It is as if some inspired member of a negro tribe in central Africa had suddenly awakened to the fact that his voodoo-worshipping friends were not acting rationally. From their status the burden of his chant might be horrible for its devilish revelations. But in our eyes he would be a seer and a prophet. Why should he have considered the feelings of the miserable savages? There is something more important than that!
George Soule.
The Salvation of the World à la Wells
Social Forces in England and America, by H. G. Wells. [Harper and Brothers, New York.]
Like many philosophers, Mr. Wells is concerned mainly with the need of a new human race. All profound reformers want that. The method of achieving this desirable result is, however, the rock of turning. It probably isn’t necessary to say that our present reformer is not one of those blind apostles of effortless immediacy. Such transmution was respectable when Botany Bay was a popular seaside resort for radical poets and philosophers. They of today realize something of the immensity of the developmental process. Their hopes are often so remote that they seem almost despair, but still time is trusted with a reliance on science for the urge toward human perfectibility. Of such the leader is H. G. Wells.
Clearly the conviction that civilization needs a new race is well founded. All ideals, all ideas, civilization, culture are and have always been the products of a pitiful minority. The tendency at present is toward making the desire of the majority supreme. The majority do not cleave toward ideals—not even toward establishing their own glory. Rousseau imagined that millions loved righteousness; Jefferson made such beliefs the basis of the country’s documents of incorporation. The idealists were manifestly mistaken. Men have never been drawn toward the ideals they have professed. Truth, justice, equality have never been valued when sex, property, or power were opposed. The virtues came in the early days from “Thus saith the Lord,” and they come today, if they come at all, from “Thus saith a Strong Man.”
Mr. Wells guesses that there are fifty thousand reading and thinking persons in England—keepers of the citadel. The fifty thousand are practically England. Perhaps his estimate is too low. John Brisben Walker says that in the United States the number of persons able to think independently about political and social matters has increased from a few score to about two hundred and fifty thousand within thirty years. The fact is, albeit, that the world has been fashioned always by this very small minority. Furthermore the present creation is not one in which there is reason for great pride.
The essay on the Great State is especially fine in this connection. Wells’s idea of the Normal Social Life and of the constant divergence of a minority is altogether clarifying for the watcher from any vantage, but it is in his discussion of the labor unrest that the reader in Colorado discovers the prophecies he most needs. For illustration this:
The worker in a former generation took himself for granted; it is a new phase when the toilers begin to ask, not one man here and there, but in masses, in battalions, in trades: “Why, then, are we toilers, and for what is it that we toil?”
The ruling minority in Colorado has been confronted with this question during the coal strike. So far no response has been given save the impromptu utterances of a hideous rage and fright at the thought of awakening workers.