long as the members go to Geneva to represent not mankind but national Governments they will go there in a diplomatic, bargaining, and competitive spirit. There will develop a pro-French or pro-British group, and an anti-French or anti-British group; the alliances and antagonisms of another great war may easily work themselves out upon the floor of the League gatherings. That all the nations of Europe and under European influence may have been got to meet in Geneva will in itself be no more a guarantee of peace than was the meeting of the United States Congress before the election of President Lincoln a guarantee of peace in America. It is a matter of supreme importance to the whole world that before it is too late this body which we now call the League of Nations should be denationalised and put upon a cosmopolitan basis.

XXVII
THE LABOUR PARTY ON TRIAL: THE FOLLY OF THE FIVE CRUISERS

15.3.24

I have recently been watching British politics from a rather interesting angle; I have been seeing Britain through Latin eyes from the Portuguese corner of Europe. Events come to me generally in this order. First the Lisbon Diario des Noticias comes in with my coffee; next day the French Quotidien arrives before lunch and the Italian Secolo at dinner, and there is usually another twenty-four hours before a bundle of London papers comes to hand. The Paris Daily Mail or the Action Française may come in neck and neck with the Quotidien, but I don’t go out of my way to see them. I get no American papers at all. In this perspective the death of Dr. Theophilo Braga, a sort of Frederic Harrison, who was the first President of the Portuguese Republic, and a congress of Latin Pressmen in Lisbon take on the importance of considerable international events, and all that looms largest in the London Times or the American Press undergoes a compression that amounts at times to complete effacement. That stupid outrage upon civilisation, the deportation of Miguel de Unamuno, the great rector of the University of Salamanca, to the Canary Islands because of his disrespect for the Spanish monarchy and dictatorship gets a large Press in all these Latin countries. It matters to them. It ought to matter to every civilised man. The petroleum scandals in the United States get a rather muddled attention; every country has the oil scandals it deserves; and there were important articles upon the death of President Wilson. In its day the coming of the League of Nations was a great event. Otherwise there has been very little notice either of the United States or the overseas Empire of Britain. America means Brazil, and “overseas” Angola.