The World Set Free, H. G. Wells [ereader for textbooks .txt] 📗

two days as a beggar might have waited at a rich man’s door, after being bullied by ushers and watched by policemen, was called as a witness, rather severely handled by counsel, and told not to “quibble” by the judge when he was trying to be absolutely explicit.

The judge scratched his nose with a quill pen, and sneered at Holsten’s astonishment round the corner of his monstrous wig. Holsten was a great man, was he? Well, in a law-court great men were put in their places.

“We want to know has the plaintiff added anything to this or hasn’t he?” said the judge, “we don’t want to have your views whether Sir Philip Dass’s improvements were merely superficial adaptations or whether they were implicit in your paper. No doubt⁠—after the manner of inventors⁠—you think most things that were ever likely to be discovered are implicit in your papers. No doubt also you think too that most subsequent additions and modifications are merely superficial. Inventors have a way of thinking that. The law isn’t concerned with that sort of thing. The law has nothing to do with the vanity of inventors. The law is concerned with the question whether these patent rights have the novelty the plaintiff claims for them. What that admission may or may not stop, and all these other things you are saying in your overflowing zeal to answer more than the questions addressed to you⁠—none of these things have anything whatever to do with the case in hand. It is a matter of constant astonishment to me in this court to see how you scientific men, with all your extraordinary claims to precision and veracity, wander and wander so soon as you get into the witness-box. I know no more unsatisfactory class of witness. The plain and simple question is, has Sir Philip Dass made any real addition to existing knowledge and methods in this matter or has he not? We don’t want to know whether they were large or small additions nor what the consequences of your admission may be. That you will leave to us.”

Holsten was silent.

“Surely?” said the judge, almost pityingly.

“No, he hasn’t,” said Holsten, perceiving that for once in his life he must disregard infinitesimals.

“Ah!” said the judge, “Now why couldn’t you say that when counsel put the question?⁠ ⁠…”

An entry in Holsten’s diary-autobiography, dated five days later, runs: “Still amazed. The law is the most dangerous thing in this country. It is hundreds of years old. It hasn’t an idea. The oldest of old bottles and this new wine, the most explosive wine. Something will overtake them.”

§ IV

There was a certain truth in Holsten’s assertion that the law was “hundreds of years old.” It was, in relation to current thought and widely accepted ideas, an archaic thing. While almost all the material and methods of life had been changing rapidly and were now changing still more rapidly, the law courts and the legislatures of the world were struggling desperately to meet modern demands with devices and procedures, conceptions of rights and property and authority and obligation that dated from the rude compromises of relatively barbaric times. The horsehair wigs and antic dresses of the British judges, their musty courts and overbearing manners, were indeed only the outward and visible intimations of profounder anachronisms. The legal and political organisation of the earth in the middle twentieth century was indeed everywhere like a complicated garment, outworn yet strong, that now fettered the governing body that once it had protected.

Yet that same spirit of freethinking and outspoken publication that in the field of natural science had been the beginning of the conquest of nature, was at work throughout all the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries preparing the spirit of the new world within the degenerating body of the old. The idea of a greater subordination of individual interests and established institutions to the collective future, is traceable more and more clearly in the literature of those times, and movement after movement fretted itself away in criticism of and opposition to, first this aspect and then that of the legal, social, and political order. Already in the early nineteenth century Shelley, with no scrap of alternative, is denouncing the established rulers of the world as Anarchs, and the entire system of ideas and suggestions that was known as Socialism, and more particularly its international side, feeble as it was in creative proposals or any method of transition, still witnesses to the growth of a conception of a modernised system of interrelationships that should supplant the existing tangle of proprietary legal ideas.

The word “Sociology” was invented by Herbert Spencer, a popular writer upon philosophical subjects who flourished about the middle of the nineteenth century; but the idea of a state, planned as an electric traction system is planned, without reference to preexisting apparatus, upon scientific lines, did not take a very strong hold upon the popular imagination of the world until the twentieth century. Then, the growing impatience of the American people with the monstrous and socially paralysing party systems that had sprung out of their absurd electoral arrangements, led to the appearance of what came to be called the “Modern State” movement, and a galaxy of brilliant writers, in America, Europe, and the East, stirred up the world to the thought of bolder rearrangements of social interaction, property, employment, education, and government, than had ever been contemplated before. No doubt these Modern State ideas were very largely the reflection upon social and political thought of the vast revolution in material things that had been in progress for two hundred years, but for a long time they seemed to be having no more influence upon existing institutions than the writings of Rousseau and Voltaire seemed to have had at the time of the death of the latter. They were fermenting in men’s minds, and it needed only just such social and political stresses as the coming of the atomic mechanisms brought about, to thrust them forward