What is Coming? by H. G. Wells

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Depreciation of the currency means, of course, a continuing rise in
prices, a continuing writing off of debt. If labour has any real grasp
of its true interests it will not resent this. It will merely insist
steadfastly on a proper adjustment of its wages to the new standard. On
that point, however, it will be better to write later....

Let us see how far we have got in this guessing. We have considered
reasons that seem to point to the destruction of a great amount of old
property and old debt, and the creation of a great volume of new debt
before the end of the war, and we have adopted the ideas that currency
will probably have depreciated more and more and prices risen right up
to the very end.

There will be by that time a general habit of saving throughout the
community, a habit more firmly established perhaps in the propertied
than in the wages-earning class. People will be growing accustomed to a
dear and insecure world. They will adopt a habit of caution; become
desirous of saving and security.

Directly the phase of enormous war loans ends, the new class of
_rentiers_ holding the various great new national loans will find
themselves drawing this collectively vast income and anxious to invest
it. They will for a time be receiving the bulk of the unearned income of
the world. Here, in the high prices representing demand and the need for
some reinvestment of interest representing supply, we have two of the
chief factors that are supposed to be necessary to a phase of business
enterprise. Will the economic history of the next few decades be the
story of a restoration of the capitalistic system upon a new basis?
Shall we all become investors, speculators, or workers toiling our way
to a new period of security, cheapness and low interest, a restoration
of the park, the enclosure, the gold standard and the big automobile,
with only this difference--that the minimum wage will be somewhere about
two pounds, and that a five-pound note will purchase about as much as a
couple of guineas would do in 1913?

That is practically parallel with what happened in the opening half of
the nineteenth century after the Napoleonic wars, and it is not an
agreeable outlook for those who love the common man or the nobility of
life. But if there is any one principle sounder than another of all
those that guide the amateur in prophecy, it is that _history never
repeats itself_. The human material in which those monetary changes and
those developments of credit will occur will be entirely different from
the social medium of a hundred years ago.

The nature of the State has altered profoundly in the last century. The
later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries constituted a period
of extreme individualism. What were called "economic forces" had
unrestricted play. In the minds of such people as Harriet Martineau and
Herbert Spencer they superseded God. People were no longer reproached
for "flying in the face of Providence," but for "flying in the face of
Political Economy."

In that state of freedom you got whatever you could in any way you
could; you were not your neighbour's keeper, and except that it
interfered with the enterprise of pickpockets, burglars and forgers, and
kept the dice loaded in favour of landlords and lawyers, the State stood
aside from the great drama of human getting. For industrialism and
speculation the State's guiding maxim was _laissez faire_.

The State is now far less aloof and far more constructive. It is far
more aware of itself and a common interest. Germany has led the way from
a system of individuals and voluntary associations in competition
towards a new order of things, a completer synthesis. This most modern
State is far less a swarming conflict of businesses than a great
national business. It will emerge from this war much more so than it
went in, and the thing is and will remain so plain and obvious that only
the greediest and dullest people among the Pledged Allies will venture
to disregard it. The Allied nations, too, will have to rescue their
economic future from individual grab and grip and chance.

The second consideration that forbids us to anticipate any parallelism
of the history of 1915-45 with 1815-45 is the greater lucidity of the
general mind, the fact that all Western Europe, down to the agricultural
labourers, can read and write and does read newspapers and "get ideas."
The explanation of economic and social processes that were mysterious to
the elect a hundred years ago are now the commonplaces of the tap-room.
What happened then darkly, and often unconsciously, must happen in
1916-26 openly and controllably. The current bankruptcy and liquidation
and the coming reconstruction of the economic system of Europe will go
on in a quite unprecedented amount of light. We shall see and know what
is happening much more clearly than anything of the kind has ever been
seen before.

It is not only that people will have behind them, as a light upon what
is happening, the experiences and discussions of a hundred years, but
that the international situation will be far plainer than it has ever
been. This war has made Germany the central fact in all national affairs
about the earth. It is not going to destroy Germany, and it seems
improbable that either defeat or victory, or any mixture of these, will
immediately alter the cardinal fact of Germany's organised
aggressiveness.

The war will not end the conflict of anti-Germany and Germany, That will
only end when the results of fifty years of aggressive education in
Germany have worn away. This will be so plain that the great bulk of
people everywhere will not only see their changing economic
relationships far more distinctly than such things have been seen
hitherto, but that they will see them as they have never been seen
before, definitely orientated to the threat of German world
predominance. The landlord who squeezes, the workman who strikes and
shirks, the lawyer who fogs and obstructs, will know, and will know that
most people know, that what he does is done, not under an empty,
regardless heaven, but in the face of an unsleeping enemy and in
disregard of a continuous urgent necessity for unity.

So far we have followed this speculation upon fairly firm ground, but
now our inquiry must plunge into a jungle of far more difficult and
uncertain possibilities. Our next stage brings us to the question of how
people and peoples and classes of people are going to react to the new
conditions of need and knowledge this war will have brought about, and
to the new demands that will be made upon them.

This is really a question of how far they will prove able to get out of
the habits and traditions of their former social state, how far they
will be able to take generous views and make sacrifices and unselfish
efforts, and how far they will go in self-seeking or class selfishness
regardless of the common welfare. This is a question we have to ask
separately of each great nation, and of the Central Powers as a whole,
and of the Allies as a whole, before we can begin to estimate the
posture of the peoples of the world in, say, 1946.

Now let me here make a sort of parenthesis on human nature. It will be
rather platitudinous, but it is a necessary reminder for what follows.

So far as I have been able to observe, nobody lives steadily at one
moral level. If we are wise we shall treat no man and no class--and for
the matter of that no nation--as either steadfastly malignant or
steadfastly disinterested. There are phases in my life when I could die
quite cheerfully for an idea; there are phases when I would not stir six
yards to save a human life. Most people fluctuate between such extremes.
Most people are self-seeking, but most people will desist from a
self-seeking cause if they see plainly and clearly that it is not in the
general interest, and much more readily if they also perceive that other
people are of the same mind and know that they know their course is
unsound.

The fundamental error of orthodox political economy and of Marxian
socialism is to assume the inveterate selfishness of everyone. But most
people are a little more disposed to believe what it is to their
interest to believe than the contrary. Most people abandon with
reluctance ways of living and doing that have served them well. Most
people can see the neglect of duty in other classes more plainly than
they do in their own.

This war has brought back into the everyday human life of Europe the
great and overriding conception of devotion to a great purpose. But that
does not imply clear-headedness in correlating the ways of one's
ordinary life with this great purpose. It is no good treating as cynical
villainy things that merely exhibit the incapacity of our minds to live
consistently.

One Labour paper a month or so ago was contrasting Mr. Asquith's
eloquent appeals to the working man to economise and forgo any rise in
wages with the photographs that were appearing simultaneously in the
smart papers of the very smart marriage of Mr. Asquith's daughter. I
submit that by that sort of standard none of us will be blameless. But
without any condemnation, it is easy to understand that the initiative
to tax almost to extinction large automobiles, wedding dresses,
champagne, pate de foie gras and enclosed parks, instead of gin and
water, bank holiday outings and Virginia shag, is less likely to come
from the Prime Minister class than from the class of dock labourers.
There is an unconscious class war due to habit and insufficient thinking
and insufficient sympathy that will play a large part in the
distribution of the burthen of the State bankruptcy that is in progress,
and in the subsequent readjustment of national life.

And having made this parenthesis, I may perhaps go on to point out the
peculiar limitations under which various classes will be approaching the
phase of reorganisation, without being accused of making this or that
class the villain of an anticipatory drama.

Now, three great classes will certainly resist the valiant
reconstruction of economic life with a vigour in exact proportion to
their baseness, stupidity and narrowness of outlook. They will, as
classes, come up for a moral judgment, on whose verdict the whole future
of Western civilisation depends. If they cannot achieve a considerable,
an unprecedented display of self-sacrifice, unselfish wisdom, and
constructive vigour, if the community as a whole can produce no forces
sufficient to restrain their lower tendencies, then the intelligent
father had better turn his children's faces towards the New World. For
Europe will be busy with social disorder for a century.

The first great class is the class that owns and holds land and
land-like claims upon the community, from the Throne downward. This
Court and land-holding class cannot go on being rich and living rich
during the strains of the coming years. The reconstructing world cannot
bear it. Whatever rises in rent may occur through the rise in prices,
must go to meet the tremendous needs of the State.

This class, which has so much legislative and administrative power in at
least three of the great belligerents--in Great Britain and Germany
perhaps most so--must be prepared to see itself taxed, and must be
willing to assist in its own taxation to the very limit of its
statistical increment. The almost vindictive greed of the landowners
that blackened the history of England after Waterloo, and brought Great
Britain within sight of revolution, must not be repeated. The British
Empire cannot afford a revolution in the face of the Central European
Powers. But in the past century there has been an enormous change in
men's opinions and consciences about property; whereas we were
Individualists, now we are Socialists. The British lord, the German
junker, has none of the sense of unqualified rights that his
great-grandfather had, and he is aware of a vigour of public criticism
that did not exist in the former time....

How far will these men get out of the tradition of their birth and
upbringing?

Next comes the great class of lawyers who, through the idiotic method of
voting in use in modern democracies, are able practically to rule Great
Britain, and who are powerful and influential in all democratic
countries.

In order to secure a certain independence and integrity in its courts,
Great Britain long ago established the principle of enormously
overpaying its judges and lawyers. The natural result has been to give
our law courts and the legal profession generally a bias in favour of
private wealth against both the public interest and the proletariat. It
has also given our higher national education an overwhelming direction
towards the training of advocates and against science and constructive
statecraft. An ordinary lawyer has no idea of making anything; that
tendency has been destroyed in his mind; he waits and sees and takes
advantage of opportunity. Everything that can possibly be done in
England is done to make our rulers Micawbers and Artful Dodgers.

One of the most anxious questions that a Briton can ask himself to-day
is just how far the gigantic sufferings and still more monstrous
warnings of this war have shocked the good gentlemen who must steer the
ship of State through the strong rapids of the New Peace out of this
forensic levity their training has imposed upon them....

There, again, there are elements of hope. The lawyer has heard much
about himself in the past few years. His conscience may check his
tradition. And we have a Press--it has many faults, but it is no longer
a lawyer's Press....

And the third class which has immediate interests antagonistic to bold
reconstructions of our national methods is that vaguer body, the body of
investing capitalists, the savers, the usurers, who live on dividends.
It is a vast class, but a feeble class in comparison with the other
two; it is a body rather than a class, a weight rather than a power. It
consists of all sorts of people with nothing in common except the
receipt of unearned income....

All these classes, by instinct and the baser kinds of reason also, will
be doing their best to check the rise in prices, stop and reverse the
advance in wages, prevent the debasement of the circulation, and
facilitate the return to a gold standard and a repressive social
stability. They will be resisting any comprehensive national
reconstruction, any increase in public officials, any "conscription" of
land or railways or what not for the urgent civil needs of the State.
They will have fighting against these tendencies something in their own
consciences, something in public opinion, the tradition of public
devotion their own dead sons have revived--and certain other forces.

They will have over against them the obvious urgent necessities of the
time.

The most urgent necessity will be to get back the vast moiety of the
population that has been engaged either in military service or the
making of munitions to productive work, to the production of food and
necessary things, and to the restoration of that export trade which, in
the case of Great Britain at least, now that her overseas investments
have been set off by overseas war debts, is essential to the food
supply. There will be coming back into civil life, not merely thousands,
but millions of men who have been withdrawn from it. They will feel that
they have deserved well of their country. They will have had their
imaginations greatly quickened by being taken away from the homes and
habits to which they were accustomed. They will have been well fed and
inured to arms, to danger, and the chances of death. They will have no
illusions about the conduct of the war by the governing classes, or the
worshipful heroism of peers and princes. They will know just how easy is
courage, and how hard is hardship, and the utter impossibility of doing
well in war or peace under the orders of detected fools.

This vast body will constitute a very stimulating congregation of
spectators in any attempt on the part of landlord, lawyer and investor
to resume the old political mystery dance, in which rents are to be sent
up and wages down, while the old feuds of Wales and Ireland, ancient
theological and sectarian jealousies and babyish loyalties, and so forth
are to be waved in the eyes of the no longer fascinated realist.

"Meanwhile," they will say, with a stiff impatience unusual in their
class, "about _us_?" ...

Here are the makings of internal conflict in every European country. In
Russia the landlord and lawyer, in France the landlord, are perhaps of
less account, and in France the investor is more universal and jealous.
In Germany, where Junker and Court are most influential and brutal,
there is a larger and sounder and broader tradition of practical
efficiency, a modernised legal profession, and a more widely diffused
scientific imagination.

How far in each country will imagination triumph over tradition and
individualism? How far does the practical bankruptcy of Western
civilisation mean a revolutionary smash-up, and a phase that may last
for centuries, of disorder and more and more futile conflict? And how
far does it mean a reconstruction of human society, within a few score
of years, upon sounder and happier lines? Must that reconstruction be
preceded by a revolution in all or any of the countries?

To what extent can the world produce the imagination it needs? That, so
far, is the most fundamental question to which our prophetic
explorations have brought us.

IV. BRAINTREE, BOCKING, AND THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD

Will the war be followed by a period of great distress, social disorder
and a revolution in Europe, or shall we pull through the crisis without
violent disaster? May we even hope that Great Britain will step straight
out of the war into a phase of restored and increasing welfare?

Like most people, I have been trying to form some sort of answer to this
question. My state of mind in the last few months has varied from a
considerable optimism to profound depression. I have met and talked to
quite a number of young men in khaki--ex-engineers, ex-lawyers,
ex-schoolmasters, ex-business men of all sorts--and the net result of
these interviews has been a buoyant belief that there is in Great
Britain the pluck, the will, the intelligence to do anything, however
arduous and difficult, in the way of national reconstruction. And on the
other hand there is a certain stretch of road between Dunmow and
Coggeshall....

That stretch of road is continually jarring with my optimistic
thoughts. It is a strongly pro-German piece of road. It supports
allegations against Great Britain, as, for instance, that the British
are quite unfit to control their own affairs, let alone those of an
empire; that they are an incompetent people, a pig-headedly stupid
people, a wasteful people, a people incapable of realising that a man
who tills his field badly is a traitor and a weakness to his country....

Let me place the case of this high road through Braintree (Bocking
intervening) before the reader. It is, you will say perhaps, very small
beer. But a straw shows the way the wind blows. It is a trivial matter
of road metal, mud, and water-pipes, but it is also diagnostic of the
essential difficulties in the way of the smooth and rapid reconstruction
of Great Britain--and very probably of the reconstruction of all
Europe--after the war. The Braintree high road, I will confess, becomes
at times an image of the world for me. It is a poor, spiritless-looking
bit of road, with raw stones on one side of it. It is also, I perceive,
the high destiny of man in conflict with mankind. It is the way to
Harwich, Holland, Russia, China, and the whole wide world.

Even at the first glance it impresses one as not being the road that
would satisfy an energetic and capable people. It is narrow for a high
road, and in the middle of it one is checked by an awkward bend, by
cross-roads that are not exactly cross-roads, so that one has to turn
two blind corners to get on eastward, and a policeman, I don't know at
what annual cost, has to be posted to nurse the traffic across. Beyond
that point one is struck by the fact that the south side is considerably
higher than the north, that storm water must run from the south side to
the north and lie there. It does, and the north side has recently met
the trouble by putting down raw flints, and so converting what would be
a lake into a sort of flint pudding. Consequently one drives one's car
as much as possible on the south side of this road. There is a
suggestion of hostility and repartee between north and south side in
this arrangement, which the explorer's inquiries will confirm. It may be
only an accidental parallelism with profounder fact; I do not know. But
the middle of this high road is a frontier. The south side belongs to
the urban district of Braintree; the north to the rural district of
Bocking.

If the curious inquirer will take pick and shovel he will find at any
rate one corresponding dualism below the surface. He will find a
Bocking water main supplying the houses on the north side and a
Braintree water main supplying the south. I rather suspect that the
drains are also in duplicate. The total population of Bocking and
Braintree is probably little more than thirteen thousand souls
altogether, but for that there are two water supplies, two sets of
schools, two administrations.

To the passing observer the rurality of the Bocking side is
indistinguishable from the urbanity of the Braintree side; it is just a
little muddier. But there are dietetic differences. If you will present
a Bocking rustic with a tin of the canned fruit that is popular with the
Braintree townsfolk, you discover one of these differences. A dustman
perambulates the road on the Braintree side, and canned food becomes
possible and convenient therefore. But the Braintree grocers sell canned
food with difficulty into Bocking. Bocking, less fortunate than its
neighbour, has no dustman apparently, and is left with the tin on its
hands. It can either bury it in its garden--if it has a garden--take it
out for a walk wrapped in paper and drop it quietly in a ditch, if
possible in the Braintree area, or build a cairn with it and its
predecessors and successors in honour of the Local Government Board
(President L5,000, Parliamentary Secretary L1,500, Permanent Secretary
L2,000, Legal Adviser L1,000 upward, a total administrative expenditure
of over L300,000 ...). In death Bocking and Braintree are still divided.
They have their separate cemeteries....

Now to any disinterested observer there lies about the Braintree-Bocking
railway station one community. It has common industries and common
interests. There is no _octroi_ or anything of that sort across the
street. The shops and inns on the Bocking side of the main street are
indistinguishable from those on the Braintree side. The inhabitants of
the two communities intermarry freely. If this absurd separation did not
exist, no one would have the impudence to establish it now. It is
wasteful, unfair (because the Bocking piece is rather better off than
Braintree and with fewer people, so that there is a difference in the
rates), and for nine-tenths of the community it is more or less of a
nuisance.

It is also a nuisance to the passing public because of such
inconvenience as the asymmetrical main road. It hinders local
development and the development of a local spirit. It may, of course,
appeal perhaps to the humorous outlook of the followers of Mr. G.K.
Chesterton and Mr. Belloc, who believe that this war is really a war in
the interests of the Athanasian Creed, fatness, and unrestricted drink
against science, discipline, and priggishly keeping fit enough to join
the army, as very good fun indeed, good matter for some jolly reeling
ballad about Roundabout and Roundabout, the jolly town of Roundabout;
but to anyone else the question of how it is that this wasteful
Bocking-Braintree muddle, with its two boards, its two clerks, its two
series of jobs and contracts, manages to keep on, was even before the
war a sufficiently discouraging one.

It becomes now a quite crucial problem. Because the muddle between the
sides of the main road through Bocking and Braintree is not an isolated
instance; it is a fair sample of the way things are done in Great
Britain; it is an intimation of the way in which the great task of
industrial resettlement that the nation must face may be attempted.

It is--or shall I write, "it may be"?

That is just the question I do not settle in my mind. I would like to
think that I have hit upon a particularly bad case of entangled local
government. But it happens that whenever I have looked into local
affairs I have found the same sort of waste and--insobriety of
arrangement. When I started, a little while back, to go to Braintree to
verify these particulars, I was held up by a flood across the road
between Little Easton and Dunmow. Every year that road is flooded and
impassable for some days, because a bit of the affected stretch is under
the County Council and a bit under the Little Easton Parish Council, and
they cannot agree about the contribution of the latter. These things
bump against the most unworldly. And when one goes up the scale from the
urban district and rural district boundaries, one finds equally crazy
county arrangements, the same tangle of obstacle in the way of quick,
effective co-ordinations, the same needless multiplicity of clerks, the
same rich possibilities of litigation, misunderstanding, and deadlocks
of opinion between areas whose only difference is that a mischievous
boundary has been left in existence between them. And so on up to
Westminster. And to still greater things....

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