What is Coming? by H. G. Wells

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The greatest of this series of possessions are those in black Africa.
The French imagination has taken a very strong hold of the idea of a
great French-speaking West and Central Africa, with which the ordinary
British citizen will only too gladly see the conquered German colonies
incorporated. The Italians have a parallel field of development in the
hinterland of Tripoli. Side by side, France, Belgium and Italy, no
longer troubled by hostile intrigues, may very well set themselves in
the future to the task of building up a congenial Latin civilisation out
of the tribal confusions of these vast regions. They will, I am
convinced, do far better than the English in this domain. The
English-speaking peoples have been perhaps the most successful
_settlers_ in the world; the United States and the Dominions are there
to prove it; only the Russians in Siberia can compare with them; but as
administrators the British are a race coldly aloof. They have nothing to
give a black people, and no disposition to give.

The Latin-speaking peoples, the Mediterranean nations, on the other
hand, have proved to be the most successful _assimilators_ of other
races that mankind has ever known. Alexandre Dumas is not the least of
the glories of France. In a hundred years' time black Africa, west of
Tripoli, from Oran to Rhodesia, will, I believe, talk French. And what
does not speak French will speak the closely related Italian. I do not
see why this Latin black culture should not extend across equatorial
Africa to meet the Indian influence at the coast, and reach out to join
hands with Madagascar. I do not see why the British flag should be any
impediment to the Latinisation of tropical Africa or to the natural
extension of the French and Italian languages through Egypt. I guess,
however, that it will be an Islamic and not a Christian cult that will
be talking Italian and French. For the French-speaking civilisation will
make roads not only for French, Belgians, and Italians, but for the
Arabs whose religion and culture already lie like a net over black
Africa. No other peoples and no other religion can so conveniently give
the negro what is needed to bring him into the comity of civilised
peoples....

A few words of digression upon the future of Islam may not be out of
place here. The idea of a militant Christendom has vanished from the
world. The last pretensions of Christian propaganda have been buried in
the Balkan trenches. A unification of Africa under Latin auspices
carries with it now no threat of missionary invasion. Africa will be a
fair field for all religions, and the religion to which the negro will
take will be the religion that best suits his needs. That religion, we
are told by nearly everyone who has a right to speak upon such
questions, is Islam, and its natural propagandist is the Arab. There is
no reason why he should not be a Frenchified Arab.

Both the French and the British have the strongest interest in the
revival of Arabic culture. Let the German learn Turkish if it pleases
him. Through all Africa and Western Asia there is a great to-morrow for
a renascent Islam under Arab auspices. Constantinople, that venal city
of the waterways, sitting like Asenath at the ford, has corrupted all
who came to her; she has been the paralysis of Islam. But the Islam of
the Turk is a different thing from the Islam of the Arab. That was one
of the great progressive impulses in the world of men. It is our custom
to underrate the Arab's contribution to civilisation quite absurdly in
comparison with our debt to the Hebrew and Greek. It is to the
initiatives of Islamic culture, for example, that we owe our numerals,
the bulk of modern mathematics, and the science of chemistry. The
British have already set themselves to the establishment of Islamic
university teaching in Egypt, but that is the mere first stroke of the
pick at the opening of the mine. English, French, Russian, Arabic,
Hindustani, Spanish, Italian; these are the great world languages that
most concern the future of civilisation from the point of view of the
Peace Alliance that impends. No country can afford to neglect any of
those languages, but as a matter of primary importance I would say, for
the British, Hindustani, for the Americans, Russian or Spanish, for the
French and Belgians and Italians, Arabic. These are the directions in
which the duty of understanding is most urgent for each of these
peoples, and the path of opportunity plainest.

The disposition to underrate temporarily depressed nations, races, and
cultures is a most irrational, prevalent, and mischievous form of
stupidity. It distorts our entire outlook towards the future. The
British reader can see its absurdity most easily when he reads the
ravings of some patriotic German upon the superiority of the "Teuton"
over the Italians and Greeks--to whom we owe most things of importance
in European civilisation. Equally silly stuff is still to be read in
British and American books about "Asiatics." And was there not some
fearful rubbish, not only in German but in English and French, about the
"decadence" of France? But we are learning--rapidly. When I was a
student in London thirty years ago we regarded Japan as a fantastic
joke; the comic opera, _The Mikado_, still preserves that foolish phase
for the admiration of posterity. And to-day there is a quite
unjustifiable tendency to ignore the quality of the Arab and of his
religion. Islam is an open-air religion, noble and simple in its broad
conceptions; it is none the less vital from Nigeria to China because it
has sickened in the closeness of Constantinople. The French, the
Italians, the British have to reckon with Islam and the Arab; where the
continental deserts are, there the Arabs are and there is Islam; their
culture will never be destroyed and replaced over these regions by
Europeanism. The Allies who prepare the Peace of the World have to make
their peace with that. And when I foreshadow this necessary liaison of
the French and Arabic cultures, I am thinking not only of the Arab that
is, but of the Arab that is to come. The whole trend of events in Asia
Minor, the breaking up and decapitation of the Ottoman Empire and the
Euphrates invasion, points to a great revival of Mesopotamia--at first
under European direction. The vast system of irrigation that was
destroyed by the Mongol armies of Hulugu in the thirteenth century will
be restored; the desert will again become populous. But the local type
will prevail. The new population of Mesopotamia will be neither European
nor Indian; it will be Arabic; and with its concentration Arabic will
lay hold of the printing press. A new intellectual movement in Islam, a
renascent Bagdad, is as inevitable as is 1950.

I have, however, gone a little beyond the discussion of the future of
the barbaric possessions in these anticipations of an Arabic
co-operation with the Latin peoples in the reconstruction of Western
Asia and the barbaric regions of north and central Africa. But regions
of administered barbarism occur not only in Africa. The point is that
they are administered, and that their economic development is very
largely in the hands, and will for many generations remain in the hands,
of the possessing country. Hitherto their administration has been in
the interests of the possessing nation alone. Their acquisition has been
a matter of bitter rivalries, their continued administration upon
exclusive lines is bound to lead to dangerous clashings. The common
sense of the situation points to a policy of give and take, in which
throughout the possessions of all the Pledged Allies, the citizens of
all will have more or less equal civil advantages. And this means some
consolidation of the general control of those Administered Territories.
I have already hinted at the possibility that the now exclusively
British navy may some day be a world-navy controlled by an Admiralty
representing a group of allies, Australasia, Canada, Britain and, it may
be, France and Russia and the United States. To those who know how
detached the British Admiralty is at the present time from the general
methods of British political life, there will be nothing strange in this
idea of its completer detachment. Its personnel does to a large extent
constitute a class apart. It takes its boys out of the general life very
often before they have got to their fourteenth birthday. It is not so
closely linked up with specific British social elements, with political
parties and the general educational system, as are the rest of the
national services.

There is nothing so very fantastic in this idea of a sort of
World-Admiralty; it is not even completely novel. Such bodies as the
Knights Templars transcended nationality in the Middle Ages. I do not
see how some such synthetic control of the seas is to be avoided in the
future. And now coming back to the "White Man's Burthen," is there not a
possibility that such a board of marine and international control as the
naval and international problems of the future may produce (or some
closely parallel body with a stronger Latin element), would also be
capable of dealing with these barbaric "Administered Territories"? A day
may come when Tripoli, Nigeria, the French and the Belgian Congo will be
all under one supreme control. We may be laying the foundations of such
a system to-day unawares. The unstable and fluctuating conferences of
the Allies to-day, their repeated experiences of the disadvantages of
evanescent and discontinuous co-ordinations, may press them almost
unconsciously toward this building up of things greater than they know.

We come now to the third and most difficult type of overseas
"possessions." These are the annexed or conquered regions with settled
populations already having a national tradition and culture of their
own. They are, to put it bluntly, the suppressed, the overlaid,
nations. Now I am a writer rather prejudiced against the idea of
nationality; my habit of thought is cosmopolitan; I hate and despise a
shrewish suspicion of foreigners and foreign ways; a man who can look me
in the face, laugh with me, speak truth and deal fairly, is my brother
though his skin is as black as ink or as yellow as an evening primrose.
But I have to recognise the facts of the case. In spite of all my large
liberality, I find it less irritating to be ruled by people of my own
language and race and tradition, and I perceive that for the mass of
people alien rule is intolerable.

Local difference, nationality, is a very obstinate thing. Every country
tends to revert to its natural type. Nationality will out. Once a people
has emerged above the barbaric stage to a national consciousness, that
consciousness will endure. There is practically always going to be an
Egypt, a Poland, an Armenia. There is no Indian nation, there never has
been, but there are manifestly a Bengal and a Rajputana, there is
manifestly a constellation of civilised nations in India. Several of
these have literatures and traditions that extend back before the days
when the Britons painted themselves with woad. Let us deal with this
question mainly with reference to India. What is said will apply
equally to Burmah or Egypt or Armenia or--to come back into
Europe--Poland.

Now I have talked, I suppose, with many scores of people about the
future of India, and I have never yet met anyone, Indian or British, who
thought it desirable that the British should evacuate India at once. And
I have never yet met anyone who did not think that ultimately the
British must let the Indian nations control their own destinies. There
are really not two opposite opinions about the destiny of India, but
only differences of opinion as to the length of time in which that
destiny is to be achieved. Many Indians think (and I agree with them)
that India might be a confederation of sovereign states in close
alliance with the British Empire and its allies within the space of
fifty years or so. The opposite extreme was expressed by an old weary
Indian administrator who told me, "Perhaps they may begin to be capable
of self-government in four or five hundred years." These are the extreme
Liberal and the extreme Tory positions in this question. It is a choice
between decades and centuries. There is no denial of the inevitability
of ultimate restoration. No one of any experience believes the British
administration in India is an eternal institution.

There is a great deal of cant in this matter in Great Britain. Genteel
English people with relations in the Indian Civil Service and habits of
self-delusion, believe that Indians are "grateful" for British rule. The
sort of "patriotic" self-flattery that prevailed in the Victorian age,
and which is so closely akin to contemporary German follies, fostered
and cultivated this sweet delusion. There are, no doubt, old ladies in
Germany to-day who believe that Belgium will presently be "grateful" for
the present German administration. Let us clear our minds of such cant.
As a matter of fact no Indians really like British rule or think of it
as anything better than a necessary, temporary evil. Let me put the
parallel case to an Englishman or a Frenchman. Through various political
ineptitudes our country has, we will suppose, fallen under the rule of
the Chinese. They administer it, we will further assume, with an
efficiency and honesty unparalleled in the bad old times of our lawyer
politicians. They do not admit us to the higher branches of the
administration; they go about our country wearing a strange costume,
professing a strange religion--which implies that ours is
wrong--speaking an unfamiliar tongue. They control our financial system
and our economic development--on Chinese lines of the highest merit.
They take the utmost care of our Gothic cathedrals for us. They put our
dearest racial possessions into museums and admire them very much
indeed. They teach our young men to fly kites and eat bird's nest soup.
They do all that a well-bred people can do to conceal their habit and
persuasion of a racial superiority. But they keep up their "prestige."
... You know, we shouldn't love them. It really isn't a question of
whether they rule well or ill, but that the position is against certain
fundamentals of human nature. The only possible footing upon which we
could meet them with comfortable minds would be the footing that we and
they were discussing the terms of the restoration of our country. Then
indeed we might almost feel friendly with them. That is the case with
all civilised "possessions." The only terms upon which educated British
and Indians can meet to-day with any comfort is precisely that. The
living intercourse of the British and Indian mind to-day is the
discussion of the restoration. Everything else is humbug on the one side
and self-deception on the other.

It is idle to speak of the British occupation of India as a conquest or
a robbery. It is a fashion of much "advanced" literature in Europe to
assume that the European rule of various Asiatic countries is the
result of deliberate conquest with a view to spoliation. But that is
only the ugly side of the facts. Cases of the deliberate invasion and
spoliation of one country by another have been very rare in the history
of the last three centuries. There has always been an excuse, and there
has always been a percentage of truth in the excuse. The history of
every country contains phases of political ineptitude in which that
country becomes so misgoverned as to be not only a nuisance to the
foreigner within its borders but a danger to its neighbours. Mexico is
in such a phase to-day. And most of the aggressions and annexations of
the modern period have arisen out of the inconveniences and reasonable
fears caused by such an inept phase. I am a persistent advocate for the
restoration of Poland, but at the same time it is very plain to me that
it is a mere travesty of the facts to say that Poland, was a white lamb
of a country torn to pieces by three wicked neighbours, Poland in the
eighteenth century was a dangerous political muddle, uncertain of her
monarchy, her policy, her affinities. She endangered her neighbours
because there was no guarantee that she might not fall under the
tutelage of one of them and become a weapon against the others.

The division of Poland was an outrage upon the Polish people, but it
was largely dictated by an entirely honest desire to settle a dangerous
possibility. It seemed less injurious than the possibility of a
vacillating, independent Poland playing off one neighbour against
another. That possibility will still be present in the minds of the
diplomatists who will determine the settlement after the war. Until the
Poles make up their minds, and either convince the Russians that they
are on the side of Russia and Bohemia against Germany for evermore, or
the Germans that they are willing to be Posenised, they will live
between two distrustful enemies.

The Poles need to think of the future more and the wrongs of Poland
less. They want less patriotic intrigue and more racial self-respect.
They are not only Poles but members of a greater brotherhood. My
impression is that Poland will "go Slav"--in spite of Cracow. But I am
not sure. I am haunted by the fear that Poland may still find her future
hampered by Poles who are, as people say, "too clever by half." An
incalculable Poland cannot be and will not be tolerated by the rest of
Europe.

And the overspreading of India by the British was in the same way very
clearly done under compulsion, first lest the Dutch or French should
exploit the vast resources of the peninsula against Britain, and then
for fear of a Russian exploitation. I am no apologist for British rule
in India; I think we have neglected vast opportunities there; it was our
business from the outset to build up a free and friendly Indian
confederation, and we have done not a tithe of what we might have done
to that end. But then we have not done a little of what we might have
done for our own country.

Nevertheless we have our case to plead, not only for going to India
but--with the Berlin papers still babbling of Bagdad and beyond[3]--of
sticking there very grimly. And so too the British have a fairly sound
excuse for grabbing Egypt in their fear lest in its phase of political
ineptitude it should be the means of strangling the British Empire as
the Turk in Constantinople has been used to strangle the Russian. None
of these justifications I admit are complete, but all deserve
consideration. It is no good arguing about the finer ethics of the
things that are; the business of sane men is to get things better. The
business of all sane men in all the countries of the Pledged Allies and
in America is manifestly to sink petty jealousies and a suicidal
competitiveness, and to organise co-operation with all the intellectual
forces they can find or develop in the subject countries, to convert
these inept national systems into politically efficient independent
organisations in a world peace alliance. If we fail to do that, then all
the inept states and all the subject states about the world will become
one great field for the sowing of tares by the enemy.

[Footnote 3: This was written late in February, 1916.]

So that with regard to the civilised just as with regard to the barbaric
regions of the "possessions" of the European-centred empires, we come to
the same conclusion. That on the whole the path of safety lies in the
direction of pooling them and of declaring a common policy of
progressive development leading to equality. The pattern of the United
States, in which the procedure is first the annexation of "territories"
and then their elevation to the rank of "States," must, with of course
far more difficulty and complication, be the pattern for the "empires"
of to-day--so far as they are regions of alien population. The path of
the Dominions, settled by emigrants akin to the home population,
Siberia, Canada, and so forth, to equal citizenship with the people of
the Mother Country is by comparison simple and plain.

And so the discussion of the future of the overseas "empires" brings us
again to the same realisation to which the discussion of nearly every
great issue arising out of this war has pointed, the realisation of the
imperative necessity of some great council or conference, some permanent
overriding body, call it what you will, that will deal with things more
broadly than any "nationalism" or "patriotic imperialism" can possibly
do. That body must come into human affairs. Upon the courage and
imagination of living statesmen it depends whether it will come simply
and directly into concrete reality or whether it will materialise slowly
through, it may be, centuries of blood and blundering from such phantom
anticipations as this, anticipations that now haunt the thoughts of all
politically-minded men.

XII. THE OUTLOOK FOR THE GERMANS

Section 1

Whatever some of us among the Allies may say, the future of Germany lies
with Germany. The utmost ambition of the Allies falls far short of
destroying or obliterating Germany; it is to give the Germans so
thorough and memorable an experience of war that they will want no more
of it for a few generations, and, failing the learning of that lesson,
to make sure that they will not be in a position to resume their
military aggressions upon mankind with any hope of success. After all,
it is not the will of the Allies that has determined even this resolve.
It is the declared and manifest will of Germany to become predominant in
the world that has created the Alliance against Germany, and forged and
tempered our implacable resolution to bring militarist Germany down. And
the nature of the coming peace and of the politics that will follow the
peace are much more dependent upon German affairs than upon anything
else whatever.

This is so clearly understood in Great Britain that there is scarcely a
newspaper that does not devote two or three columns daily to extracts
from the German newspapers, and from letters found upon German killed,
wounded, or prisoners, and to letters and descriptive articles from
neutrals upon the state of the German mind. There can be no doubt that
the British intelligence has grasped and kept its hold upon the real
issue of this war with an unprecedented clarity. At the outset there
came declarations from nearly every type of British opinion that this
war was a war against the Hohenzollern militarist idea, against
Prussianism, and not against Germany.

In that respect Britain has documented herself to the hilt. There have
been, of course, a number of passionate outcries and wild accusations
against Germans, as a race, during the course of the struggle; but to
this day opinion is steadfast not only in Britain, but if I may judge
from the papers I read and the talk I hear, throughout the whole
English-speaking community, that this is a war not of races but ideas. I
am so certain of this that I would say if Germany by some swift
convulsion expelled her dynasty and turned herself into a republic, it
would be impossible for the British Government to continue the war for
long, whether it wanted to do so or not. The forces in favour of
reconciliation would be too strong. There would be a complete revulsion
from the present determination to continue the war to its bitter but
conclusive end.

It is fairly evident that the present German Government understands this
frame of mind quite clearly, and is extremely anxious to keep it from
the knowledge of the German peoples. Every act or word from a British
source that suggests an implacable enmity against the Germans as a
people, every war-time caricature and insult, is brought to their
knowledge. It is the manifest interest of the Hohenzollerns and
Prussianism to make this struggle a race struggle and not merely a
political struggle, and to keep a wider breach between the peoples than
between the Governments. The "Made in Germany" grievance has been used
to the utmost against Great Britain as an indication of race hostility.
The everyday young German believes firmly that it was a blow aimed
specially at Germany; that no such regulation affected any goods but
German goods. And the English, with their characteristic heedlessness,
have never troubled to disillusion him. But even the British
caricaturist and the British soldier betray their fundamental opinion
of the matter in their very insults. They will not use a word of abuse
for the Germans as Germans; they call them "Huns," because they are
thinking of Attila, because they are thinking of them as invaders under
a monarch of peaceful France and Belgium, and not as a people living in
a land of their own.

In Great Britain there is to this day so little hostility for Germans as
such, that recently a nephew of Lord Haldane's, Sir George Makgill, has
considered it advisable to manufacture race hostility and provide the
Hohenzollerns with instances and quotations through the exertions of a
preposterous Anti-German League. Disregarding the essential evils of the
Prussian idea, this mischievous organisation has set itself to persuade
the British people that the Germans are diabolical _as a race_. It has
displayed great energy and ingenuity in pestering and insulting
naturalised Germans and people of German origin in Britain--below the
rank of the Royal Family, that is--and in making enduring bad blood
between them and the authentic British. It busies itself in breaking up
meetings at which sentiments friendly to Germany might be expressed,
sentiments which, if they could be conveyed to German hearers, would
certainly go far to weaken the determination of the German social
democracy to fight to the end.

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