In my articles, which are about to appear in book form, I took his Outline of History section by section, examined, turned over, analysed, and exposed failure after failure in historical judgment and information.
One challenge after another—I know not how many in all, but certainly dozens on dozens—was put down by me clearly and, I hope, methodically throughout a series of articles originally twenty-eight in number, and of such volume that they still will form when rearranged a book not less than 70,000 or 80,000 words.
Of all this great mass of destructive criticism which leaves his Outline limp and deflated, Mr. Wells knows nothing. He leaves it unanswered, and he leaves it unanswered because he cannot answer it. All he can do is to fill a pamphlet with loud personal abuse.
I do not think it difficult to discover his motive or the calculation upon which he worked. He said to himself: “I have a vast reading public which will buy pretty well anything I write, and very few of whom have seen or will see Belloc’s work. For to begin with he has no such huge popular sales as mine; and on the top of that his work is only written for his co-religionists, who are an insignificant body. Also it only appeared in a few of their Catholic papers, which nobody reads.
“Therefore, if I write a pamphlet against Belloc holding him up to ridicule in every possible fashion, slanging him with the violence so dear to the populace, making him out to be a grotesque fellow—and yet shirking nine-tenths of his criticism—I am in no danger of exposure. The pamphlet attacking Belloc will be very widely read, people will believe anything I say in it about his articles, because they will not have read these articles and because, in their simplicity, they think me a great scientist.”
This calculation is partially justified.
I suppose that for ten men who may read Mr. Wells’s pamphlet against me, there will not perhaps be more than one who will read this, my reply.
But I would like to point out to Mr. Wells that success of this kind is short-lived. No one can read what I have said in the second section of this pamphlet, no one can read that list of authorities of whom Mr. Wells has not even heard, and whom he loudly proclaimed not even to exist, without discovering that the author of the Outline of History was incompetent for his task. Very few people, I think, faced with chapter and verse of that sort, can refrain from passing on the good news.
If you take the history of opinion upon matters of positive fact, you will generally discover that the discovery of the truth affects at first but a small circle, and that a popular error may cover a whole society. But it is the truth that wins in the long run, because the truth is not soluble: it is hard and resistant. The number of people who continue to believe that there has been no modern destructive criticism of Darwinism by the greatest of modern biologists, anthropologists, and scientific men, bearing the highest names in our civilisation, will necessarily be progressively lessened as time goes on. The half educated of any period are always cocksure of things which the real science of that period has long ago abandoned; but their situation is not a stable nor a permanent one. Sooner or later they learn. So undoubtedly will it be with Darwinian Natural Selection.
Mr. Wells’s incompetence in that one department of his history has been exposed. I have exposed it. But note that he was here on his own chosen ground. He boasted special instruction in these affairs of physical science, and particularly in biology; he contrasted his education with my own, which had been so deplorably limited to the Humanities, and in his attack upon me he was fighting wholly upon a position chosen by himself.