What is Coming? by H. G. Wells

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So far I have been stating a situation and reviewing certain
possibilities. In the past half-century the United States has been
developing a great system of universities and a continental production
of literature and discussion to supplement the limited Press and the New
England literature of the earlier phase of the American process. It is
one of the most interesting speculations in the world to everyone how
far this new organisation of the American mind is capable of grasping
the stupendous opportunities and appeals of the present time. The war
and the great occasions that must follow the war will tax the mind and
the intellectual and moral forces of the Pledged Allies enormously. How
far is this new but very great and growing system of thought and
learning in the United States capable of that propaganda of ideas and
language, that progressive expression of a developing ideal of
community, that in countries so spontaneous, so chaotic or democratic as
the United States and the Pledged Allies must necessarily take the
place of the organised authoritative _Kultur_ of the Teutonic type of
state?

As an undisguisedly patriotic Englishman, I would like to see the lead
in this intellectual synthesis of the nations, that _must_ be achieved
if wars are to cease, undertaken by Great Britain. But I am bound to
confess that in Great Britain I see neither the imaginative courage of
France nor the brisk enterprise of the Americans. I see this matter as a
question of peace and civilisation, but there are other baser but quite
as effective reasons why America, France, and Great Britain should exert
themselves to create confidences and understandings between their
populations and the Russian population. There is the immediate business
opportunity in Russia. There is the secondary business opportunity in
China that can best be developed as the partners rather than as the
rivals of the Russians. Since the Americans are nearest, by way of the
Pacific, since they are likely to have more capital and more free energy
to play with than the Pledged Allies, I do on the whole incline to the
belief that it is they who will yet do the pioneer work and the leading
work that this opportunity demands.

Section 2

If beneath the alliances of the present war there is to grow up a system
of enduring understandings that will lead to the peace of the world,
there is needed as a basis for such understandings much greater facility
of intellectual intercourse than exists at present. Firstly, the world
needs a _lingua franca_; next, the Western peoples need to know more of
the Russian language and life than they do, and thirdly, the English
language needs to be made more easily accessible than it is at present.
The chief obstacle to a Frenchman or Englishman learning Russian is the
difficult and confusing alphabet; the chief obstacle to anyone learning
English is the irrational spelling. Are people likely to overcome these
very serious difficulties in the future, and, if so, how will they do
it? And what prospects are there of a _lingua franca_?

Wherever one looks closely into the causes and determining influences of
the great convulsions of this time, one is more and more impressed by
the apparent smallness of the ultimate directing influence. It seems to
me at least that it is a practically proven thing that this vast
aggression of Germany is to be traced back to a general tone of court
thinking and discussion in the Prussia of the eighteenth century, to
the theories of a few professors and the gathering trend of German
education in a certain direction. It seems to me that similarly the
language teachers of to-day and to-morrow may hold in their hands the
seeds of gigantic international developments in the future.

It is not a question of the skill or devotion of individual teachers so
much as of the possibility of organising them upon a grand scale. An
individual teacher must necessarily use the ordinary books and ordinary
spelling and type of the language in which he is giving instruction; he
may get a few elementary instruction books from a private publisher,
specially printed for teaching purposes, but very speedily he finds
himself obliged to go to the current printed matter. This, as I will
immediately show, bars the most rapid and fruitful method of teaching.
And in this as in most affairs, private enterprise, the individualistic
system, shows itself a failure. In England, for example, the choice of
Russian lesson books is poor and unsatisfactory, and there is either no
serviceable Russian-English, English-Russian school dictionary in
existence, or it is published so badly as to be beyond the range of my
inquiries. But a state, or a group of universities, or even a rich
private association such as far-seeing American, French and British
business men might be reasonably expected to form, could attack the
problem of teaching a language in an altogether different fashion.

The difficulty in teaching English lies in the inconsistency of the
spelling, and the consequent difficulties of pronunciation. If there
were available an ample series of text-books, reading books, and books
of general interest, done in a consistent phonetic type and spelling--in
which the value of the letters of the phonetic system followed as far as
possible the prevalent usage in Europe--the difficulty in teaching
English not merely to foreigners but, as the experiments in teaching
reading of the Simplified Spelling Society have proved up to the hilt,
to English children can be very greatly reduced. At first the difficulty
of the irrational spelling can be set on one side. The learner attacks
and masters the essential language. Then afterwards he can, if he likes,
go on to the orthodox spelling, which is then no harder for him to read
and master than it is for an Englishman of ordinary education to read
the facetious orthography of Artemus Ward or of the _Westminster
Gazette_ "orfis boy." The learner does one thing at a time instead of
attempting, as he would otherwise have to do, two things--and they are
both difficult and different and conflicting things--simultaneously.

Learning a language is one thing and memorising an illogical system of
visual images--for that is what reading ordinary English spelling comes
to--is quite another. A man can learn to play first chess and then
bridge in half the time that these two games would require if he began
by attempting simultaneous play, and exactly the same principle applies
to the language problem.

These considerations lead on to the idea of a special development or
sub-species of the English language for elementary teaching and foreign
consumption. It would be English, very slightly simplified and
regularised, and phonetically spelt. Let us call it Anglo-American. In
it the propagandist power, whatever that power might be, state,
university or association, would print not simply, instruction books but
a literature of cheap editions. Such a specialised simplified
Anglo-American variety of English would enormously stimulate the already
wide diffusion of the language, and go far to establish it as that
_lingua franca_ of which the world has need.

And in the same way, the phonetic alphabet adopted as the English medium
could be used as the medium for instruction in French, where, as in the
British Isles, Canada, North and Central Africa, and large regions of
the East, it is desirable to make an English-speaking community
bi-lingual. At present a book in French means nothing to an uninstructed
Englishman, an English book conveys no accurate sound images to an
uninstructed Frenchman. On the other hand, a French book printed on a
proper phonetic system could be immediately read aloud--though of course
it could not be understood--by an uninstructed Englishman. From the
first he would have no difficulties with the sounds. And vice versa.
Such a system of books would mean the destruction of what are, for great
masses of French and English people, insurmountable difficulties on the
way to bi-lingualism. Its production is a task all too colossal for any
private publishers or teachers, but it is a task altogether trivial in
comparison with the national value of its consequences. But whether it
will ever be carried out is just one of those riddles of the jumping cat
in the human brain that are most perplexing to the prophet.

The problem becomes at once graver, less hopeful, and more urgent when
we take up the case of Russian. I have looked closely into this business
of Russian teaching, and I am convinced that only a very, very small
number of French-and English-speaking people are going to master Russian
under the existing conditions of instruction. If we Westerns want to get
at Russia in good earnest we must take up this Russian language problem
with an imaginative courage and upon a scale of which at present I see
no signs. If we do not, then the Belgians, French, Americans and English
will be doing business in Russia after the war in the German
language--or through a friendly German interpreter. That, I am afraid,
is the probability of the case. But it need not be the case. Will and
intelligence could alter all that.

What has to be done is to have Russian taught at first in a Western
phonetic type. Then it becomes a language not very much more difficult
to acquire than, say, German by a Frenchman. When the learner can talk
with some freedom, has a fairly full vocabulary, a phraseology, knows
his verb and so on, then and then only should he take up the unfamiliar
and confusing set of visual images of Russian lettering--I speak from
the point of view of those who read the Latin alphabet. How confusing it
may be only those who have tried it can tell. Its familiarity to the eye
increases the difficulty; totally unfamiliar forms would be easier to
learn. The Frenchman or Englishman is confronted with

COP;

the sound of that is

SAR!

For those who learn languages, as so many people do nowadays, by visual
images, there will always be an undercurrent toward saying "COP." The
mind plunges hopelessly through that tangle to the elements of a speech
which is as yet unknown.

Nevertheless almost all the instruction in Russian of which I can get an
account begins with the alphabet, and must, I suppose, begin with the
alphabet until teachers have a suitably printed set of instruction books
to enable them to take the better line. One school teacher I know, in a
public school, devoted the entire first term, the third of a year, to
the alphabet. At the end he was still dissatisfied with the progress of
his pupils. He gave them Russian words, of course, words of which they
knew nothing--in Russian characters. It was too much for them to take
hold of at one and the same time. He did not even think of teaching them
to write French and English words in the strange lettering. He did not
attempt to write his Russian in Latin letters. He was apparently
ignorant of any system of transliteration, and he did nothing to
mitigate the impossible task before him. At the end of the term most of
his pupils gave up the hopeless effort. It is not too much to say that
for a great number of "visualising" people, the double effort at the
outset of Russian is entirely too much. It stops them altogether. But to
almost anyone it is possible to learn Russian if at first it is
presented in a lettering that gives no trouble.

If I found myself obliged to learn Russian urgently, I would get some
accepted system of transliteration, carefully transcribe every word of
Russian in my text-book into the Latin characters, and learn the
elements of the language from my manuscript. A year or so ago I made a
brief visit to Russia with a "Russian Self-Taught" in my pocket. Nothing
sticks, nothing ever did stick of that self-taught Russian except the
words that I learnt in Latin type. Those I remember as I remember all
words, as groups of Latin letters. I learnt to count, for example, up to
a hundred. The other day I failed to recognise the Russian word for
eleven in Russian characters until I had spelt it out. Then I said, "Oh,
of course!" But I knew it when I heard it.

I write of these things from the point of view of the keen learner. Some
Russian teachers will be found to agree with me; others will not. It is
a paradox in the psychology of the teacher that few teachers are willing
to adopt "slick" methods of teaching; they hate cutting corners far more
than they hate obstacles, because their interest is in the teaching and
not in the "getting there." But what we learners want is not an
exquisite, rare knowledge of particulars, we do not want to spend an
hour upon Russian needlessly; we want to get there as quickly and
effectively as possible. And for that, transliterated books are
essential.

Now these may seem small details in the learning of languages, mere
schoolmasters' gossip, but the consequences are on the continental
scale. The want of these national text-books and readers is a great gulf
between Russia and her Allies; _it is a greater gulf than the
profoundest political misunderstanding could be_. We cannot get at them
to talk plainly to them, and they cannot get at us to talk plainly to
us. A narrow bridge of interpreters is our only link with the Russian
mind. And many of those interpreters are of a race which is for very
good reasons hostile to Russia. An abundant cheap supply, firstly, of
English and French books, _in_ English and French, but in the Russian
character, by means of which Russians may rapidly learn French and
English--for it is quite a fable that these languages are known and used
in Russia below the level of the court and aristocracy--and, secondly,
of Russian books in the Latin (or some easy phonetic development of the
Latin) type, will do more to facilitate interchange and intercourse
between Russia and France, America and Britain, and so consolidate the
present alliance than almost any other single thing. But that supply
will not be a paying thing to provide; if it is left to publishers or
private language teachers or any form of private enterprise it will
never be provided. It is a necessary public undertaking.

But because a thing is necessary it does not follow that it will be
achieved. Bread may be necessary to a starving man, but there is always
the alternative that he will starve. France, which is most accessible to
creative ideas, is least interested in this particular matter. Great
Britain is still heavily conservative. It is idle to ignore the forces
still entrenched in the established church, in the universities and the
great schools, that stand for an irrational resistance to all new
things. American universities are comparatively youthful and sometimes
quite surprisingly innovating, and America is the country of the
adventurous millionaire. There has been evidence in several American
papers that have reached me recently of a disposition to get ahead with
Russia and cut out the Germans (and incidentally the British). Amidst
the cross-currents and overlappings of this extraordinary time, it seems
to me highly probable that America may lead in this vitally important
effort to promote international understanding.

XI. "THE WHITE MAN'S BURTHEN"

One of the most curious aspects of the British "Pacifist" is his
willingness to give over great blocks of the black and coloured races to
the Hohenzollerns to exploit and experiment upon. I myself being
something of a pacifist, and doing what I can, in my corner, to bring
about the Peace of the World, the Peace of the World triumphant and
armed against every disturber, could the more readily sympathise with
the passive school of Pacifists if its proposals involved the idea that
England should keep to England and Germany to Germany. My political
ideal is the United States of the World, a union of states whose state
boundaries are determined by what I have defined as the natural map of
mankind. I cannot understand those pacifists who talk about the German
right to "expansion," and babble about a return of her justly lost
colonies. That seems to me not pacificism but patriotic inversion. This
large disposition to hand over our fellow-creatures to a Teutonic
educational system, with "frightfulness" in reserve, to "efficiency" on
Wittenberg lines, leaves me--hot. The ghosts of the thirst-tormented
Hereros rise up in their thousands from the African dust, protesting.

This talk of "legitimate expansion" is indeed now only an exploiter's
cant. The age of "expansion," the age of European "empires" is near its
end. No one who can read the signs of the times in Japan, in India, in
China, can doubt it. It ended in America a hundred years ago; it is
ending now in Asia; it will end last in Africa, and even in Africa the
end draws near. Spain has but led the way which other "empires" must
follow. Look at her empire in the atlases of 1800. She fell down the
steps violently and painfully, it is true--but they are difficult to
descend. No sane man, German or anti-German, who has weighed the
prospects of the new age, will be desirous of a restoration of the now
vanished German colonial empire, vindictive, intriguing, and
unscrupulous, a mere series of centres of attack upon adjacent
territory, to complicate the immense disentanglements and readjustments
that lie already before the French and British and Italians.

Directly we discuss the problem of the absolutely necessary permanent
alliance that this war has forced upon at least France, Belgium,
Britain and Russia, this problem of the "empires" faces us. What are
these Allies going to do about their "subject races"? What is the world
going to do about the "subject races"? It is a matter in which the
"subject races" are likely to have an increasingly important voice of
their own. We Europeans may discuss their fate to-day among ourselves;
we shall be discussing it with them to-morrow. If we do not agree with
them then, they will take their fates in their own hands in spite of us.
Long before A.D. 2100 there will be no such thing as a "subject race" in
all the world.

Here again we find ourselves asking just that same difficult question of
more or less, that arises at every cardinal point of our review of the
probable future. How far is this thing going to be done finely; how far
is it going to be done cunningly and basely? How far will greatness of
mind, how far will imaginative generosity, prevail over the jealous and
pettifogging spirit that lurks in every human being? Are French and
British and Belgians and Italians, for example, going to help each other
in Africa, or are they going to work against and cheat each other? Is
the Russian seeking only a necessary outlet to the seas of the world,
or has he dreams of Delhi? Here again, as in all these questions,
personal idiosyncrasy comes in; I am strongly disposed to trust the good
in the Russian.

But apart from this uncertain question of generosity, there are in this
case two powerful forces that make against disputes, secret
disloyalties, and meanness. One is that Germany will certainly be still
dangerous at the end of the war, and the second is that the gap in
education, in efficiency, in national feeling and courage of outlook,
between the European and the great Asiatic and African communities, is
rapidly diminishing. If the Europeans squabble much more for world
ascendancy, there will be no world ascendancy for them to squabble for.
We have still no means of measuring the relative enfeeblement of Europe
in comparison with Asia already produced by this war. As it is, certain
things are so inevitable--the integration of a modernised Bengal, of
China, and of Egypt, for example--that the question before us is
practically reduced to whether this restoration of the subject peoples
will be done with the European's aid and goodwill, or whether it will be
done against him. That it will be done in some manner or other is
certain.

The days of suppression are over. They know it in every country where
white and brown and yellow mingle. If the Pledged Allies are not
disposed to let in light to their subject peoples and prepare for the
days of world equality that are coming, the Germans will. If the Germans
fail to be the most enslaving of people, they may become the most
liberating. They will set themselves, with their characteristic
thoroughness, to destroy that magic "prestige" which in Asia
particularly is the clue to the miracle of European ascendancy. In the
long run that may prove no ill service to mankind. The European must
prepare to make himself acceptable in Asia, to state his case to Asia
and be understood by Asia, or to leave Asia. That is the blunt reality
of the Asiatic situation.

It has already been pointed out in these chapters that if the alliance
of the Pledged Allies is indeed to be permanent, it implies something in
the nature of a Zollverein, a common policy towards the rest of the
world and an arrangement involving a common control over the
dependencies of all the Allies. It will be interesting, now that we have
sketched a possible map of Europe after the war, to look a little more
closely into the nature of the "empires" concerned, and to attempt a few
broad details of the probable map of the Eastern hemisphere outside
Europe in the years immediately to come.

Now there are, roughly speaking, three types of overseas "possessions."
They may be either (1) territory that was originally practically
unoccupied and that was settled by the imperial people, or (2) territory
with a barbaric population having no national idea, or (3) conquered
states. In the case of the British Empire all three are present; in the
case of the French only the second and third; in the case of the Russian
only the first and third. Each of these types must necessarily follow
its own system of developments. Take first those territories originally
but thinly occupied, or not occupied at all, of which all or at least
the dominant element of the population is akin to that of the "home
country." These used to be called by the British "colonies"--though the
"colonies" of Greece and Rome were really only garrison cities settled
in foreign lands--and they are now being rechristened "Dominions."
Australia, for instance, is a British Dominion, and Siberia and most of
Russia in Asia, a Russian Dominion. Their manifest destiny is for their
children to become equal citizens with the cousins and brothers they
have left at home.

There has been much discussion in England during the last decade upon
some modification of the British legislature that would admit
representatives from the Dominions to a proportional share in the
government of the Empire. The problem has been complicated by the
unsettled status of Ireland and the mischief-making Tories there, and by
the perplexities arising out of those British dependencies of
non-British race--the Indian states, for example, whose interests are
sometimes in conflict with those of the Dominions.

The attractiveness of the idea of an Imperial legislature is chiefly on
the surface, and I have very strong doubts of its realisability. These
Dominions seem rather to tend to become independent and distinct
sovereign states in close and affectionate alliance with Great Britain,
and having a common interest in the British Navy. In many ways the
interests of the Dominions are more divergent from those of Great
Britain than are Great Britain and Russia, or Great Britain and France.
Many of the interests of Canada are more closely bound to those of the
United States than they are to those of Australasia, in such a matter as
the maintenance of the Monroe Principle, for example. South Africa again
takes a line with regard to British Indian subjects which is highly
embarrassing to Great Britain. There is a tendency in all the British
colonies to read American books and periodicals rather than British, if
for no other reason than because their common life, life in a newish and
very democratic land, is much more American than British in character.

On the other hand, one must remember that Great Britain has European
interests--the integrity of Holland and Belgium is a case in
point--which are much closer to the interests of France than they are to
those of the younger Britains beyond the seas. A voice in an Alliance
that included France and the United States, and had its chief common
interest in the control of the seas, may in the future seem far more
desirable to these great and growing English-speaking Dominions than the
sending of representatives to an Imperial House of Lords at Westminster,
and the adornment of elderly colonial politicians with titles and
decorations at Buckingham Palace.

I think Great Britain and her Allies have all of them to prepare their
minds for a certain release of their grip upon their "possessions," if
they wish to build up a larger unity; I do not see that any secure
unanimity of purpose is possible without such releases and
readjustments.

Now the next class of foreign "possession" is that in which the French
and Belgians and Italians are most interested. Britain also has
possessions of this type in Central Africa and the less civilised
districts of India, but Russia has scarcely anything of the sort. In
this second class of possession the population is numerous, barbaric,
and incapable of any large or enduring political structure, and over its
destinies rule a small minority of European administrators.

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