What is Coming? by H. G. Wells

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A few years ago we were all discussing who should buy _The Times_; I do
not know what chances an agent of the Kaiser might not have had if he
had been sufficiently discreet. This venality will be far more dangerous
to the Allied countries after the war than during its continuance. So
long as the state of war lasts there are prompt methods available for
any direct newspaper treason, and it is in the neutral countries only
that the buying and selling of papers against the national interest has
occurred to any marked extent.

Directly peace is signed, unless we provide for the event beforehand,
our Press will pass under neutral conditions. There will be nothing to
prevent, for example, any foreseeing foreign power coming into Great
Britain, offering to buy up not only this paper or that, but also, what
is far more important, to buy up the great book and newspaper
distributing firms. These vitally important public services, so far as
law and theory go, will be as entirely in the market as railway tickets
at a station unless we make some intelligent preventive provision.
Unless we do, and if, as is highly probable, peace puts no immediate
stop to international malignity, the Germans will be bigger fools than I
think them if they do not try to get hold of these public services. It
is a matter of primary importance in the outlook of every country in
Europe, therefore, that it should insist upon and secure responsible
native ownership of every newspaper and news and book distributing
agency, and the most drastic punishment for newspaper corruption. Given
that guarantee against foreign bribery, we may, I think, let free speech
rage. This is so much a matter of common sense that I cannot imagine
even British "wait and see" waiting for the inevitable assault upon our
national journalistic virtue that will follow the peace.

So I spread out the considerations that I think justify our forecasting,
in a very changed Great Britain and a changed Europe, firstly, a legal
profession with a quickened conscience, a sense of public function and a
reformed organisation, and, secondly, a Press, which is recognised and
held accountable in law and in men's minds, as an estate of the realm,
as something implicitly under oath to serve the State. I do not agree
with Professor Michel's pessimistic conclusion that peace will bring
back exacerbated party politics and a new era of futility to the
democratic countries. I believe that the tremendous demonstration of
this war (a demonstration that gains weight with every week of our
lengthening effort), of the waste and inefficiency of the system of
1913-14, will break down at last even the conservatism of the most
rigidly organised and powerful and out-of-date of all professions.

It is not only that I look to the indignation and energy of intelligent
men who are outside our legal and political system to reform it, but to
those who are in it now. A man may be quietly parasitic upon his mother,
and yet incapable of matricide. So much of our national energy and
ability has been attracted to the law in Great Britain that our nation,
with our lawyers in modern clothing instead of wigs and gowns, lawyers
who have studied science and social theory instead of the spoutings of
Cicero and the loquacious artfulness of W.E. Gladstone, lawyers who look
forward at the destiny of their country instead of backward and at the
markings on their briefs, may yet astonish the world. The British lawyer
really holds the future of the British Empire and, indeed, I could
almost say, of the whole world in his hands at the present time, as much
as any single sort of man can be said to hold it. Inside his skull
imagination and a heavy devil of evil precedent fight for his soul and
the welfare of the world. And generosity fights against tradition and
individualism. Only the men of the Press have anything like the same
great possibilities of betrayal.

To these two sorts of men the dim spirit of the nation looks for such
leading as a democracy can follow. To them the men with every sort of
special ability, the men of science, the men of this or that sort of
administrative ability and experience, the men of creative gifts and
habits, every sort of man who wants the world to get on, look for the
removal (or the ingenious contrivance) of obstructions and
entanglements, for the allaying (or the fomentation) of suspicion,
misapprehension, and ignorant opposition, for administration (or class
blackmail).

Yet while I sit as a prophetic amateur weighing these impalpable forces
of will and imagination and habit and interest in lawyer, pressman,
maker and administrator, and feeling by no means over-confident of the
issue, it dawns upon me suddenly that there is another figure present,
who has never been present before in the reckoning up of British
affairs. It is a silent figure. This figure stands among the pressmen
and among the lawyers and among the workers; for a couple of decades at
least he will be everywhere in the British system; he is young and he is
uniformed in khaki, and he brings with him a new spirit into British
life, the spirit of the new soldier, the spirit of subordination to a
common purpose....

France, which has lived so much farther and deeper and more bitterly
than Britain, knows....[2]

[Footnote 2: In "An Englishman Looks at the World," a companion volume
to the present one, which was first published by Messrs. Cassell early
in 1914, and is now obtainable in a shilling edition, the reader will
find a full discussion of the probable benefit of proportional
representation in eliminating the party hack from political life.
Proportional representation would probably break up party organisations
altogether, and it would considerably enhance the importance and
responsibility of the Press. It would do much to accelerate the
development of the state of affairs here foreshadowed, in which the role
of government and opposition under the party system will be played by
elected representatives and Press respectively.]

VII. THE NEW EDUCATION

Some few months ago Mr. Harold Spender, in the _Daily News_, was calling
attention to a very significant fact indeed. The higher education in
England, and more particularly the educational process of Oxford and
Cambridge, which has been going on continuously since the Middle Ages,
is practically in a state of suspense. Oxford and Cambridge have
stopped. They have stopped so completely that Mr. Spender can speculate
whether they can ever pick up again and resume upon the old lines.

For my own part, as the father of two sons who are at present in
mid-school, I hope with all my heart that they will not. I hope that the
Oxford and Cambridge of unphilosophical classics and Little-go Greek for
everybody, don's mathematics, bad French, ignorance of all Europe except
Switzerland, forensic exercises in the Union Debating Society, and cant
about the Gothic, the Oxford and Cambridge that turned boys full of life
and hope and infinite possibility into barristers, politicians,
mono-lingual diplomatists, bishops, schoolmasters, company directors,
and remittance men, are even now dead.

Quite recently I passed through Cambridge, and, with the suggestions of
Mr. Spender in my mind, I paused to savour the atmosphere of the place.
He had very greatly understated the facts of the case. He laid stress
upon the fact that instead of the normal four thousand undergraduates or
so, there are now scarcely four hundred. But before I was fairly in
Cambridge I realised that that gives no idea of the real cessation of
English education. Of the first seven undergraduates I saw upon the
Trumpington road, one was black, three were coloured, and one of the
remaining three was certainly not British, but, I should guess,
Spanish-American. And it isn't only the undergraduates who have gone.
All the dons of military age and quality have gone too, or are staying
up not in caps and gowns, but in khaki; all the vigorous teachers are
soldiering; there are no dons left except those who are unfit for
service--and the clergy. Buildings, libraries, empty laboratories, empty
lecture theatres, vestiges, refugees, neutrals, khaki; that is Cambridge
to-day.

There never was before, there never may be again, so wonderful an
opportunity for a cleaning-up and sweeping-out of those two places, and
for a profitable new start in British education.

The cessation of Oxford and Cambridge does not give the full measure of
the present occasion. All the other British universities are in a like
case. And the schools which feed them have been practically swept clean
of their senior boys. And not a tithe of any of this war class of
schoolboys will ever go to the universities now, not a tithe of the war
class of undergraduates will ever return. Between the new education and
the old there will be a break of two school generations. For the next
thirty or forty years an exceptional class of men will play a leading
part in British affairs, men who will have learnt more from reality and
less from lectures than either the generations that preceded or the
generations that will follow them. The subalterns of the great war will
form a distinct generation and mark an epoch. Their experiences of need,
their sense of deficiencies, will certainly play a large part in the
reconstitution of British education. _The stamp of the old system will
not be on them_.

Now is the time to ask what sort of training should a university give to
produce the ruling, directing, and leading men which it exists to
produce? Upon that Great Britain will need to make up its mind
speedily. It is not a matter for to-morrow or the day after; it is
necessary to decide now what it is the Britain that is coming will need
and want, and to set to work revising the admission and degree
requirements, and reconstructing all those systems of public
examinations for the public services that necessarily dominate school
and university teaching, before the universities and schools reassemble.
If the rotten old things once get together again, the rotten old things
will have a new lease of life. This and no other is the hour for
educational reconstruction. And it is in the decisions and readjustments
of schools and lectures and courses, far more than anywhere else, that
the real future of Great Britain will be decided. Equally true is this
of all the belligerent countries. Much of the future has a kind of
mechanical inevitableness, but here far more than anywhere else, can a
few resolute and capable men mould the spirit and determine the quality
of the Europe to come.

Now surely the chief things that are needed in the education of a ruling
class are these--first, the selection and development of Character,
then the selection and development of Capacity, and, thirdly, the
imparting of Knowledge upon broad and comprehensive lines, and the
power of rapidly taking up and using such detailed knowledge as may be
needed for special occasions. It is upon the first count that the
British schools and universities have been most open to criticism. We
have found the British university-trained class under the fiery tests of
this war an evasive, temporising class of people, individualistic,
ungenerous, and unable either to produce or obey vigorous leadership. On
the whole, it is a matter for congratulation, it says wonderful things
for the inherent natural qualities of the English-speaking peoples, that
things have proved no worse than they are, considering the nature of the
higher education under which they have suffered.

Consider in what that educational process has consisted. Its backbone
has been the teaching of Latin by men who can read, write, and speak it
rather worse than a third-rate Babu speaks English, and of Ancient Greek
by teachers who at best half know this fine lost language. They do not
expect any real mastery of either tongue by their students, and
naturally, therefore, no real mastery is ever attained. The boys and
young men just muff about at it for three times as long as would be
needed to master completely both those tongues if they had "live"
teachers, and so they acquire habits of busy futility and petty
pedantry in all intellectual processes that haunt them throughout life.
There are also sterile mathematical studies that never get from
"exercises" to practice. There is a pretence of studying philosophy
based on Greek texts that few of the teachers and none of the taught can
read comfortably, and a certain amount of history. The Modern History
School at Oxford, for example, is the queerest collection of chunks of
reading. English history from the beginning, with occasional glances at
Continental affairs, European history for about a century, bits of
economics, and--the _Politics_ of Aristotle! It is not education; it is
a jack-daw collection....This sort of jumble has been the essentials of
the more pretentious type of "higher education" available in Great
Britain up to the present.

In this manner, through all the most sensitive and receptive years of
life, our boys have been trained in "how not to get there," in a variety
of disconnected subjects, by men who have never "got there," and it
would be difficult to imagine any curriculum more calculated to produce
a miscellaneous incompetence. They have also, it happens, received a
certain training in _savoir faire_ through the collective necessities of
school life, and a certain sharpening in the arts of advocacy through
the debating society. Except for these latter helps, they have had to
face the world with minds neither more braced, nor more trained, nor
more informed than any "uneducated" man's.

Surely the first condition that should be laid down for the new
education in Europe is that whatever is undertaken must be undertaken in
grim earnest and done. It is ridiculous to talk about the
"character-forming" value of any study that does not go through to an
end. Manifestly Greek must be dropped as a part of the general
curriculum for a highly educated man, for the simple reason that now
there are scarcely any competent teachers, and because the sham of
teaching it partially and pretentiously demoralises student and school
alike. The claim of the clergy and so forth to "know" Greek is one of
the many corrupting lies in British intellectual life. English comic
writers never weary of sneering at the Hindu who claimed to be a "failed
B.A.," but what is the ordinary classical degree man of an English
university but a "failed" Greek scholar? Latin, too, must be either
reduced to the position of a study supplementary to the native tongue,
or brought up to an honest level of efficiency.

French and German in the case of the English, and English in the case
of the French and Russians, are essentially governess languages; any
intelligent boy or girl from a reasonably prosperous home ought to be
able to read, write, and speak either before fifteen; they are to be
taken by the way rather than regarded as a fundamental part of
education. The French, German, or English literature and literary
development up to and including contemporary work is, of course, an
entirely different matter. But there can be no doubt of the great
educational value of some highly inflected and well-developed language
_taught by men to whom it is a genuine means of expression_. Educational
needs and public necessity point alike to such languages as Russian or,
in the case of Great Britain, Hindustani to supply this sound training.

If Great Britain means business after this war, if she is to do her duty
by the Eastern world she controls, she will not stick at the petty
expense of getting a few hundreds of good Russian and Hindu teachers
into the country, and she will place Russian and Hindustani upon at
least an equal footing with Greek in all her university and competitive
examinations. Moreover, it is necessary to set a definite aim of
application before university mathematical teaching. As the first
condition of character-building in all these things, the student should
do what he ostensibly sets out to do. No degree and no position should
be attainable by half accomplishment.

Of course, languages and mathematics do not by any means round off the
education of a man of the leading classes. There is no doubt much
exercise in their attainment, much value in their possession. But the
essence of the higher education is now, as it always has been,
philosophy; not the antiquated pretence of "reading" Plato and
Aristotle, but the thorough and subtle examination of those great
questions of life that most exercise and strengthen the mind. Surely
that is the essential difference of the "educated" and the "common" man.
The former has thought, and thought out thoroughly and clearly, the
relations of his mind to the universe as a whole, and of himself to the
State and life. A mind untrained in swift and adequate criticism is
essentially an uneducated mind, though it has as many languages as a
courier and as much computation as a bookie.

And what is our fundamental purpose in all this reform of our higher
education? It is neither knowledge nor technical skill, but to make our
young men talk less and think more, and to think more swiftly, surely,
and exactly. For that we want less debating society and more philosophy,
fewer prizes for forensic ability and more for strength and vigour of
analysis. The central seat of character is the mind. A man of weak
character thinks vaguely, a man of clear intellectual decisions acts
with precision and is free from vacillation. A country of educated men
acts coherently, smites swiftly, plans ahead; a country of confused
education is a country of essential muddle.

It is as the third factor in education that the handling and experience
of knowledge comes, and of all knowledge that which is most accessible,
most capable of being handled with the greatest variety of educational
benefit, so as to include the criticism of evidence, the massing of
facts, the extraction and testing of generalisations, lies in the two
groups of the biological sciences and the exact sciences. No doubt a
well-planned system of education will permit of much varied
specialisation, will, indeed, specialise those who have special gifts
from a very early age, will have corners for Greek, Hebrew, Sanscrit,
philology, archaeology, Christian theology, and so on, and so on;
nevertheless, for that great mass of sound men of indeterminate
all-round ability who are the intellectual and moral backbone of a
nation, it is in scientific studies that their best training lies,
studies most convenient to undertake and most readily applied in life.
From either of the two groups of the sciences one may pass on to
research or to technical applications leading directly to the public
service. The biological sciences broaden out through psychology and
sociology to the theory and practice of law, and to political life. They
lead also to medical and agricultural administration. The exact sciences
lead to the administrative work of industrialism, and to general
economics.

These are the broad, clear lines of the educational necessities of a
modern community, plain enough to see, so that every man who is not
blinded by prejudice and self-interest can see them to-day. We have now
before us a phase of opportunity in educational organisation that will
never recur again. Now that the apostolic succession of the old pedagogy
is broken, and the entire system discredited, it seems incredible that
it can ever again be reconstituted in its old seats upon the old lines.
In these raw, harsh days of boundless opportunity, the opportunity of
the new education, because it is the most fundamental, is assuredly the
greatest of all.

VIII. WHAT THE WAR IS DOING FOR WOMEN

Section 1

To discuss the effect of this war upon the relations of men and women to
each other is to enter upon the analysis of a secular process compared
with which even the vast convulsions and destructions of this world
catastrophe appear only as jolts and incidents and temporary
interruptions. There are certain matters that sustain a perennial
development, that are on a scale beyond the dramatic happenings of
history; wars, the movements of peoples and races, economic changes,
such things may accelerate or stimulate or confuse or delay, but they
cannot arrest the endless thinking out, the growth and perfecting of
ideas, upon the fundamental relationships of human Beings. First among
such eternally progressive issues is religion, the relationship of man
to God; next in importance and still more immediate is the matter of
men's relations to women. In such matters each phase is a new phase;
whatever happens, there is no going back and beginning over again. The
social life, like the religious life, must grow and change until the
human story is at an end.

So that this war involves, in this as in so many matters, no fundamental
set-back, no reversals nor restorations. At the most it will but realise
things already imagined, release things latent. The nineteenth century
was a period of unprecedented modification of social relationships; but
great as these changes were, they were trivial in comparison with the
changes in religious thought and the criticism of moral ideals. Hell was
the basis of religious thinking in A.D. 1800, and the hangman was at the
back of the law; in 1900 both Hell and the hangman seemed on the verge
of extinction. The creative impulse was everywhere replacing fear and
compulsion in human motives. The opening decade of the twentieth century
was a period of unprecedented abundance in everything necessary to human
life, of vast accumulated resources, of leisure and release. It was
also, because of that and because of the changed social and religious
spirit, a period of great social disorganisation and confused impulses.

We British can already look back to the opening half of 1914 as to an
age gone for ever. Except that we were all alive then and can remember,
it has become now almost as remote, almost as "historical," as the days
before the French Revolution. Our days, our methods and reactions, are
already so different. The greater part of the freedom of movement, the
travel and going to and fro, the leisure, the plenty and carelessness,
that distinguished early twentieth century life from early nineteenth
century life, has disappeared. Most men are under military discipline,
and every household economises. The whole British people has been
brought up against such elementary realities of need, danger, and
restraint as it never realised before. We discover that we had been
living like Olympians in regard to worldly affairs, we had been
irresponsibles, amateurs. Much of that fatness of life, the wrappings
and trimmings of our life, has been stripped off altogether. That has
not altered the bones of life; it has only made them plainer; but it has
astonished us as much as if looking into a looking-glass one suddenly
found oneself a skeleton. Or a diagram.

What was going on before this war in the relations of men and women is
going on still, with more rapidity perhaps, and certainly with more
thoroughness. The war is accentuating, developing, defining. Previously
our discussions and poses and movements had merely the air of seeking
to accentuate and define. What was apparently being brought about by
discursive efforts, and in a mighty controversy and confusion, is coming
about now as a matter of course.

Before the war, in the British community as in most civilised
communities, profound changes were already in progress, changes in the
conditions of women's employment, in the legal relations of husband and
wife, in the political status of women, in the status of illegitimate
children, in manners and customs affecting the sexes. Every civilised
community was exhibiting a falling birth-rate and a falling death-rate,
was changing the quality of its housing, and diminishing domestic labour
by organising supplies and developing, appliances. That is to say, that
primary human unit, the home, was altering in shape and size and
frequency and colour and effect. A steadily increasing proportion of
people were living outside the old family home, the home based on
maternity and offspring, altogether. A number of us were doing our best
to apprehend the summation of all this flood of change. We had a vague
idea that women were somehow being "emancipated," but just what this
word meant and what it implied were matters still under exploration.
Then came the war. For a time it seemed as if all this discussion was at
an end, as if the problem itself had vanished.

But that was only a temporary distraction of attention. The process of
change swirled into new forms that did not fit very easily into the
accepted formulae, swirled into new forms and continued on its way. If
the discussion ceased for a time, the process of change ceased not at
all. Matters have travelled all the farther in the last two years for
travelling mutely. The questions between men and women are far more
important and far more incessant than the questions between Germans and
the rest of mankind. They are coming back now into the foreground of
human thought, but amended and altered. Our object is to state the
general nature of that alteration. It has still been "emancipation," but
very different in quality from the "emancipation" that was demanded so
loudly and incoherently in that ancient world--of 1913!

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