A Modern Utopia, H. G. Wells [i like reading books .txt] 📗

as the

desirable end upon which all civilising efforts converge, what do

you regard as the desirable end? Synthesis, one may remark in

passing, does not necessarily mean fusion, nor does it mean

uniformity.

 

The alternatives fall roughly under three headings. The first is to

assume there is a best race, to define as well as one can that best

race, and to regard all other races as material for extermination.

This has a fine, modern, biological air (“Survival of the Fittest”).

If you are one of those queer German professors who write insanity

about Welt-Politik, you assume the best race is the “Teutonic”;

Cecil Rhodes affected that triumph of creative imagination, the

“Anglo-Saxon race”; my friend, Moses Cohen, thinks there is much to

be said for the Jew. On its premises, this is a perfectly sound and

reasonable policy, and it opens out a brilliant prospect for the

scientific inventor for what one might call Welt-Apparat in the

future, for national harrowing and reaping machines, and

race-destroying fumigations. The great plain of China (“Yellow

Peril”) lends itself particularly to some striking wholesale

undertaking; it might, for example, be flooded for a few days, and

then disinfected with volcanic chlorine. Whether, when all the

inferior races have been stamped out, the superior race would not

proceed at once, or after a brief millennial period of social

harmony, to divide itself into sub-classes, and begin the business

over again at a higher level, is an interesting residual question

into which we need not now penetrate.

 

That complete development of a scientific Welt-Politik is not,

however, very widely advocated at present, no doubt from a want of

confidence in the public imagination. We have, however, a very

audible and influential school, the Modern Imperialist school, which

distinguishes its own race—there is a German, a British, and an

Anglo-Saxon section in the school, and a wider teaching which

embraces the whole “white race” in one remarkable tolerance—as the

superior race, as one, indeed, superior enough to own slaves,

collectively, if not individually; and the exponents of this

doctrine look with a resolute, truculent, but slightly indistinct

eye to a future in which all the rest of the world will be in

subjection to these elect. The ideals of this type are set forth

pretty clearly in Mr. Kidd’s Control of the Tropics. The whole world

is to be administered by the “white” Powers—Mr. Kidd did not

anticipate Japan—who will see to it that their subjects do not

“prevent the utilisation of the immense natural resources which they

have in charge.” Those other races are to be regarded as children,

recalcitrant children at times, and without any of the tender

emotions of paternity. It is a little doubtful whether the races

lacking “in the elementary qualities of social efficiency” are

expected to acquire them under the chastening hands of those races

which, through “strength and energy of character, humanity, probity,

and integrity, and a single-minded devotion to conceptions of duty,”

are developing “the resources of the richest regions of the earth”

over their heads, or whether this is the ultimate ideal.

 

Next comes the rather incoherent alternative that one associates in

England with official Liberalism.

 

Liberalism in England is not quite the same thing as Liberalism in

the rest of the world; it is woven of two strands. There is

Whiggism, the powerful tradition of seventeenth-century Protestant

and republican England, with its great debt to republican Rome, its

strong constructive and disciplinary bias, its broad and originally

very living and intelligent outlook; and interwoven with this there

is the sentimental and logical Liberalism that sprang from the

stresses of the eighteenth century, that finds its early scarce

differentiated expression in Harrington’s Oceana, and after fresh

draughts of the tradition of Brutus and Cato and some elegant

trifling with noble savages, budded in La Cite Morellyste, flowered

in the emotional democratic naturalism of Rousseau, and bore

abundant fruit in the French Revolution. These are two very distinct

strands. Directly they were freed in America from the grip of

conflict with British Toryism, they came apart as the Republican and

Democratic parties respectively. Their continued union in Great

Britain is a political accident. Because of this mixture, the whole

career of English-speaking Liberalism, though it has gone to one

unbroken strain of eloquence, has never produced a clear statement

of policy in relation to other peoples politically less fortunate.

It has developed no definite ideas at all about the future of

mankind. The Whig disposition, which once had some play in India,

was certainly to attempt to anglicise the “native,” to assimilate

his culture, and then to assimilate his political status with that

of his temporary ruler. But interwoven with this anglicising

tendency, which was also, by the bye, a Christianising tendency, was

a strong disposition, derived from the Rousseau strand, to leave

other peoples alone, to facilitate even the separation and autonomy

of detached portions of our own peoples, to disintegrate finally

into perfect, because lawless, individuals. The official exposition

of British “Liberalism” to-day still wriggles unstably because of

these conflicting constituents, but on the whole the Whig strand now

seems the weaker. The contemporary Liberal politician offers cogent

criticism upon the brutality and conceit of modern imperialisms, but

that seems to be the limit of his service. Taking what they do not

say and do not propose as an indication of Liberal intentions, it

would seem that the ideal of the British Liberals and of the

American Democrats is to favour the existence of just as many petty,

loosely allied, or quite independent nationalities as possible, just

as many languages as possible, to deprecate armies and all controls,

and to trust to the innate goodness of disorder and the powers of an

ardent sentimentality to keep the world clean and sweet. The

Liberals will not face the plain consequence that such a state of

affairs is hopelessly unstable, that it involves the maximum risk of

war with the minimum of permanent benefit and public order. They

will not reflect that the stars in their courses rule inexorably

against it. It is a vague, impossible ideal, with a rude sort of

unworldly moral beauty, like the gospel of the Doukhobors. Besides

that charm it has this most seductive quality to an official British

Liberal, that it does not exact intellectual activity nor indeed

activity of any sort whatever. It is, by virtue of that alone, a far

less mischievous doctrine than the crude and violent Imperialism of

the popular Press.

 

Neither of these two schools of policy, neither the international

laisser faire of the Liberals, nor “hustle to the top” Imperialism,

promise any reality of permanent progress for the world of men. They

are the resort, the moral reference, of those who will not think

frankly and exhaustively over the whole field of this question. Do

that, insist upon solutions of more than accidental applicability,

and you emerge with one or other of two contrasted solutions, as the

consciousness of kind or the consciousness of individuality prevails

in your mind. In the former case you will adopt aggressive

Imperialism, but you will carry it out to its “thorough” degree of

extermination. You will seek to develop the culture and power of

your kind of men and women to the utmost in order to shoulder all

other kinds from the earth. If on the other hand you appreciate the

unique, you will aim at such a synthesis as this Utopia displays, a

synthesis far more credible and possible than any other

Welt-Politik. In spite of all the pageant of modern war, synthesis

is in the trend of the world. To aid and develop it, could be made

the open and secure policy of any great modern empire now. Modern

war, modern international hostility is, I believe, possible only

through the stupid illiteracy of the mass of men and the conceit and

intellectual indolence of rulers and those who feed the public mind.

Were the will of the mass of men lit and conscious, I am firmly

convinced it would now burn steadily for synthesis and peace.

 

It would be so easy to bring about a world peace within a few

decades, was there but the will for it among men! The great empires

that exist need but a little speech and frankness one with another.

Within, the riddles of social order are already half solved in books

and thought, there are the common people and the subject peoples to

be educated and drilled, to be led to a common speech and a common

literature, to be assimilated and made citizens; without, there is

the possibility of treaties. Why, for example, should Britain and

France, or either and the United States, or Sweden and Norway, or

Holland, or Denmark, or Italy, fight any more for ever? And if there

is no reason, how foolish and dangerous it is still to sustain

linguistic differences and custom houses, and all sorts of foolish

and irritating distinctions between their various citizens! Why

should not all these peoples agree to teach some common language,

French, for example, in their common schools, or to teach each

other’s languages reciprocally? Why should they not aim at a common

literature, and bring their various common laws, their marriage

laws, and so on, into uniformity? Why should they not work for a

uniform minimum of labour conditions through all their communities?

Why, then, should they not—except in the interests of a few rascal

plutocrats—trade freely and exchange their citizenship freely

throughout their common boundaries? No doubt there are difficulties

to be found, but they are quite finite difficulties. What is there

to prevent a parallel movement of all the civilised Powers in the

world towards a common ideal and assimilation?

 

Stupidity—nothing but stupidity, a stupid brute jealousy, aimless

and unjustifiable.

 

The coarser conceptions of aggregation are at hand, the hostile,

jealous patriotisms, the blare of trumpets and the pride of fools;

they serve the daily need though they lead towards disaster. The

real and the immediate has us in its grip, the accidental personal

thing. The little effort of thought, the brief sustained effort of

will, is too much for the contemporary mind. Such treaties, such

sympathetic international movements, are but dream stuff yet on

earth, though Utopia has realised them long since and already passed

them by.