What is Coming? by H. G. Wells

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What is Coming?

A Forecast of Things after the War

By H.G. WELLS

1916

CONTENTS

1. FORECASTING THE FUTURE
2. THE END OF THE WAR
3. NATIONS IN LIQUIDATION
4. BRAINTREE, BOCKING, AND THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD
5. How FAR WILL EUROPE GO TOWARD SOCIALISM?
6. LAWYER AND PRESS
7. THE NEW EDUCATION
8. WHAT THE WAR IS DOING FOR WOMEN
9. THE NEW MAP OF EUROPE
10. THE UNITED STATES, FRANCE, BRITAIN, AND RUSSIA
11. THE "WHITE MAN'S BURTHEN"
12. THE OUTLOOK FOR THE GERMANS

I. FORECASTING THE FUTURE

Prophecy may vary between being an intellectual amusement and a serious
occupation; serious not only in its intentions, but in its consequences.
For it is the lot of prophets who frighten or disappoint to be stoned.
But for some of us moderns, who have been touched with the spirit of
science, prophesying is almost a habit of mind.

Science is very largely analysis aimed at forecasting. The test of any
scientific law is our verification of its anticipations. The scientific
training develops the idea that whatever is going to happen is really
here now--if only one could see it. And when one is taken by surprise
the tendency is not to say with the untrained man, "Now, who'd ha'
thought it?" but "Now, what was it we overlooked?"

Everything that has ever existed or that will ever exist is here--for
anyone who has eyes to see. But some of it demands eyes of superhuman
penetration. Some of it is patent; we are almost as certain of next
Christmas and the tides of the year 1960 and the death before 3000 A.D.
of everybody now alive as if these things had already happened. Below
that level of certainty, but still at a very high level of certainty,
there are such things as that men will probably be making aeroplanes of
an improved pattern in 1950, or that there will be a through railway
connection between Constantinople and Bombay and between Baku and Bombay
in the next half-century. From such grades of certainty as this, one may
come down the scale until the most obscure mystery of all is reached:
the mystery of the individual. Will England presently produce a military
genius? or what will Mr. Belloc say the day after to-morrow? The most
accessible field for the prophet is the heavens; the least is the secret
of the jumping cat within the human skull. How will so-and-so behave,
and how will the nation take it? For such questions as that we need the
subtlest guesses of all.

Yet, even to such questions as these the sharp, observant man may risk
an answer with something rather better than an even chance of being
right.

The present writer is a prophet by use and wont. He is more interested
in to-morrow than he is in to-day, and the past is just material for
future guessing. "Think of the men who have walked here!" said a tourist
in the Roman Coliseum. It was a Futurist mind that answered: "Think of
the men who will." It is surely as interesting that presently some
founder of the World Republic, some obstinate opponent of militarism or
legalism, or the man who will first release atomic energy for human use,
will walk along the Via Sacra as that Cicero or Giordano Bruno or
Shelley have walked there in the past. To the prophetic mind all history
is and will continue to be a prelude. The prophetic type will
steadfastly refuse to see the world as a museum; it will insist that
here is a stage set for a drama that perpetually begins.

Now this forecasting disposition has led the writer not only to publish
a book of deliberate prophesying, called "Anticipations," but almost
without premeditation to scatter a number of more or less obvious
prophecies through his other books. From first to last he has been
writing for twenty years, so that it is possible to check a certain
proportion of these anticipations by the things that have happened, Some
of these shots have hit remarkably close to the bull's-eye of reality;
there are a number of inners and outers, and some clean misses. Much
that he wrote about in anticipation is now established commonplace. In
1894 there were still plenty of sceptics of the possibility either of
automobiles or aeroplanes; it was not until 1898 that Mr. S.P. Langley
(of the Smithsonian Institute) could send the writer a photograph of a
heavier-than-air flying machine actually in the air. There were articles
in the monthly magazines of those days _proving_ that flying was
impossible.

One of the writer's luckiest shots was a description (in "Anticipations"
in 1900) of trench warfare, and of a deadlock almost exactly upon the
lines of the situation after the battle of the Marne. And he was
fortunate (in the same work) in his estimate of the limitations of
submarines. He anticipated Sir Percy Scott by a year in his doubts of
the decisive value of great battleships (_see_ "An Englishman Looks at
the World"); and he was sound in denying the decadence of France; in
doubting (before the Russo-Japanese struggle) the greatness of the power
of Russia, which was still in those days a British bogey; in making
Belgium the battle-ground in a coming struggle between the mid-European
Powers and the rest of Europe; and (he believes) in foretelling a
renascent Poland. Long before Europe was familiar with the engaging
personality of the German Crown Prince, he represented great airships
sailing over England (which country had been too unenterprising to make
any) under the command of a singularly anticipatory Prince Karl, and in
"The World Set Free" the last disturber of the peace is a certain
"Balkan Fox."

In saying, however, here and there that "before such a year so-and-so
will happen," or that "so-and-so will not occur for the next twenty
years," he was generally pretty widely wrong; most of his time estimates
are too short; he foretold, for example, a special motor track apart
from the high road between London and Brighton before 1910, which is
still a dream, but he doubted if effective military aviation or aerial
fighting would be possible before 1950, which is a miss on the other
side. He will draw a modest veil over certain still wider misses that
the idle may find for themselves in his books; he prefers to count the
hits and leave the reckoning of the misses to those who will find a
pleasure in it.

Of course, these prophecies of the writer's were made upon a basis of
very generalised knowledge. What can be done by a really sustained
research into a particular question--especially if it is a question
essentially mechanical--is shown by the work of a Frenchman all too
neglected by the trumpet of fame--Clement Ader. M. Ader was probably the
first man to get a mechanism up into the air for something more than a
leap. His _Eole_, as General Mensier testifies, prolonged a jump as far
as fifty metres as early as 1890. In 1897 his _Avion_ fairly flew. (This
is a year ahead of the date of my earliest photograph of S.P. Langley's
aeropile in mid-air.) This, however, is beside our present mark. The
fact of interest here is that in 1908, when flying was still almost
incredible, M. Ader published his "Aviation Militaire." Well, that was
eight years ago, and men have been fighting in the air now for a year,
and there is still nothing being done that M. Ader did not see, and
which we, if we had had the wisdom to attend to him, might not have been
prepared for. There is much that he foretells which is still awaiting
its inevitable fulfilment. So clearly can men of adequate knowledge and
sound reasoning power see into the years ahead in all such matters of
material development.

But it is not with the development of mechanical inventions that the
writer now proposes to treat. In this book he intends to hazard certain
forecasts about the trend of events in the next decade or so. Mechanical
novelties will probably play a very small part in that coming history.
This world-wide war means a general arrest of invention and enterprise,
except in the direction of the war business. Ability is concentrated
upon that; the types of ability that are not applicable to warfare are
neglected; there is a vast destruction of capital and a waste of the
savings that are needed to finance new experiments. Moreover, we are
killing off many of our brightest young men.

It is fairly safe to assume that there will be very little new furniture
on the stage of the world for some considerable time; that if there is
much difference in the roads and railways and shipping it will be for
the worse; that architecture, domestic equipment, and so on, will be
fortunate if in 1924 they stand where they did in the spring of 1914. In
the trenches of France and Flanders, and on the battlefields of Russia,
the Germans have been spending and making the world spend the comfort,
the luxury and the progress of the next quarter-century. There is no
accounting for tastes. But the result is that, while it was possible
for the writer in 1900 to write "Anticipations of the Reaction of
Mechanical Progress upon Human Life and Thought," in 1916 his
anticipations must belong to quite another system of consequences.

The broad material facts before us are plain enough. It is the mental
facts that have to be unravelled. It isn't now a question of "What
thing--what faculty--what added power will come to hand, and how will it
affect our ways of living?" It is a question of "How are people going to
take these obvious things--waste of the world's resources, arrest of
material progress, the killing of a large moiety of the males in nearly
every European country, and universal loss and unhappiness?" We are
going to deal with realities here, at once more intimate and less
accessible than the effects of mechanism.

As a preliminary reconnaissance, as it were, over the region of problems
we have to attack, let us consider the difficulties of a single
question, which is also a vital and central question in this forecast.
We shall not attempt a full answer here, because too many of the factors
must remain unexamined; later, perhaps, we may be in a better position
to do so. This question is the probability of the establishment of a
long world peace.

At the outset of the war there was a very widely felt hope among the
intellectuals of the world that this war might clear up most of the
outstanding international problems, and prove the last war. The writer,
looking across the gulf of experience that separates us from 1914,
recalls two pamphlets whose very titles are eloquent of this
feeling--"The War that will End War," and "The Peace of the World." Was
the hope expressed in those phrases a dream? Is it already proven a
dream? Or can we read between the lines of the war news, diplomatic
disputations, threats and accusations, political wranglings and stories
of hardship and cruelty that now fill our papers, anything that still
justifies a hope that these bitter years of world sorrow are the
darkness before the dawn of a better day for mankind? Let us handle this
problem for a preliminary examination.

What is really being examined here is the power of human reason to
prevail over passion--and certain other restraining and qualifying
forces. There can be little doubt that, if one could canvass all mankind
and ask them whether they would rather have no war any more, the
overwhelming mass of them would elect for universal peace. If it were
war of the modern mechanical type that was in question, with air raids,
high explosives, poison gas and submarines, there could be no doubt at
all about the response. "Give peace in our time, O Lord," is more than
ever the common prayer of Christendom, and the very war makers claim to
be peace makers; the German Emperor has never faltered in his assertion
that he encouraged Austria to send an impossible ultimatum to Serbia,
and invaded Belgium because Germany was being attacked. The Krupp-Kaiser
Empire, he assures us, is no eagle, but a double-headed lamb, resisting
the shearers and butchers. The apologists for war are in a hopeless
minority; a certain number of German Prussians who think war good for
the soul, and the dear ladies of the London _Morning Post_ who think war
so good for the manners of the working classes, are rare, discordant
voices in the general chorus against war. If a mere unsupported and
uncoordinated will for peace could realise itself, there would be peace,
and an enduring peace, to-morrow. But, as a matter of fact, there is no
peace coming to-morrow, and no clear prospect yet of an enduring
universal peace at the end of this war.

Now what are the obstructions, and what are the antagonisms to the
exploitation of this world-wide disgust with war and the world-wide
desire for peace, so as to establish a world peace?

Let us take them in order, and it will speedily become apparent that we
are dealing here with a subtle quantitative problem in psychology, a
constant weighing of whether this force or that force is the stronger.
We are dealing with influences so subtle that the accidents of some
striking dramatic occurrence, for example, may turn them this way or
that. We are dealing with the human will--and thereby comes a snare for
the feet of the would-be impartial prophet. To foretell the future is to
modify the future. It is hard for any prophet not to break into
exhortation after the fashion of the prophets of Israel.

The first difficulty in the way of establishing a world peace is that it
is nobody's business in particular. Nearly all of us want a world
peace--in an amateurish sort of way. But there is no specific person or
persons to whom one can look for the initiatives. The world is a
supersaturated solution of the will-for-peace, and there is nothing for
it to crystallise upon. There is no one in all the world who is
responsible for the understanding and overcoming of the difficulties
involved. There are many more people, and there is much more
intelligence concentrated upon the manufacture of cigarettes or
hairpins than upon the establishment of a permanent world peace. There
are a few special secretaries employed by philanthropic Americans, and
that is about all. There has been no provision made even for the
emoluments of these gentlemen when universal peace is attained;
presumably they would lose their jobs.

Nearly everybody wants peace; nearly everybody would be glad to wave a
white flag with a dove on it now--provided no unfair use was made of
such a demonstration by the enemy--but there is practically nobody
thinking out the arrangements needed, and nobody making nearly as much
propaganda for the instruction of the world in the things needful as is
made in selling any popular make of automobile. We have all our
particular businesses to attend to. And things are not got by just
wanting them; things are got by getting them, and rejecting whatever
precludes our getting them.

That is the first great difficulty: the formal Peace Movement is quite
amateurish.

It is so amateurish that the bulk of people do not even realise the very
first implication of the peace of the world. It has not succeeded in
bringing this home to them.

If there is to be a permanent peace of the world, it is clear that
there must be some permanent means of settling disputes between Powers
and nations that would otherwise be at war. That means that there must
be some head power, some point of reference, a supreme court of some
kind, a universally recognised executive over and above the separate
Governments of the world that exist to-day. That does not mean that
those Governments Have to disappear, that "nationality" has to be given
up, or anything so drastic as that. But it does mean that all those
Governments have to surrender almost as much of their sovereignty as the
constituent sovereign States which make up the United States of America
have surrendered to the Federal Government; if their unification is to
be anything more than a formality, they will have to delegate a control
of their inter-State relations to an extent for which few minds are
prepared at present.

It is really quite idle to dream of a warless world in which States are
still absolutely free to annoy one another with tariffs, with the
blocking and squeezing of trade routes, with the ill-treatment of
immigrants and travelling strangers, and between which there is no means
of settling boundary disputes. Moreover, as between the united States of
the world and the United States of America there is this further
complication of the world position: that almost all the great States of
Europe are in possession, firstly, of highly developed territories of
alien language and race, such as Egypt; and, secondly, of barbaric and
less-developed territories, such as Nigeria or Madagascar. There will be
nothing stable about a world settlement that does not destroy in these
"possessions" the national preference of the countries that own them and
that does not prepare for the immediate or eventual accession of these
subject peoples to State rank. Most certainly, however, thousands of
intelligent people in those great European countries who believe
themselves ardent for a world peace will be staggered at any proposal to
place any part of "our Empire" under a world administration on the
footing of a United States territory. Until they cease to be staggered
by anything of the sort, their aspirations for a permanent peace will
remain disconnected from the main current of their lives. And that
current will flow, sluggishly or rapidly, towards war. For essentially
these "possessions" are like tariffs, like the strategic occupation of
neutral countries or secret treaties; they are forms of the conflict
between nations to oust and prevail over other nations.

Going on with such things and yet deprecating war is really not an
attempt to abolish conflict; it is an attempt to retain conflict and
limit its intensity; it is like trying to play hockey on the
understanding that the ball shall never travel faster than eight miles
an hour.

Now it not only stands in our way to a permanent peace of the world that
the great mass of men are not prepared for even the most obvious
implications of such an idea, but there is also a second invincible
difficulty--that there is nowhere in the world anybody, any type of men,
any organisation, any idea, any nucleus or germ, that could possibly
develop into the necessary over-Government. We are asking for something
out of the air, out of nothingness, that will necessarily array against
itself the resistance of all those who are in control, or interested in
the control, of the affairs of sovereign States of the world as they are
at present; the resistance of a gigantic network of Government
organisations, interests, privileges, assumptions.

Against this a headless, vague aspiration, however universal, is likely
to prove quite ineffective. Of course, it is possible to suggest that
the Hague Tribunal is conceivably the germ of such an overriding
direction and supreme court as the peace of the world demands, but in
reality the Hague Tribunal is a mere legal automatic machine. It does
nothing unless you set it in motion. It has no initiative. It does not
even protest against the most obvious outrages upon that phantom of a
world-conscience--international law.

Pacificists in their search for some definite starting-point, about
which the immense predisposition for peace may crystallise, have
suggested the Pope and various religious organisations as a possible
basis for the organisation of peace. But there would be no appeal from
such a beginning to the non-Christian majority of mankind, and the
suggestion in itself indicates a profound ignorance of the nature of the
Christian churches. With the exception of the Quakers and a few Russian
sects, no Christian sect or church has ever repudiated war; most have
gone out of the way to sanction it and bless it.

It is altogether too rashly assumed by people whose sentimentality
outruns their knowledge that Christianity is essentially an attempt to
carry out the personal teachings of Christ. It is nothing of the sort,
and no church authority will support that idea. Christianity--more
particularly after the ascendancy of the Trinitarian doctrine was
established--was and is a theological religion; it is the religion that
triumphed over Arianism, Manichseism, Gnosticism, and the like; it is
based not on Christ, but on its creeds. Christ, indeed, is not even its
symbol; on the contrary, the chosen symbol of Christianity is the cross
to which Christ was nailed and on which He died. It was very largely a
religion of the legions. It was the warrior Theodosius who, more than
any single other man, imposed it upon Europe.

There is no reason, therefore, either in precedent or profession, for
expecting any plain lead from the churches in this tremendous task of
organising and making effective the widespread desire of the world for
peace. And even were this the case, it is doubtful if we should find in
the divines and dignitaries of the Vatican, of the Russian and British
official churches, or of any other of the multitudinous Christian sects,
the power and energy, the knowledge and ability, or even the goodwill
needed to negotiate so vast a thing as the creation of a world
authority.

One other possible starting-point has been suggested. It is no great
feat for a naive imagination to suppose the President of the Swiss
Confederation or the President of the United States--for each of these
two systems is an exemplary and encouraging instance of the possibility
of the pacific synthesis of independent States--taking a propagandist
course and proposing extensions of their own systems to the suffering
belligerents.

But nothing of the sort occurs. And when you come to look into the
circumstances of these two Presidents you will discover that neither of
them is any more free than anybody else to embark upon the task of
creating a State-overriding, war-preventing organisation of the world.
He has been created by a system, and he is bound to a system; his
concern is with the interests of the people of Switzerland or of the
United States of America. President Wilson, for example, is quite
sufficiently occupied by the affairs of the White House, by the clash of
political parties, by interferences with American overseas trade and the
security of American citizens. He has no more time to give to projects
for the fundamental reconstruction of international relationships than
has any recruit drilling in England, or any captain on an ocean liner,
or any engineer in charge of a going engine.

We are all, indeed, busy with the things that come to hand every day. We
are all anxious for a permanent world peace, but we are all up to the
neck in things that leave us no time to attend to this world peace that
nearly every sane man desires.

Meanwhile, a small minority of people who trade upon
contention--militarists, ambitious kings and statesmen, war contractors,
loan mongers, sensational journalists--follow up their interests and
start and sustain war.

There lies the paradoxical reality of this question. Our first inquiry
lands us into the elucidation of this deadlock. Nearly everybody desires
a world peace, and yet there is not apparent anywhere any man free and
able and willing to establish it, while, on the other hand, there are a
considerable number of men in positions of especial influence and power
who will certainly resist the arrangements that are essential to its
establishment.

But does this exhaust the question, and must we conclude that mankind is
doomed to a perpetual, futile struggling of States and nations and
peoples--breaking ever and again into war? The answer to that would
probably, be "Yes" if it were not for the progress of war. War is
continually becoming more scientific, more destructive, more coldly
logical, more intolerant of non-combatants, and more exhausting of any
kind of property. There is every reason to believe that it will continue
to intensify these characteristics. By doing so it may presently bring
about a state of affairs that will supply just the lacking elements that
are needed for the development of a world peace.

I would venture to suggest that the present war is doing so now: that it
is producing changes in men's minds that may presently give us both the
needed energy and the needed organisation from which a world direction
may develop.

The first, most distinctive thing about this conflict is the
exceptionally searching way in which it attacks human happiness. No war
has ever destroyed happiness so widely. It has not only killed and
wounded an unprecedented proportion of the male population of all the
combatant nations, but it has also destroyed wealth beyond precedent. It
has also destroyed freedom--of movement, of speech, of economic
enterprise. Hardly anyone alive has escaped the worry of it and the
threat of it. It has left scarcely a life untouched, and made scarcely a
life happier. There is a limit to the principle that "everybody's
business is nobody's business." The establishment of a world State,
which was interesting only to a few cranks and visionaries before the
war, is now the lively interest of a very great number of people. They
inquire about it; they have become accessible to ideas about it.

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