Washington and the Riddle of Peace

by H. G. Wells

Washington, Nov. 25.

In the opening paper of this series I said that Western civilization was undergoing a very rapid process of disorganization, a process that was already nearly complete in Russia and that was spreading out to the whole world. It is a huge secular process demanding unprecedented collective action among the nations if it is to be arrested and I welcome the Washington Conference as the most hopeful beginning of such concerted action.

Now that the Washington Conference has defined its scope and limitations and got down to a definite scheme of work it will be well to return to this ampler question of the decline in the world’s affairs.

Now there are great numbers of people, more particularly in America, who still refuse to recognize this intermittent and variable process, which resumes and goes on again and rests steady for a time and then hurries, which is taking all that we know as civilization in Europe toward a final destruction. The mere statement that this is going on they call “pessimism,” and with a sort of genial hostility they oppose any attempt to consider the possibility of any action to turn back the evil process.

I suppose they would call the note of a fire alarm or the toot of a motor horn “pessimism”—until the thing hit them good and hard. It would have the same effect of a disagreeable warning and interruption to the even tenor of their ways. They argue that this alleged decadence is not going on, or, what is from a soundly practical point of view the same thing, that it is never going to reach them or anything that they really care for.

The starvation of Russia down to an empty shell, the break up of China, the retrogression of Southeastern Europe to barbarism, the sinking of Constantinople to the level of a drunken brothel, the steadily approaching collapse of Germany, is nothing to these “optimists.” America is all right, anyhow, and am I my brother’s keeper? It is just a phase of misfortune “over there” and the people must get out of it as they can.

Wait for the swing of the pendulum, the turn of the tide. Things will come right again—over the heaps of dead. There have been such slumps before in those countries away over there, notoriously less favored by God, as they are, than America.

It may be well therefore to go over this matter a little more fully and to give my grounds for supposing that there is a rot, a coming undone, going on in our system, that will not necessarily recover—that the movement isn’t the swing of a pendulum, nor this ebb an ebb that will turn again. And further, that this rotting process is bound to affect not merely Europe and Asia, but ultimately America.

Now let us recapitulate in the most general terms what has happened and is happening at the present time to impoverish and disorganize the world. First, there has been a very great destruction of life through the war, especially in Europe. Mostly this has been the killing of young men who would otherwise have been the flower of the working mass of these countries at the present time. This in itself is a great loss of energy, but it is a recoverable loss. A new generation is already growing up to replace these millions of dead and to efface the economic loss of this tragic and sorrowful destruction.

Nor is the extraordinary waste of property, of energy and raw material spent in mere destruction, an irreplaceable loss. Given toil, given courage, devastated areas can be restored, fresh energies found to replenish the countless millions and millions of foot pounds of work wasted upon explosives. Many beautiful things, buildings, works of art and the like have gone, never to be gotten again, but their place may conceivably be taken by new efforts of creative, artistic energy, given toil, given confidence and hope.