And here where the constructive theory of Wells begins, let me quote a passage from The New Machiavelli that gives the gist of it:
The line of human improvements and the expansion of human life lies in the direction of education and finer initiatives. If humanity cannot develop an education far beyond anything that is now provided, if it cannot collectively invent devices and solve problems on a much richer, broader scale than it does at the present time, it cannot hope to achieve any very much finer order or any more general happiness than it now enjoys. We must believe, therefore, that it can develop such a training and education, or we must abandon secular constructive hope. And here my initial difficulty as against crude democracy comes in. If humanity at large is capable of that high education and those creative freedoms our hope demands, much more must its better and more vigorous types be so capable. And if those who have power and scope and freedom to respond to imaginative appeals cannot be won to the idea of collective self-development, then the whole of humanity cannot be won to that. From that one passes to what has become my general conception in politics, the conception of the constructive imagination working upon the vast complex of powerful people, enterprising people, influential people, amidst whom power is diffused to-day, to produce that self-conscious, highly selective, open-minded, devoted, aristocratic culture, which seems to me to be the necessary next phase in the development of human affairs. I see human progress, not as the spontaneous product of crowds of low minds swayed by elementary needs, but as a natural but elaborate result of intricate human interdependencies, of human energy and curiosity liberated and acting at leisure, of human passions and motives, modified and redirected by literature and art.
This permeation of the head men of the world, this creation of a natural collective-minded aristocracy appears now to be the permanent hope of Wells. It is the stuff of all his novels, it is the centre of his ethical system; and his Utopia is made possible by the existence in it of just such a flexible leading caste—the so-called Samurai. But before coming to the inner implications of this, to the individual and personal realities and difficulties of this, I must follow the development of the idea in Wells himself. At various times, in various works, he has presented it from a dozen different angles: as something that is certain to come, as something he greatly desires to come, as something that will not come at all except through prodigious effort, as something that will come through a general catastrophe, as something that will come through isolated individual endeavor, and the like. That is to say he has presented his idea through all the various literary mediums of exposition, fable, prophecy, psychological analysis, and ethical appeal.
It appears in a crude form in his first avowedly sociological work, Anticipations. He there attempts to show that the chaos of society is of itself beginning to generate a constructive class, into whose hands it must ultimately fall. The advance of mechanism, he predicts, will produce four clearly defined classes: an immense shareholding class with all the potentialities of great property and a complete lack of function with regard to that property; a non-producing class of middle-men dependent on these, and composed of agents, managers, lawyers, clerks, brokers, speculators, typists, and organizers; the expropriated class of propertyless and functionless poor, whose present livelihood is dependent on the fact that machinery is not yet so cheap as their labor. And amid this generally disorganized mass a fourth element will define itself. This in rudiment is the element of mechanics and engineers, whose work makes it necessary for them to understand the machines they are making and to be continually on the lookout for new methods. These men, he holds, will inevitably develop a common character based on a self-wrought scientific education and view of life. About them as a nucleus all the other skilled and constructive minds—doctors, teachers, investigators, writers, and the like—will tend to group themselves; and as the other classes in their very nature will tend to social disintegration, these will inevitably grow more and more conscious of a purpose, a reason, a function in common, and will disentangle themselves from the aimless and functionless masses about them. Democracy, as we know it, will meanwhile pass away. For democratic government unavoidably reduces itself to government by party machines and party machines depend for their existence on alarms, quarrelsome patriotisms, and international exasperations whose almost inevitable outcome is war.
Whether war follows or not, the power of society is bound to fall into the hands of the scientifically trained, constructive middle class, because this class is the only indispensable element in it. Without war this must occur just as soon as the spending and purchasing power of the shareholding class becomes dependent for its existence on the class which alone can save society from destruction. With war it will occur with even greater rapidity: for in the warfare of the future that nation is bound to win which has most effectively realized socialist ideals, in which the government can command, with least interference from private control, its roads, its food, its clothing, its material, its resources, which has most efficiently organized itself as a whole; and the class that modern warfare will bring to the front is the class that knows how to handle machinery and how to direct it. But just as this class will be the most efficient in war, so will it be the most careful to prevent war: it will in fact confirm the ultimate tendency toward a World State at peace with itself, through the agency, not of any of the governments that we know to-day but of an informal coöperative organization which is altogether outside the governmental systems of society, and which may in time assimilate the greater part of the population of the world.
Such is the argument of this book, and except for the inevitability of it—the belief that all this must come to pass—Wells has not since abandoned it in any essential way. The new aristocracy that figures there, the advance-guard of a better civilization, is precisely the ethical ideal which is embodied in the chief characters of his novels. Thus too the Samurai of A Modern Utopia are figured as having arisen at first informally as the constructive minds disentangling themselves from the social chaos. Gradually becoming aware through research, discussion and coöperation of a common purpose, they have at last assumed a militant form and supplanted the political organizations of the world.
The general intention of all this finds utterance in the most poetic of all the fables of Wells, The Food of the Gods. The Food itself, invented by two undistinguished-looking scientists, becomes current in the world through the very haphazardness of a society which will not control discoveries detrimental to it and which consequently has no means of coping with a discovery capable of superseding it. "Heracleophorbia" has thus the same initial advantage as Tono-Bungay or any other shabby patent medicine. It has an additional advantage; for while patent medicines have the sanction of private enterprise and are controlled by secret patents for the gain of their inventors, the Food of the Gods, like every discovery of honorable scientists, is given freely to the world. Thus the Food and the gigantic race of supermen who spring from it and bring with them a nobler order of things are themselves generated by the very chaos they promise to supplant. Just in proportion as the inventors are frank and open men, having no secret gainful purpose, the Food spreads far and wide. It is stolen, spilled, scattered; and wherever it falls every living thing grows gigantic. Immense wasps drone like motor-cars over the meadows, chickens grow as large as emus, and here and there a baby fed upon it and unable thereafter to accept any less robust diet grows gradually to Rabelaisian proportions. Caddles, a type of all the growing giants, comes to his forty-foot maturity in a remote village where, as the mellow vicar observes, "Things change, but Humanity—aere perennius." There he is taught by the little folk to submit himself to all his governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters and to order himself lowly and reverently to all his betters. They put him to work in the chalk-pits, where he learns to manage a whole quarry single-handed and makes of himself a rudimentary engineer, and then he breaks loose and tramps to London. He finds himself in the crowded New Kent Road, and they tell him he is obstructing the traffic: "But where is it going?" he says; "where does it come from? What does it mean?" Around him play the electric signs advertising Yanker's Yellow Pills and Tupper's Tonic Wine for Vigor, conveying to his troubled mind the significance of a world of chaos and accident, perverted instinct, and slavery to base suggestion.
Is it necessary to say that society becomes alarmed at last? Is it necessary to add that Wells opens fire upon it with his whole battery of satire? Plainly men and giants cannot live in the same world; the little men find their little ways, their sacred customs of order, home, and religion threatened by a strange new thing. The Children of the Food meanwhile have grown beyond the conventions and proportions of common life; they have experienced a kind of humanity to which all men can attain and from which there can be no retrogression to the lesser scheme. In the end, having found one another, they assemble in their embankment, the world against them. They sit amid their vast machinery, Titanic shapes in the darkness broken by searchlights and the flames of their forges. An ambassador from the old order brings them the terms upon which they may go free. They must separate themselves from the world and give up the Food. They refuse:
"Suppose we give up this thing that stirs within us," says the Giant Leaguer.... "What then? Will this little world of theirs be as it was before? They may fight against greatness in us who are the children of men, but can they conquer?... For greatness is abroad, and not only in us, not only in the Food, but in the purpose of all things! It is in the nature of all things, it is part of time and space. To grow and still to grow, from first to last, that is Being, that is the law of life."