New worlds for old: A plain account of modern socialism

by H. G. Wells

The first of these is the principle of freedom of speech; the second, freedom of writing; and the third, universality of information. In the civilized State every one must be free to know, knowledge must be patent and at hand, and any one must be free to discuss, write, suggest and persuade. These freedoms must be guarded as sacred things. It is not in the untutored nature of man to respect any of these freedoms; it is not in the bureaucratic habit of mind. Indeed, the desire to suppress opinions adverse to our own is almost instinctive in human nature. It is an instinct we have to conquer. Fair play in discussion is sustained by a cultivated respect, by a correction of natural instinct; men need to be trained to be jealous of obscurantism, of unfair argument, of authoritative interference with opinion when that opinion is against them. In England such a jealousy does already largely exist, it has been cultivated with us since the seventeenth century at least; America, it seemed to me during my short visit to the States, has somewhat retrograded from its former British standard in this respect, there is a crude majority tyranny in the matter of publication, an un-English disposition to boycott libraries, books, authors and publications upon petty issues, a growing disposition to discriminate in the mails against unpopular views. These interferences with open statement and discussion are decivilizing forces.

Given a clear public understanding of these necessities as primary, then one may point out that the next necessity for the mental existence of a Socialist State is an extension and cheapening of the impartial universal distributing activity of the public post so that it becomes not only the means of correspondence, but also of distributing books and newspapers, pamphlets and every form of printed matter. The post-office must become bookseller and newsagent. In France this is already the case with the press, and newspapers are handed in not by the newsboy but by the public mail. In England Messrs. Smith and Mudie, and so forth, may censor what they like among periodicals or books. The remedy is more toilsome and vexatious than the injury. Neither England nor America has any security against finding its public supply of magazines or literature suddenly choked by the manœuvres of some blackmailing Book or News Trust squalidly “fighting” author or publisher for an increase in its proportion of profits, or interested in financial exploitations liable to exposure. Neither country is secure against the complete control of its channels of thought by some successful monopolistic adventurer….

The Socialist State will not for a moment permit such risks as these; it must certainly be a ubiquitous newsvendor and bookseller; the ordinary newsvendor and bookseller must become an impartial State official, working for a sure and comfortable salary instead of for precarious profits. And this amplification of the book and news post and the book and news trades will need to be not simply a municipal but a State service of the widest range.

Distribution, however, is only the beginning of the problem. There is the more difficult issue of getting books and papers printed and published. And here we come to an intricate puzzle in reconciling the indisputable need for untrammelled individual expression on the one hand with public ownership on the other, and also with the difficult riddle how authors may be supported under Socialist conditions. It is not within the design of this book to do more than indicate a possible solution. These are problems the Socialist has still to work out. At present authors with business shrewdness and the ability to be interesting get an income from the sale of their books, and it seems possible that they might continue to be paid in that way under Socialism. It is difficult outside the field of specialist work (which under any social system has to be endowed in relation to colleges and universities) to find any other just way of discriminating between the author who ought to get a living from writing, and the author who has no reasonable claim to do so. But under Socialism, in addition to the private publisher or altogether replacing him, there will have to be some sort of public publisher.

Here again difficulties arise. It is difficult to see how, if there is only one general State publishing department, a sort of censorship can be altogether avoided, and even if, for example, one insists upon the right of every one who cares to pay for it to have matter printed, bound and issued by the public presses and binders, it still leaves a disagreeable possibility of uniformity haunting the mind. But the whole trend of administrative Socialism is towards a conception of great local governments, of land, elementary education, omnibus-transit, power distribution and the like, vesting in the hands of municipalities as great as mediæval principalities; and it seems possible to look to these great bodies and to the municipal patriotism and inter-municipal rivalries that will develop about them, for just that spirited and competitive publishing that is desirable, just as one looks now to their rivalries as a stimulus for art and architecture and public dignity and display.[25] Already, as I have pointed out in a previous chapter (Chapter IX., [§ 5]), the decorative arts had to be rescued from the degrading influence of private enterprise; no one wants to go back now to the early Victorian state of affairs, and so it is reasonable to hope that out of the municipal art and technical schools, which teach printing, binding and the like, public presses, public binderies and all the machinery of book production may be developed in a natural and convenient manner. So, too, the municipalities might publish, seek out, maintain and honour writers and sell the books they produced, against each other all over the world. It would be a matter of pride for authors still unrecognized to go forth to the world with the arms of some great city on their covers, and it would be a matter of pride for any city to have its arms upon work become classic and immortal. So at least one method of competition is possible in this matter….

This, however, is but one passing suggestion out of many possibilities. But in all these issues of the intellectual life, it is manifest that public ownership must be so contrived, and can be so contrived as to avoid centralization and a control without alternatives. Moreover, whatever public publishing is done, it must be left open to any one to set up as an independent publisher or printer, and to sell and advertise through the impartial public book and news distributing organization.

I lay some stress upon this matter of book issuing because I think it is a remarkable and regrettable thing about contemporary Socialist discussion that it does not seem to be in the least alive to the great public disadvantage of leaving this vitally important service to private gain getting. Municipal coal, municipal milk, municipal house owning, the Socialists seem prepared for, and even municipal theatres, but municipal publication they still do not take into consideration. They leave the capitalist free to contrive the control of their book supply and to check and determine all the provender of their minds….

The problem of the press is perhaps to be solved by some parallel combination of individual enterprise and public resources. All sorts of things may happen to the newspaper of to-day even in the near future, it cannot but be felt that in its present form it is an extremely transitory phenomenon, that it no longer embodies and rules public thought as it did in the middle and later Victorian period, and that a separation of public discussion from the news sheet is already in progress. Both in England and America the popular magazine seems taking over an increasing share of the public thinking. The newspaper appears to be in the opening throes of a period of fundamental change.

But I will not go into the future of the newspaper here. All these suggestions are merely thrown out in the most tentative way to indicate the nature of the field for study that lies open for any intelligent worker to cultivate, and that Socialists have so far been too busy to consider….

The same truth that controls must be divided and a competition at least for honour and repute kept alive under Socialism, needs also to be applied to schools and colleges, and all the vast machinery of research. It is imperative that there should be overlapping and competing organizations. An educated and prosperous community such as we postulate for the Socialist State will necessarily be more alert for interest and intellectual quality than our present “driven” multitude; its ampler leisure, its wider horizons, will keep it critical and exacting of what claims its attention. The rivalries of institutions and municipalities will be part of the drama of life. Under Socialism, with the extension of the educational process it contemplates, universities and colleges must become the most prominent of facts; nearly every one will have that feeling for some such place which now one finds in a Trinity man for Trinity; the sort of feeling that sent the last thoughts of Cecil Rhodes back to Oriel. Everywhere, balanced against the Town Hall or the Parliament House, will be the great university buildings and art museums, the lecture halls open to all comers, the great noiseless libraries, the book exhibitions and book and pamphlet stores, keenly criticized, keenly used, will teem with unhurrying, incessant, creative activities.