The Salvaging of Civilization

by H. G. Wells

There will be a ministry of social and labour conditions.

There will be a ministry of world health.

There will be a ministry, the most important ministry of all, watching and supplementing national educational work and taking up the care and stimulation of backward communities.

And instead of a War Office and Naval and Military departments, there will be a Peace Ministry studying the belligerent possibilities of every new invention, watching for armed disturbances everywhere, and having complete control of every armed force that remains in the world. All these world ministries will be working in co-operation with local authorities who will apply world-wide general principles to local conditions.

These items probably comprehend everything that the government of a World State would have to do. Much of its activity would be merely the co-ordination and adjustment of activities already very thoroughly discussed and prepared for it by local and national discussions. I think it will be a mistake for us to assume that the work of a world government will be vaster and more complex than that of such governments as those of the United States or the British Empire. In many respects it will have an enormously simplified task. There will be no foreign enemy, no foreign competition, no tariffs, so far as it is concerned, or tariff wars. It will be keeping order; it will not be carrying on a contest. There will be no necessity for secrecy; it will not be necessary to have a Cabinet plotting and planning behind closed doors; there will be no general policy except a steady attention to the common welfare. Even the primary origin of a World Council must necessarily be different from that of any national government. Every existing government owes its beginnings to force and is in its fundamental nature militant. It is an offensive-defensive organ. This fact saturates our legal and social tradition more than one realizes at first. There is, about civil law everywhere, a faint flavour of a relaxed state of siege. But a world government will arise out of different motives and realize a different ideal. It will be primarily an organ for keeping the peace.

And now perhaps we may look at this project of a World State mirrored in the circumstances of the life of one individual citizen. Let us consider very briefly the life of an ordinary young man living in a World State and consider how it would differ from a commonplace life to-day.

He will have been born in some one of the United States of the World—in New York or California, or Ontario or New Zealand, or Portugal or France or Bengal or Shan-si; but wherever his lot may fall, the first history he will learn will be the wonderful history of mankind, from its nearly animal beginnings, a few score thousand years ago, with no tools, but implements of chipped stone and hacked wood, up to the power and knowledge of our own time. His education will trace for him the beginnings of speech, of writing, of cultivation and settlement.

He will learn of the peoples and nations of the past, and how each one has brought its peculiar gifts and its distinctive contribution to the accumulating inheritance of our race.

He will know, perhaps, less of wars, battles, conquests, massacres, kings and the like unpleasant invasions of human dignity and welfare, and he will know more of explorers, discoverers and stout outspoken men than our contemporary citizen.

While he is still a little boy, he will have the great outlines of the human adventure brought home to his mind by all sorts of vivid methods of presentation, such as the poor poverty-struck schools of our own time cannot dream of employing.