A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an Optimist

by T. Baron Russell

Of course all sorts of other wastes will be avoided through the natural progress of discovery and the natural development of thought. Illness is a waste. Illness will be much less common in a hundred years’ time. A man who eats and consumes the world’s products without contributing to them will be too expensive a luxury for the new age to indulge itself with: and the present excuse for a “leisure” class—already scorned in America—that a rich and leisured class fosters and patronises the arts, will be absurd. All classes will foster and patronise the arts. For, just as we shall see that idleness is waste (and even more injurious to the idler than to his fellows), so we shall also see that overwork is a waste, because the legitimate purpose of human endeavour is not wealth, but happiness. When all work, all will be able to play.

Planetary economy will be a determining factor in the change of diet which the coming century must inevitably witness. Such a wasteful food as animal flesh cannot survive: and even apart from the moral necessity which will compel mankind, for its own preservation, to abandon the use of alcohol, the direct and indirect wastefulness of alcohol will make it impossible for beverages containing it to be tolerated. Very likely tobacco will follow it. We are already in sight of legislation to restrain the use of tobacco by the young. It will probably be unnecessary for the law to prohibit its use by adults. The frugal adult of the new age will abandon it unbidden, the change taking place as smoothly and silently as the process from the universal drunkenness of our great-grandfathers to the relative sobriety of ourselves, a process of which it is surprising that anyone can fail to perceive that the natural end must be the total disuse of alcoholic drinks. All things work their way to their natural conclusion, and there is no more fertile source of sociological blindness than the fallacy which treats certain phenomena of society as static, whereas all phenomena of society are really in the dynamic state, and always must be so.

In such matters as the exhaustion of the soil, and the reckless waste of wood, our present practice will certainly be reformed. There will be great improvements in agricultural chemistry, necessitated by the disappearance of animal manure. The obsolescence of the horse is already in sight; probably we ourselves shall see the day when the horse will cease to be employed except in the organised material of war: and as soon as we cease to eat animals we shall cease to herd cattle, sheep and poultry. But some means will have to be found for returning to the soil the materials we take out of it. Of course the idiotic wastefulness of many systems of sewage disposal, and the dangers, inconveniences and degrading occupations associated with existing alternatives, will be rectified. By improved agricultural methods, lands at present unutilised will be brought under cultivation: and the wasteful and selfish reservation of game preserves, deer forests and excessive pleasure-grounds will have to be abolished—not by legislative enactment, but probably by spontaneous social developments; by the natural development, in short, of economy in the world’s possessions. A hundred years hence we shall cease to behave as though the resources of the planet were illimitable and could be wasted at will. In the succession of the ages the spendthrift will have given birth to the miser, reversing the usual order of generations. No doubt the attention concentrated upon agriculture as a consequence of the greatly increased use of vegetable and cereal foods will have, as one of its consequences, the discovery of new means for improving all sorts of crops—means of which even the wonderful achievements of the scientific agriculture of the present day do not contain even the first germs. We shall also, perhaps, find means for avoiding the terrible losses and wastage entailed by climatic accidents. At all events, irrigation will be perfected, and probably we shall be able by acclimatisation and modification to find uses for crops that will flourish during that portion of the year when, in temperate climates, the land at present lies idle. This will both stimulate and further necessitate the improvements in agricultural chemistry already mentioned.

As the combustions of solids will no longer be a general method of obtaining heat, we shall greatly economise wood; and the wickedly mischievous word “inexhaustible” will not be applied to timber regions like the Rocky Mountain district of Canada. Arboriculture will become a more practical art than it as yet shows any signs of being; and along with careful afforestation will go skilled improvement in tree-growing. We shall replace all the trees we use by better trees, better cultivated. Even so, however, there will have to be devised great economies in the use of wood—economies like the recent invention of a method by which, instead of being wastefully sawn into planks, a tree-trunk can be cut up spirally, so that almost the whole of it may be used. In many places where wood is now employed in the arts, metals will doubtless be used instead, their greater neatness and durability making it advisable thus to substitute them, for reasons of convenience as well as economy; and probably new alloys, into which the lighter metals, as aluminium, will enter, may give us increased strength without increased weight, which will again be an economy, because it will save power. But even so, the world’s expenditure of wood will continue to be enormous.

War has been alluded to above. War is too wasteful, as well as too imbecilely uncivilised, to survive this century. It may be well to inquire as to the manner in which its abolition is most likely to be brought about. We may take it for granted that no sudden political or revolutionary movement will abolish the physical conflict of peoples. “All the arts which brutalise the practical polemist” will not be abandoned at a moment’s notice on the bidding of any potentate or combination of potentates. To conceive of them as thus abandoned is to overlook the whole nature of political change. It is absurd (as Herbert Spencer remarks) to assume “that out of a community morally imperfect and intellectually imperfect, there may in some way be had legislative regulation that is not proportionately imperfect.” But it would be equally absurd to believe that the moral and intellectual advance which our present tendencies show to be gradually taking place—an advance certain to be greatly accelerated during the middle half of the next hundred years—can fail to put a stop to war as a political device.

War will probably not be dispensed with in response to any great and sudden revolt of the world’s conscience against the bloodshed and other evils much worse than bloodshed which it entails—of which indeed it actually consists. The world knows quite well already that war is wicked, wasteful and silly: if it were possible for a suddenly-exasperated realisation of this to take an instantaneous effect, we could and should similarly abolish numerous other evils which we show every disposition to tolerate for some time yet. The fact that single families are able to hold wealth in enormous excess of the maximum amount which it can possibly be good for the community that individuals should hold, is such an evil. The “Yellow” journalism of America and England is another evil just about as difficult, or as easy, to abolish at a stroke as war, and not much less injurious. The manipulation of tariffs and currencies to suit the greedy aims of manufacturers, landowners and capitalists is another evil which is constantly experienced or threatened in one part of the world or another; and if as a race we were yet enlightened enough to utter that great “Peace; be still!” which must some day be breathed over the troubled waters of international diplomacy, we should be enlightened enough to rid ourselves of these other evils. But instead, the change must be gradually worked up to. It is not even at all certain that the whole world will at one given moment decide to abandon war. It is not necessarily the case that the first nation enlightened enough to lay down the sword would immediately fall under the oppression of its armed neighbours, as Bismarck prophesied, and would no doubt have practised to arrange. Nor need we assume, as so many have thought it necessary to believe, that universal peace can only follow the exhaustion of universal war, the dove winging her first flight over the shambles of Armageddon. I do not for an instant believe that the actual horrors of war are the likely or possible source of peace; on the contrary, war always tends to breed war, partly through international exasperation, partly through the unashamed and cynical self-seeking of professional warriors. Peace hath her outrages no less severe than war. It is against the preparation for war, rather than against war itself, that we shall revolt.

Of course the increased urbanity of future thought, the tenderer conscience of the future, will help the cause of peace. The world’s rulers will be more humane, less reckless than those set up by the inferior morality and intellect of the present age. It is not from the rulers, but from the ruled, however, that peace will come. It is the peoples that will refuse to be the supporters of idle, useless, profligate and dangerous millions, trained to no duty but slaughter, skilful only in the service of national crime. Every decade will see the burden of armament grow heavier. In every decade fresh efforts will be made to lift the weight of them off the rich, the governing classes, and throw it upon the poor, the governed classes. The workers will be taxed, and their taxes manipulated to their disadvantage. And they must pay in person as well as purse. There is no civilised and highly developed country in the world that can possibly escape universal military service within the next quarter of a century, unless it be the United States: and only that country if the people of the United States abandon absolutely their present dreams of empire and renounce the luxury of an effective Foreign Office. As for ourselves, it is most likely universal naval service that we shall have to endure. And the rulers of the nations will play the chess of diplomacy, using the peoples as their pawns, until the pawns, grown wiser than the bishops, and more agile than the knights, reach the eighth square of intellect and become sovereign in themselves. It is not by high diplomacy that war will be abandoned, but by the will of the workers. Only a very careless and unthoughtful observer of the last fifteen years’ history can have failed to note the steady growth of international solidarity in labour questions. The trade societies of different nations frequently contribute to each other’s strike-funds: they constantly communicate and confer, and they do so with increasing frequency and effectiveness every time there is any special advantage to be seen in joint action against the common enemy—greed. Conceive for an instant what is going to be the effect of this when working men and women, infinitely the most important and most worthy part of the race, are no longer degraded by stupid restrictions of education, no longer brought up on the insane system of striving only for a stuffed memory instead of for a developed character, and have learned to think about their political duties instead of only transacting them without thought, without any possible opportunity of learning how to think. The whole mass of workers throughout the world will come to an understanding. They have no possible conflicting interests which can compare in importance with the interests which, for their class, are identical all the world over. Already the improved morality of the peoples will have yielded improved governments, more enlightened parliaments, wiser statesmanship. The administrative organ will only need to be properly stimulated by the solid agreement of workers throughout civilisation. There is never the least sign of international or racial jealousy among working men in their international relations, and what, by reason of the clash of international interests and the danger of national aggression diplomatists could not accomplish, the irresistible volition of the unanimous peoples will force upon the cabinets of the world. It will come about by degrees. The preparations for it will be long visible, long misunderstood. And we shall usefully tinker at the question, often stave off little dangers of war by arbitrations, treaties of mutual understanding, peace conferences and the like; and though probably no great war necessary to reconcile the conflicting destinies of peoples was ever prevented by such means, we shall avoid many fights which might have arisen out of the vain notions of prestige, dignity, and national self-sufficiency. But once means have been found for the destruction of the machinery of war, the worst danger of war will have been got rid of: and then the practice we shall have had in settling disputes peacefully will be of the greatest service to us.

When the armies and the navies of the world are disbanded there will be a condition of affairs which it is highly necessary to consider. In all nations entitled to rank as world-powers there is an enormous military class. When the armies go home for the last time, and magazine rifles and machine guns become museum objects and nothing more; when it is no longer conceived to be the greatest service a man can render to his country to organise clubs wherein men may inexpensively learn how to shoot, so as to be able to kill each other with a creditable precision when the chance comes; then there will arise the problem of how to employ these disbanded drones: and to some this problem has appeared to present acute difficulties on account of the labour-problem involved.

But to apprehend anything beyond the most transient embarrassments from this cause is surely to misconceive the whole subject of economics. The men at present withdrawn from productive labour by employment, either transiently (as in countries where conscription is used), or more or less permanently (as in England), have to be fed, clothed and housed in any event; and they can only be thus supplied with the commodities of life by the labour of other men. What the term of their military service happens to be is immaterial to the subject. Whether there are standing armies and navies with long or short service, and a reserve; or armies and navies served for three years by successive drafts; the amount of labour withdrawn in any community is at any one period the same in that community. The return to civil life of the volunteer armies employed in the United States during the Civil War and the war of the deliverance of Cuba did not produce troublesome economic conditions; and only those persons who think that a society is enriched by the circulation of money spent in wasteful expenditure like the fireworks and banquets consumed in celebrating an event like the visit of a foreign potentate, or commemorating more or less irrelevantly the failure of “Gunpowder treason and plot,” can imagine that a nation would be impoverished by the vast accession to its productive power yielded by the abolition of armaments. Similarly, to think that the suppression of Woolwich arsenal and the closing of Krupp’s gun factory would be an industrial calamity instead of an enormous saving of national money, is to adopt the uninstructed view of politics which conceives of governments as self-supported and self-created institutions whose expenditure is a gift to the people; instead of as being organisations paid by the people out of earnings which would otherwise be enjoyed by themselves. This sort of conception, fatuous as it appears when once reduced to logical terms, is common enough. Whenever any object of popular desire appears inaccessible we are always being told that the Government ought to provide it—as if Government were a sort of deity capable of producing wealth from somewhere outside the world. But such notions have only to be for a moment examined in order that their fallacy may become manifest and palpable; and it is equally easy to see that the wealth-producing power of the men composing armies would be a direct gift to the community of the world if armies were abolished, and that the moneys formerly, but no longer, expended upon their accoutrements, weapons and sustenance would be so much waste obviated. Here will, in fact, be one of the many economies of a hundred years hence.

It will be convenient to digress, in passing, in order to notice one very curious contention sometimes rather fancifully introduced into discussions on the subject of universal peace.