A year of prophesying

by H. G. Wells

It was unfortunate for the good relations of the Intelligenzia with the Labour Party that two police spies were found under the platform of a private meeting of the Communist Party the other day. The Intelligenzia will always have a very tolerant corner in its heart for the Communist Party in Britain and America. The party gets hold of a lot of the best of the young people and does them a lot of good. It is extremist, and you cannot have a healthy mental life in a community in which extremist opinions and intentions are not fairly stated. Prohibition of opinions is an insult to adult citizens. In Great Britain at least the Communist Party is a perfectly legal organisation. It has as much right to hold a private meeting as the Liberal or Tory Party. It is the business of the police and Government to respect and protect its privacy. Mr. Henderson ought to know a lot about the Communists. They supply a healthy criticism and irritant on the Left wing of his party. He ought to have known this police annoyance was going on, and he ought to have stopped it as soon as he came into office. Either he knew this meeting was going to be spied upon or he did not. If he did he does not understand freedom, and if he did not his officials are lacking in respect for him.

In a large number of quite symptomatic affairs the Labour Government either through ignorance or through other preoccupations has failed to take advantage of its opportunities, and each one of these failures estranges some new group of intelligent people. For example, everyone with a vision a little wider than the politician’s realises the importance of China to the future of mankind. In the long run, even the question of the mishandling of the five cruisers may prove less serious than negligence on the part of our Government toward the China Boxer indemnity money. The Chinese ask for a directive voice in that matter. Dr. Tsai is the Chancellor of Pekin University; he represents the best educational influences in China. He comes to London, but he finds most of the Ministers he wants to see too busy trying on their breeches and stockings to see him. He is given a nice talk with a permanent official, and told in the best official style that all his suggestions will be most carefully considered by the “Committee.” The Committee which is to be set up may be just the sort of Committee that destroys the confidence of progressive Chinamen in British good faith. As it was first planned it represented material interests strongly; it had only one member who could be called an educationist; and there was no representative of New China upon it at all. There has been much coming and going since then, and the situation may be to a large extent saved, but if so it will be in spite of rather than thanks to any creative comprehension on the part of the Foreign Secretary or any member of the Labour Government.

One could multiply instances of this sort of wasted opportunity, in which the Labour Government has displayed itself as obtuse and blind as any Government could have been. Mr. Smillie, the other day, rejecting “all understandings with Liberals,” declares that the Labour Party is “out to deal with root causes.” But this Labour Government has never dared to be caught looking at a “root cause” yet. Take the question of birth-control. England is over-populated; it has a million unemployed; it cannot house its population decently, and it cannot educate its numerous progeny above a miserably low standard. But the Roman Catholic vote is organised against birth-control, and the Labour politicians dare not offend the Roman Catholic vote. Yet the housing problem, the unemployment problem, the organisation of education, the relations of the British Empire with other countries, the question of the necessity of war, all become absolutely different according to whether the population of the country is considered as being stationary or expansive. But this present Labour Government does not know whether it is for birth-control or against it. It does not know anything of that sort about itself. It does not know whether it is shaping the future for a restrained or overflowing population. The Intelligenzia, in the enthusiasm of its plunge into politics, thought that the Labour Party—as distinguished from all other parties—did. And generally they are coming to realise how greatly they overrated the creative power and the creative will of Labour.

As the exhilaration consequent upon being allowed carte blanche to write promises for the Labour Party evaporates, the Intelligenzia will revert to its normal and proper aloofness from politicians. The Intelligenzia are the rain and the wind and sunshine of the political field, but not the field-workers of politics. To have the Intelligenzia in a party is like an elemental being married to a mortal. Elementals have magic gifts, but they are not always comfortable to live with. The Labour politicians will feel more and more masters in their own house—at least until the next election—as the critical, exacting Intelligenzia evaporate from the party.

XXXVII
CONSTRUCTIVE IDEAS AND THEIR RELATION TO CURRENT POLITICS

17.5.24

Mr. Smillie, a little while ago, was talking of the peculiar mental virtues of the Labour Party. It was “out to deal with root causes” and so forth. There was to be no parleying with Liberals. This was immediately before Mr. Snowden produced the greatest Liberal Budget in history; something off something for everybody and no Socialist confiscation. I was moved at the time of Mr. Smillie’s speech to point out that the Labour Government had not been caught looking at the root cause of anything whatever since it came into office. It had put on its Court livery like little gentlemen, and done as it was told. That “root cause” delusion was created in the mind of Mr. Smillie by reading the election addresses of his associates.

For a time, until it got into office, the Labour Party was a magnificent hoarding for the constructive Radical. At bottom it is a party of feelings rather than ideas. It became boldly, out-spokenly Socialist. It was declared to stand for a broad collective handling of our common interests, for scientific method. It wasn’t afraid of bankers or landowners or Protection-seeking trade monopolists. It stood for the free, high constructive future against the injustice and mean limitations of the present. It was the New Age struggling to be. But really it wasn’t for all those things because it was so at heart, but because it had to say something different from all other parties, and the creative Intelligenzia prompted it. So long as it was out of office active constructive minds could do its public thinking for it. But now that the Labour Party has taken office it has come of age and become an adult political party; it has lost the wild freshness and promise of youth, and begun to act for itself. Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, with his piety and his political dexterity, is extremely like a Scotch, instead of a Welsh, Lloyd George, and the array of his colleagues is revealed as the very twin brothers of the Tory and Liberal knights, local councillors, provincial mayors, and so forth we have always known. The Labour Party brought down from the cloudland of promise to performance is seen to be little more than another of the numerous Liberal parties that have appeared in the vast inchoate world of British Liberalism. It has appeared and struggled to office because Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith were tiresome, obstinate egotists without an up-to-date idea between them, and because the complexity of self-conscious interests in Great Britain is too great any longer for the magnificent simplicity and “loyalties” of the old two-party system.

All this is perfectly natural and necessary. All political parties must represent the present, existing interests, existing social fears and jealousies, current delusions. No political party can represent the future, as Mr. Smillie would have us believe the Labour Party does. But it was the delusion of Karl Marx that the expropriated masses of mankind, living at a disadvantage, would necessarily realise the desirability of a more highly organised Socialist State and evolve a collective will to bring it about. This idea, through the devoted repetition of the Marxists, has infected the greater part of Socialist thought. It had manifestly infected Mr. Smillie. In so far as modern social inequalities and injustices, illuminated by modern educational influences, have brought out a steadily increasing hostility between the masses and the classes with an advantage, Marx was right, but in so far as that has involved the development of any capacity whatever to achieve a new and better order, he was wrong. The uncomfortable masses seek uncritically for some expression of their antagonism to the lucky, the dexterous, the unscrupulous, and the far-sighted who enjoy the advantages of the existing social and economic tangle, and their suffrages and passion will go to support the particular lucky, dexterous, unscrupulous, or far-sighted politicians who seem most in harmony with the hates and hopes of the stinted, hampered, and oppressed multitude. But the antagonisms and discords of the present system are as much a part of the present as its order and its success. The Labour Party as a Labour Party is no more inherently reconstructive than the Banking Interest or the Shipping Interest. Like them, it merely wants an excessive and inconsiderate share of present power and satisfactions.

I suppose if we could set aside the entangling influences of social position and traditions we should find that men and women fell into a series between two extremes of temperamental type; the Conservatives at one end, who like things to go on very much as they are going, only to be just a little richer and sounder and sunnier, and at the other end the disturbers who like fresh things to happen and who make fresh things happen. And of the disturbers there seem to be two main types: the personal adventurers who want a series of vivid events centring upon themselves, and do not care very much how much disorder is caused by their careers, and the innovators with an instinct or a mental habit of creative service—the scientific worker, the educationist, the innovating artist, the men with a passion for industrial and financial and social organisation, who will ultimately remake the world. These types mingle in most of us, we are all something of each, but in such prominent British figures as Lord Birkenhead, Mr. Winston Churchill, or Lord Beaverbrook we seem to have almost pure adventurers, and in Mr. Sidney Webb or Mr. C. P. Trevelyan almost pure creative service innovators. But the great financial adventurers are not in politics. They are behind politics. The un-co-ordinated, inexplicit world of to-day is all for the bold acquisitive egoist; he causes wars and prevents peace, the industrialist is in his financial net, he does things to the exchange and the money in our pockets becomes worthless counters, he controls the news in our newspapers, and buys the house over our heads and the ground under our feet. He turns up in all parties as they suit him, and his eternal antagonist, the creative service innovator, must use all parties as he can against him.