Consider him in relation to a single concrete issue, the issue of militarism:
Expenditure upon preparation for war falls, roughly, into two classes: there is expenditure upon things that have a diminishing value, things that grow old-fashioned and wear out, such as fortifications, ships, guns, and ammunition, and expenditure upon things that have a permanent and even growing value, such as organized technical research, military and naval experiment, and the education and increase of a highly trained class of war experts.
And in The Common Sense of Warfare he urges a lavish expenditure on "education and training, upon laboratories and experimental stations, upon chemical and physical research and all that makes knowledge and leading." Separate the principle involved here from the issue it is involved in, get the intention clear of the fact, and you find that he is saying just the better sort of things that Matthew Arnold said. Militarism granted, are you going to do military things or are you going to make military things a stepping-stone toward the clarification of thought, the training of men, the development of race-imagination? Militarism has been to a large extent the impetus that has made the Germans and the Japanese the trained, synthetic peoples they are. And these very qualities are themselves in the end hostile to militarism. Militarism considered in this sense is precisely what the General Strike is in the idea of M. Georges Sorel: a myth, a thing that never comes to pass, but which trains the general will by presenting it with a concrete image toward which the will readily directs itself. Kipling, in the eyes of the New Machiavelli, at least made the nation aware of what comes.
All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess, All along o' doing things rather more or less.
There is in this no defence of militarism. Granting the facts of society, there is a way that accepts and secures them as they are and another way of turning them into the service of the future, and a people that has trained itself with reference to a particular issue has virtually trained itself for all issues.
But no one, I think, has measured the difficulties of real progress more keenly than Wells has come to measure them. The further he has penetrated into human nature the more alive he has become to these difficulties. The New Machiavelli is a modern Rasselas that has no happy valley in the end, and Remington passes from party to party, penetrating inward from ideas to the better stuff of mankind, hoping to embody his "white passion of statecraft," and in the end demonstrating to himself the futility of all groups and parties alike.
And as with parties, so with men. Consider that scene in The Passionate Friends where Stratton tries to explain in writing to his father what he has been experiencing and why he must go away. He writes page after page without expressing himself and at last, certain that he and his father cannot come into touch, sends off a perfunctory note and receives a perfunctory reply. "There are times," he adds, "when the inexpressiveness of life comes near to overwhelming me, when it seems to me we are all asleep or entranced, and but a little way above the still cows who stand munching slowly in a field.... Why couldn't we and why didn't we talk together!"
That is the burden of his latest novel. By this touchstone he has come to measure the possibility of that openness of mind, that mutual understanding, that ventilation of life and thought through which alone the Great State can exist.