What is Coming? by H. G. Wells

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So it seems to me that the following conclusions about the future of
Germany emerge from these considerations. It is improbable that there
will be any such revolution as overthrew French Imperialism in 1871; the
new Prussian Imperialism is closer to the tradition of the people and
much more firmly established through the educational propaganda of the
past half-century. But liberal forces in Germany may nevertheless be
strong enough to force a peace upon the Hohenzollern empire so soon as
any hopes of aggressive successes die away, before the utmost stage of
exhaustion is reached, early in 1917, perhaps, or at latest in 1918.
This, we suppose, will be a restrictive peace so far as Germany is
concerned, humiliating her and hampering her development. The German
Press will talk freely of a _revanche_ and the renewal of the struggle,
and this will help to consolidate the Pledged Allies in their resolve to
hold Germany on every front and to retard her economic and financial
recovery. The dynasty will lose prestige gradually, the true story of
the war will creep slowly into the German consciousness, and the idea of
a middle-class republic, like the French Republic, only defensively
militant and essentially pacific and industrial, will become more and
more popular in the country.

This will have the support of strong journalists, journalists of the
Harden type for example. The dynasty tends to become degenerate, so that
the probability of either some gross scandals or an ill-advised
reactionary movement back to absolutism may develop a crisis within a
few years of the peace settlement. The mercantile and professional
classes will join hands with the social democrats to remove the decaying
incubus of the Hohenzollern system, and Germany will become a more
modern and larger repetition of the Third French republic. This collapse
of the Germanic monarchical system may spread considerably beyond the
limits of the German empire. It will probably be effected without much
violence as a consequence of the convergence and maturity of many
streams of very obvious thought. Many of the monarchs concerned may find
themselves still left with their titles, palaces, and personal estates,
and merely deprived of their last vestiges of legal power. The way will
thus be opened for a gradual renewal of good feeling between the people
of Germany and the western Europeans. This renewal will be greatly
facilitated by the inevitable fall in the German birth-rate that the
shortage and economies of this war will have done much to promote, and
by the correlated discrediting of the expansionist idea. By 1960 or so
the alteration of perspectives will have gone so far that historians
will be a little perplexed to explain the causes of the Great War. The
militarist monomania of Germany will have become incomprehensible; her
_Welt Politik_ literature incredible and unreadable....

Such is my reading of the German horoscope.

I doubt if there will be nearly so much writing and reading about the
Great War in the latter half of the twentieth century as there was about
Napoleon at the end of the nineteenth. The Great War is essentially
undramatic, it has no hero, it has no great leaders. It is a story of
the common sense of humanity suppressing certain tawdry and vulgar ideas
and ambitions, and readjusting much that was wasteful and unjust in
social and economic organisation. It is the story of how the spirit of
man was awakened by a nightmare of a War Lord.... The nightmare will
fade out of mind, and the spirit of man, with revivified energies, will
set about the realities of life, the re-establishment of order, the
increase of knowledge and creation. Amid these realities the great
qualities of the Germans mark them for a distinguished and important
role.

Sec.3

The primary business of the Allies is not reconciliation with Germany.
Their primary concern is to organise a great League of Peace about the
world with which the American States and China may either unite or
establish a permanent understanding. Separate attempts to restore
friendship with the Germans will threaten the unanimity of the League of
Peace, and perhaps renew the intrigues and evils of the Germanic
dynastic system which this war may destroy. The essential restoration of
Germany must be the work of German men speaking plain sense to Germans,
and inducing their country to hold out its hand not to this or that
suspicious neighbour but to mankind. A militarist Germany is a Germany
self-condemned to isolation or world empire. A Germany which has
returned to the ways of peace, on the other hand, will be a country that
cannot be kept out of the system of civilisation. The tariff wall cannot
but be lowered, the watchful restrictions cannot but be discontinued
against such a Germany. Europe is a system with its heart half used, so
long as Germany is isolated. The German population is and will remain
the central and largest mass of people in Europe. That is a fact as
necessary as the Indianism of India.

To reconstruct modern civilisation without Germany would be a colossal
artificial task that would take centuries to do. It is inconceivable
that Germany will stand out of Europeanism so long as to allow the trade
routes of the world to be entirely deflected from her. Her own
necessities march with the natural needs of the world.

So that I give the alliance for the isolation of Germany at the outside
a life of forty years before it ceases to be necessary through the
recovered willingness of the Germans to lay aside aggression.

But this is not a thing to be run at too hastily. It may be easily
possible to delay this national general reconciliation of mankind by an
unreal effusion. There will be no advantage in forcing the feelings of
the late combatants. It is ridiculous to suppose that for the next
decade or so, whatever happens, any Frenchmen are going to feel genial
about the occupation of their north-east provinces, or any Belgians
smile at the memory of Dinant or Louvain, or the Poles or Serbs forgive
the desolation of their country, or any English or Russians take a
humorous view of the treatment their people have had as prisoners in
Germany. So long as these are living memories they will keep a barrier
of dislike about Germany. Nor is it probable that the ordinary German
is going to survey the revised map of Africa with a happy sense of
relief, or blame no one but himself for the vanished prosperity of 1914.
That is asking too much of humanity. Unless I know nothing of Germany,
Germany will bristle with "denkmals" to keep open all such sores. The
dislike of Germany by the allied nations will be returned in the
hostility of a thwarted and disappointed people. Not even the neutrals
will be aloof from these hostilities and resentments. The world will
still, in 1950 or so, be throwing much passion into the rights and
wrongs of the sinking of the _Lusitania_. There will be a bitterness in
the memories of this and the next generation that will make the
spectacle of ardent Frenchmen or Englishmen or Belgians or Russians
embracing Germans with gusto--unpleasant, to say the least of it.

We may bring ourselves to understand, we may bring ourselves to a cold
and reasonable forgiveness, we may suppress our Sir George Makgills and
so forth, but it will take sixty or seventy years for the two sides in
this present war to grow kindly again. Let us build no false hopes nor
pretend to any false generosities. These hatreds can die out only in one
way, by the passing of a generation, by the dying out of the wounded
and the wronged. Our business, our unsentimental business, is to set
about establishing such conditions that they will so die out. And that
is the business of the sane Germans too. Behind the barriers this war
will have set up between Germany and Anti-Germany, the intelligent men
in either camp must prepare the ultimate peace they will never enjoy,
must work for the days when their sons at least may meet as they
themselves can never meet, without accusation or resentment, upon the
common business of the World Peace. That is not to be done by any
conscientious sentimentalities, any slobbering denials of unforgettable
injuries. We want no Pro-German Leagues any more than we want
Anti-German Leagues. We want patience--and silence.

My reason insists upon the inevitableness and necessity of this ultimate
reconciliation. I will do no more than I must to injure Germany further,
and I will do all that I can to restore the unity of mankind. None the
less is it true that for me for all the rest of my life the Germans I
shall meet, the German things I shall see, will be smeared with the
blood of my people and my friends that the wilfulness of Germany has
spilt.

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