What is Coming?
A Forecast of Things after the War
By
H.G. WELLS
1916
CONTENTS:
IV.
BRAINTREE, BOCKING, AND THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD
V.
HOW FAR WILL EUROPE GO TOWARD SOCIALISM?
VIII.
WHAT THE WAR IS DOING FOR WOMEN
X.
THE UNITED STATES, FRANCE, BRITAIN, AND RUSSIA
XII.
THE OUTLOOK FOR THE GERMANS
Prophecy may vary between being an intellectual amusement and a serious occupation; serious not only in its intentions, but in its consequences. For it is the lot of prophets who frighten or disappoint to be stoned. But for some of us moderns, who have been touched with the spirit of science, prophesying is almost a habit of mind.
Science is very largely analysis aimed at forecasting. The test of any scientific law is our verification of its anticipations. The scientific training develops the idea that whatever is going to happen is really here now--if only one could see it. And when one is taken by surprise the tendency is not to say with the untrained man, "Now, who'd ha' thought it?" but "Now, what was it we overlooked?"
Everything that has ever existed or that will ever exist is
here--for anyone who has eyes to see. But some of it demands eyes of superhuman
penetration. Some of it is patent; we are almost as certain of next Christmas
and the tides of the year 1960 and the death before 3000 A.D. of everybody now
alive as if these things had already happened. Below that level of certainty,
but still at a very high level of certainty, there are such things as that men
will probably be making aeroplanes of an improved pattern in 1950, or that
there will be a through railway connection between Constantinople and Bombay
and between Baku and Bombay in the next half-century. From such grades of
certainty as this, one may come down the scale until the most obscure mystery
of all is reached: the mystery of the individual. Will
Yet, even to such questions as these the sharp, observant man may risk an answer with something rather better than an even chance of being right.
The present writer is a prophet by use and wont. He is more interested in to-morrow than he is in to-day, and the past is just material for future guessing. "Think of the men who have walked here!" said a tourist in the Roman Coliseum. It was a Futurist mind that answered: "Think of the men who will." It is surely as interesting that presently some founder of the World Republic, some obstinate opponent of militarism or legalism, or the man who will first release atomic energy for human use, will walk along the Via Sacra as that Cicero or Giordano Bruno or Shelley have walked there in the past. To the prophetic mind all history is and will continue to be a prelude. The prophetic type will steadfastly refuse to see the world as a museum; it will insist that here is a stage set for a drama that perpetually begins.
Now this forecasting disposition has led the writer not only to publish a book of deliberate prophesying, called "Anticipations," but almost without premeditation to scatter a number of more or less obvious prophecies through his other books. From first to last he has been writing for twenty years, so that it is possible to check a certain proportion of these anticipations by the things that have happened, Some of these shots have hit remarkably close to the bull's-eye of reality; there are a number of inners and outers, and some clean misses. Much that he wrote about in anticipation is now established commonplace. In 1894 there were still plenty of sceptics of the possibility either of automobiles or aeroplanes; it was not until 1898 that Mr. S.P. Langley (of the Smithsonian Institute) could send the writer a photograph of a heavier-than-air flying machine actually in the air. There were articles in the monthly magazines of those days proving that flying was impossible.
One of the writer's luckiest shots was a description (in
"Anticipations" in 1900) of trench warfare,
and of a deadlock almost exactly upon the lines of the situation after the battle
of the
In saying, however, here and there that "before such a year so-and-so will happen," or that "so-and-so will not occur for the next twenty years," he was generally pretty widely wrong; most of his time estimates are too short; he foretold, for example, a special motor track apart from the high road between London and Brighton before 1910, which is still a dream, but he doubted if effective military aviation or aerial fighting would be possible before 1950, which is a miss on the other side. He will draw a modest veil over certain still wider misses that the idle may find for themselves in his books; he prefers to count the hits and leave the reckoning of the misses to those who will find a pleasure in it.
Of course, these prophecies of the writer's were made upon a basis of very generalised knowledge. What can be done by a really sustained research into a particular question--especially if it is a question essentially mechanical--is shown by the work of a Frenchman all too neglected by the trumpet of fame--Clement Ader. M. Ader was probably the first man to get a mechanism up into the air for something more than a leap. His Eole, as General Mensier testifies, prolonged a jump as far as fifty metres as early as 1890. In 1897 his Avion fairly flew. (This is a year ahead of the date of my earliest photograph of S.P. Langley's aeropile in mid-air.) This, however, is beside our present mark. The fact of interest here is that in 1908, when flying was still almost incredible, M. Ader published his "Aviation Militaire." Well, that was eight years ago, and men have been fighting in the air now for a year, and there is still nothing being done that M. Ader did not see, and which we, if we had had the wisdom to attend to him, might not have been prepared for. There is much that he foretells which is still awaiting its inevitable fulfilment. So clearly can men of adequate knowledge and sound reasoning power see into the years ahead in all such matters of material development.
But it is not with the development of mechanical inventions that the writer now proposes to treat. In this book he intends to hazard certain forecasts about the trend of events in the next decade or so. Mechanical novelties will probably play a very small part in that coming history. This world-wide war means a general arrest of invention and enterprise, except in the direction of the war business. Ability is concentrated upon that; the types of ability that are not applicable to warfare are neglected; there is a vast destruction of capital and a waste of the savings that are needed to finance new experiments. Moreover, we are killing off many of our brightest young men.
It is fairly safe to assume that there will be very little
new furniture on the stage of the world for some considerable time; that if
there is much difference in the roads and railways and shipping it will be for
the worse; that architecture, domestic equipment, and so on, will be fortunate
if in 1924 they stand where they did in the spring of 1914. In the trenches of
The broad material facts before us are plain enough. It is the mental facts that have to be unravelled. It isn't now a question of "What thing--what faculty--what added power will come to hand, and how will it affect our ways of living?" It is a question of "How are people going to take these obvious things--waste of the world's resources, arrest of material progress, the killing of a large moiety of the males in nearly every European country, and universal loss and unhappiness?" We are going to deal with realities here, at once more intimate and less accessible than the effects of mechanism.
As a preliminary reconnaissance, as it were, over the region of problems we have to attack, let us consider the difficulties of a single question, which is also a vital and central question in this forecast. We shall not attempt a full answer here, because too many of the factors must remain unexamined; later, perhaps, we may be in a better position to do so. This question is the probability of the establishment of a long world peace.
At the outset of the war there was a very widely felt hope among the intellectuals of the world that this war might clear up most of the outstanding international problems, and prove the last war. The writer, looking across the gulf of experience that separates us from 1914, recalls two pamphlets whose very titles are eloquent of this feeling--"The War that will End War," and "The Peace of the World." Was the hope expressed in those phrases a dream? Is it already proven a dream? Or can we read between the lines of the war news, diplomatic disputations, threats and accusations, political wranglings and stories of hardship and cruelty that now fill our papers, anything that still justifies a hope that these bitter years of world sorrow are the darkness before the dawn of a better day for mankind? Let us handle this problem for a preliminary examination.
What is really being examined here is the power of human
reason to prevail over passion--and certain other restraining and qualifying
forces. There can be little doubt that, if one could canvass all mankind and
ask them whether they would rather have no war any more, the overwhelming mass
of them would elect for universal peace. If it were war of the modern
mechanical type that was in question, with air raids, high explosives, poison
gas and submarines, there could be no doubt at all about the response.
"Give peace in our time, O Lord," is more than ever the common prayer
of Christendom, and the very war makers claim to be peace makers; the German
Emperor has never faltered in his assertion that he encouraged
Now what are the obstructions, and what are the antagonisms to the exploitation of this world-wide disgust with war and the world-wide desire for peace, so as to establish a world peace?
Let us take them in order, and it will speedily become
apparent that we are dealing here with a subtle quantitative problem in
psychology, a constant weighing of whether this force or that force is the
stronger. We are dealing with influences so subtle that the accidents of some
striking dramatic occurrence, for example, may turn them this way or that. We
are dealing with the human will--and thereby comes a
snare for the feet of the would-be impartial prophet. To foretell the future is
to modify the future. It is hard for any prophet not to break into exhortation
after the fashion of the prophets of
The first difficulty in the way of establishing a world peace is that it is nobody's business in particular. Nearly all of us want a world peace--in an amateurish sort of way. But there is no specific person or persons to whom one can look for the initiatives. The world is a supersaturated solution of the will-for-peace, and there is nothing for it to crystallise upon. There is no one in all the world who is responsible for the understanding and overcoming of the difficulties involved. There are many more people, and there is much more intelligence concentrated upon the manufacture of cigarettes or hairpins than upon the establishment of a permanent world peace. There are a few special secretaries employed by philanthropic Americans, and that is about all. There has been no provision made even for the emoluments of these gentlemen when universal peace is attained; presumably they would lose their jobs.
Nearly everybody wants peace; nearly everybody would be glad to wave a white flag with a dove on it now--provided no unfair use was made of such a demonstration by the enemy--but there is practically nobody thinking out the arrangements needed, and nobody making nearly as much propaganda for the instruction of the world in the things needful as is made in selling any popular make of automobile. We have all our particular businesses to attend to. And things are not got by just wanting them; things are got by getting them, and rejecting whatever precludes our getting them.
That is the first great difficulty: the formal Peace Movement is quite amateurish.
It is so amateurish that the bulk of people do not even realise the very first implication of the peace of the world. It has not succeeded in bringing this home to them.
If there is to be a permanent peace of the world, it is clear that there must be some permanent means of settling disputes between Powers and nations that would otherwise be at war. That means that there must be some head power, some point of reference, a supreme court of some kind, a universally recognised executive over and above the separate Governments of the world that exist to-day. That does not mean that those Governments Have to disappear, that "nationality" has to be given up, or anything so drastic as that. But it does mean that all those Governments have to surrender almost as much of their sovereignty as the constituent sovereign States which make up the United States of America have surrendered to the Federal Government; if their unification is to be anything more than a formality, they will have to delegate a control of their inter-State relations to an extent for which few minds are prepared at present.
It is really quite idle to dream of a warless world in which
States are still absolutely free to annoy one another with tariffs, with the
blocking and squeezing of trade routes, with the ill-treatment of immigrants
and travelling strangers, and between which there is no means of settling
boundary disputes. Moreover, as between the united States of the world and the
United States of America there is this further complication of the world
position: that almost all the great States of Europe are in possession,
firstly, of highly developed territories of alien language and race, such as
Egypt; and, secondly, of barbaric and less-developed territories, such as Nigeria
or Madagascar. There will be nothing stable about a world settlement that does
not destroy in these "possessions" the national preference of the
countries that own them and that does not prepare for the immediate or eventual
accession of these subject peoples to State rank. Most certainly, however,
thousands of intelligent people in those great European countries who believe
themselves ardent for a world peace will be staggered at any proposal to place
any part of "our Empire" under a world administration on the footing
of a
Going on with such things and yet deprecating war is really not an attempt to abolish conflict; it is an attempt to retain conflict and limit its intensity; it is like trying to play hockey on the understanding that the ball shall never travel faster than eight miles an hour.
Now it not only stands in our way to a permanent peace of the world that the great mass of men are not prepared for even the most obvious implications of such an idea, but there is also a second invincible difficulty--that there is nowhere in the world anybody, any type of men, any organisation, any idea, any nucleus or germ, that could possibly develop into the necessary over-Government. We are asking for something out of the air, out of nothingness, that will necessarily array against itself the resistance of all those who are in control, or interested in the control, of the affairs of sovereign States of the world as they are at present; the resistance of a gigantic network of Government organisations, interests, privileges, assumptions.
Against this a headless, vague aspiration, however universal, is likely to prove quite ineffective. Of course, it is possible to suggest that the Hague Tribunal is conceivably the germ of such an overriding direction and supreme court as the peace of the world demands, but in reality the Hague Tribunal is a mere legal automatic machine. It does nothing unless you set it in motion. It has no initiative. It does not even protest against the most obvious outrages upon that phantom of a world-conscience--international law.
Pacificists in their search for some definite starting-point, about which the immense predisposition for peace may crystallise, have suggested the Pope and various religious organisations as a possible basis for the organisation of peace. But there would be no appeal from such a beginning to the non-Christian majority of mankind, and the suggestion in itself indicates a profound ignorance of the nature of the Christian churches. With the exception of the Quakers and a few Russian sects, no Christian sect or church has ever repudiated war; most have gone out of the way to sanction it and bless it.
It is altogether too rashly assumed by people whose
sentimentality outruns their knowledge that Christianity is essentially an
attempt to carry out the personal teachings of Christ. It is nothing of the
sort, and no church authority will support that idea. Christianity--more
particularly after the ascendancy of the Trinitarian doctrine was
established--was and is a theological religion; it is the religion that triumphed
over Arianism, Manichseism, Gnosticism, and the like; it is based not on
Christ, but on its creeds. Christ, indeed, is not even its symbol; on the
contrary, the chosen symbol of Christianity is the cross to which Christ was
nailed and on which He died. It was very largely a religion of the legions. It
was the warrior Theodosius who, more than any single other man,
imposed it upon
There is no reason, therefore, either in precedent or profession, for expecting any plain lead from the churches in this tremendous task of organising and making effective the widespread desire of the world for peace. And even were this the case, it is doubtful if we should find in the divines and dignitaries of the Vatican, of the Russian and British official churches, or of any other of the multitudinous Christian sects, the power and energy, the knowledge and ability, or even the goodwill needed to negotiate so vast a thing as the creation of a world authority.
One other possible starting-point has been suggested. It is
no great feat for a naive imagination to suppose the President of the Swiss
Confederation or the President of the
But nothing of the sort occurs. And when you come to look
into the circumstances of these two Presidents you will discover that neither of
them is any more free than anybody else to embark upon the task of creating a
State-overriding, war-preventing organisation of the world. He has been created
by a system, and he is bound to a system; his concern is with the interests of
the people of
We are all, indeed, busy with the things that come to hand every day. We are all anxious for a permanent world peace, but we are all up to the neck in things that leave us no time to attend to this world peace that nearly every sane man desires.
Meanwhile, a small minority of people who trade upon contention--militarists, ambitious kings and statesmen, war contractors, loan mongers, sensational journalists--follow up their interests and start and sustain war.
There lies the paradoxical reality of this question. Our first inquiry lands us into the elucidation of this deadlock. Nearly everybody desires a world peace, and yet there is not apparent anywhere any man free and able and willing to establish it, while, on the other hand, there are a considerable number of men in positions of especial influence and power who will certainly resist the arrangements that are essential to its establishment.
But does this exhaust the question, and must we conclude that mankind is doomed to a perpetual, futile struggling of States and nations and peoples--breaking ever and again into war? The answer to that would probably, be "Yes" if it were not for the progress of war. War is continually becoming more scientific, more destructive, more coldly logical, more intolerant of non-combatants, and more exhausting of any kind of property. There is every reason to believe that it will continue to intensify these characteristics. By doing so it may presently bring about a state of affairs that will supply just the lacking elements that are needed for the development of a world peace.
I would venture to suggest that the present war is doing so now: that it is producing changes in men's minds that may presently give us both the needed energy and the needed organisation from which a world direction may develop.
The first, most distinctive thing about this conflict is the exceptionally searching way in which it attacks human happiness. No war has ever destroyed happiness so widely. It has not only killed and wounded an unprecedented proportion of the male population of all the combatant nations, but it has also destroyed wealth beyond precedent. It has also destroyed freedom--of movement, of speech, of economic enterprise. Hardly anyone alive has escaped the worry of it and the threat of it. It has left scarcely a life untouched, and made scarcely a life happier. There is a limit to the principle that "everybody's business is nobody's business." The establishment of a world State, which was interesting only to a few cranks and visionaries before the war, is now the lively interest of a very great number of people. They inquire about it; they have become accessible to ideas about it.
Peace organisation seems, indeed, to be following the lines
of public sanitation. Everybody in
That is one change the war will bring about that will make for world peace: a quickened general interest in its possibility. Another is the certainty that the war will increase the number of devoted and fanatic characters available for disinterested effort. Whatever other outcome this war may have, it means that there lies ahead a period of extreme economic and political dislocation. The credit system has been strained, and will be strained, and will need unprecedented readjustments. In the past such phases of uncertainty, sudden impoverishment and disorder as certainly lie ahead of us, have meant for a considerable number of minds a release--or, if you prefer it, a flight--from the habitual and selfish. Types of intense religiosity, of devotion and of endeavour are let loose, and there will be much more likelihood that we may presently find, what it is impossible to find now, a number of devoted men and women ready to give their whole lives, with a quasi-religious enthusiasm, to this great task of peace establishment, finding in such impersonal work a refuge from the disappointments, limitations, losses and sorrows of their personal life--a refuge we need but little in more settled and more prosperous periods. They will be but the outstanding individuals in a very universal quickening. And simultaneously with this quickening of the general imagination by experience there are certain other developments in progress that point very clearly to a change under the pressure of this war of just those institutions of nationality, kingship, diplomacy and inter-State competition that have hitherto stood most effectually in the way of a world pacification. The considerations that seem to point to this third change are very convincing, to my mind.
The real operating cause that is, I believe, going to break
down the deadlock that has hitherto made a supreme court and a federal
government for the world at large a dream, lies in just that possibility of an
"inconclusive peace" which so many people seem to dread.
Because, in the face of a league of the Central European
Powers attempting recuperation, cherishing revenge, dreaming of a renewal of
the struggle, it becomes impossible for the British, the French, the Belgians,
Russians, Italians or Japanese to think any longer of settling their
differences by war among themselves. To do so will mean the creation of
opportunity for the complete reinstatement of German militarism. It will open
the door for a conclusive German hegemony. Now, however clumsy and confused the
diplomacy of these present Allies may be (challenged constantly, as it is, by democracy
and hampered by a free, venal and irresponsible Press in at least three of
their countries), the necessity they will be under will be so urgent and so
evident, that it is impossible to imagine that they will not set up some
permanent organ for the direction and co-ordination of their joint
international relationships. It may be a queerly constituted body at first; it
may be of a merely diplomatic pretension; it may be called a Congress, or any
old name of that sort, but essentially its business will be to conduct a joint
fiscal, military and naval policy, to keep the peace in the Balkans and Asia,
to establish a relationship with China, and organise joint and several
arbitration arrangements with America. And it must develop something more sure
and swift than our present diplomacy. One of its chief concerns will be the
right of way through the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, and the watching of the
forces that stir up conflict in the Balkans and the
For precisely similar reasons it seems to me incredible that
the two great Central European Powers should ever fall into sustained conflict
again with one another. They, too, will be forced to create some overriding
body to prevent so suicidal a possibility.
There are more ways than one to the World State, and this second possibility of a post-war conference and a conference of the Allies, growing almost unawares into a pacific organisation of the world, since it goes on directly from existing institutions, since it has none of the quality of a clean break with the past which the idea of an immediate World State and Pax Mundi involves, and more particularly since it neither abolishes nor has in it anything to shock fundamentally the princes, the diplomatists, the lawyers, the statesmen and politicians, the nationalists and suspicious people, since it gives them years in which to change and die out and reappear in new forms, and since at the same time it will command the support of every intelligent human being who gets his mind clear enough from his circumstances to understand its import, is a far more credible hope than the hope of anything coming de novo out of Hague Foundations or the manifest logic of the war.
But, of course, there weighs against these hopes the
possibility that the Allied Powers are too various in their nature, too biased,
too feeble intellectually and imaginatively, to hold together and maintain any
institution for co-operation. The British Press may be too silly not to foster
irritation and suspicion; we may get Carsonism on a larger scale trading on the
resuscitation of dying hatreds; the British and Russian diplomatists may play
annoying tricks upon one another by sheer force of habit. There may be many
troubles of that sort. Even then I do not see that the hope of an ultimate
world peace vanishes. But it will be a Roman world peace, made in
But I will not press this inquiry farther now. It is, as I said at the beginning, a preliminary exploration of one of the great questions with which I propose to play in these articles. The possibility I have sketched is the one that most commends itself to me as probable. After a more detailed examination of the big operating forces at present working in the world, we may be in a position to revise these suggestions with a greater confidence and draw our net of probabilities a little tighter.
[1]
The prophet who emerges with the most honour from this war is Bloch. It must be fifteen or sixteen years ago since this gifted Pole made his forecast of the future. Perhaps it is more, for the French translation of his book was certainly in existence before the Boer War. His case was that war between antagonists of fairly equal equipment must end in a deadlock because of the continually increasing defensive efficiency of entrenched infantry. This would give the defensive an advantage over the most brilliant strategy and over considerably superior numbers that would completely discourage all aggression. He concluded that war was played out.
[1] This chapter was originally a newspaper article. It was written in December, 1915, and published about the middle of January. Some of it has passed from the quality of anticipation to achievement, but I do not see that it needs any material revision on that account.
His book was very carefully studied in
There was also a translation of Bloch into French. In English
a portion of his book was translated for the general reader and published with
a preface by the late Mr. W.T. Stead. It does not seem to have reached the
British military authorities, nor was it published in
But it is manifest now that if the Belgian and French
frontiers had been properly prepared--as they should have been prepared when
the Germans built their strategic railways--with trenches and gun emplacements
and secondary and tertiary lines, the Germans would never have got fifty miles
into either France or Belgium. They would have been held at Liége and in the
Somebody in those marvellous maxims from the dark ages that
seem to form the chief reading of our military experts,
said that the army that entrenches is a defeated army. The silly dictum was
repeated and repeated in the English papers after the battle of the
For long weeks the Allies retreated out of the west of
I do not believe that the Germans ever thought it would come up to date so soon. I believe they thought that they would hustle the French out of Paris, come right up to the Channel at Calais before the end of 1914, and then entrench, produce the submarine attack and the Zeppelins against England, working from Calais as a base, and that they would end the war before the spring of 1915--with the Allies still a good fifteen years behindhand.
I believe the battle of the Marne was the decisive battle of
the war, in that it shattered this plan, and that the rest of the 1914 fighting
was
The war since that first attempt--admirably planned and
altogether justifiable (from a military point of view, I mean)--of
Bloch has been equally justified in the Anglo-French attempt to get round through Gallipoli. The forces of the India Office have pushed their way through unprepared country towards Bagdad, and are now entrenching in Mesopotamia, but from the point of view of the main war that is too remote to be considered either getting through or getting round; and so too the losses of the German colonies and the East African War are scarcely to be reckoned with in the main war. They have no determining value. There remains the Balkan struggle. But the Balkan struggle is something else; it is something new. It must be treated separately. It is a war of treacheries and brags and appearances. It is not a part of, it is a sequence to, the deadlock war of 1915.
But before dealing with this new development of the latter half of 1915 it is necessary to consider certain general aspects of the deadlock war. It is manifest that the Germans hoped to secure an effective victory in this war before they ran up against Bloch. But reckoning with Bloch, as they certainly did, they hoped that even in the event of the war getting to earth, it would still be possible to produce novelties that would sufficiently neutralise Bloch to secure a victorious peace. With unexpectedly powerful artillery suddenly concentrated, with high explosives, with asphyxiating gas, with a well-organised system of grenade throwing and mining, with attacks of flaming gas, and above all with a vast munition-making plant to keep them going, they had a very reasonable chance of hacking their way through.
Against these prepared novelties the Allies have had to
improvise, and on the whole the improvisation has kept pace with the demands
made upon it. They have brought their military science up to date,
and to-day the disparity in science and equipment between the antagonists has
greatly diminished. There has been no escaping Bloch after all, and the
deadlock, if no sudden peace occurs, can end now in only one thing, the
exhaustion in various degrees of all the combatants and the succumbing of the
most exhausted. The idea of a conclusive end of the traditional pattern to this
war, of a triumphal entry into
There is, of course, one aspect of the Bloch deadlock that the Germans at least have contemplated. If it is not possible to get through or round, it may still be possible to get over. There is the air path.
This idea has certainly taken hold of the French mind, but
The Germans alone have made any sustained attempt to strike
through the air at their enemies beyond the war zone. Their Zeppelin raids upon
It is doubtful, though, if the utmost damage an air raid is
likely to inflict upon
The net result of these air raids is an inflexible determination of the British people rather to die in death grips with German militarism than to live and let it survive. The best chance for the aircraft was at the beginning of the war, when a surprise development might have had astounding results. That chance has gone by. The Germans are racially inferior to both French and English in the air, and the probability of effective blows over the deadlock is on the whole a probability in favour of the Allies. Nor is there anything on or under the sea that seems likely now to produce decisive results. We return from these considerations to a strengthened acceptance of Bloch.
The essential question for the prophet remains therefore the question of which group of Powers will exhaust itself most rapidly. And following on from that comes the question of how the successive stages of exhaustion will manifest themselves in the combatant nations. The problems of this war, as of all war, end as they begin in national psychology.
But it will be urged that this is reckoning without the
Balkans. I submit that the German thrust through the wooded wilderness of
A whole series of new problems are opened up directly we turn to this most troubled region of the Balkans--problems of the value of kingship, of nationality, of the destiny of such cities as Constantinople, which from their very beginning have never had any sort of nationality at all, of the destiny of countries such as Albania, where a tangle of intense tribal nationalities is distributed in spots and patches, or Dalmatia, where one extremely self-conscious nation and language is present in the towns and another in the surrounding country, or Asia Minor, where no definite national boundaries, no religious, linguistic, or social homogeneities have ever established themselves since the Roman legions beat them down.
But all these questions can really be deferred or set aside in our present discussion, which is a discussion of the main war. Whatever surprises or changes this last phase of the Eastern Empire, that blood-clotted melodrama, may involve, they will but assist and hasten on the essential conclusion of the great war, that the Central Powers and their pledged antagonists are in a deadlock, unable to reach a decision, and steadily, day by day, hour by hour, losing men, destroying material, spending credit, approaching something unprecedented, unknown, that we try to express to ourselves by the word exhaustion.
Just how the people who use the word "exhaustion"
so freely are prepared to define it, is a matter for speculation. The idea
seems to be a phase in which the production of equipped forces ceases through
the using up of men or material or both. If the exhaustion is fairly mutual, it
need not be decisive for a long time. It may mean simply an
ebb of vigour on both sides, unusual hardship, a general social and
economic disorganisation and grading down. The fact that a great killing off of
men is implicit in the process, and that the survivors will be largely under
discipline, militates against the idea that the end may come suddenly through a
vigorous revolutionary outbreak. Exhaustion is likely to be a very long and
very thorough process, extending over years. A "war of attrition" may
last into 1918 or 1919, and may bring us to conditions of strain and
deprivation still only very vaguely imagined. What happens in the Turkish
Empire or
Let us ask now which of the combatants is likely to undergo exhaustion most rapidly, and what is of equal or greater importance, which is likely to feel it first and most? No doubt there is a bias in my mind, but it seems to me that the odds are on the whole heavily against the Central Powers. Their peculiar German virtue, their tremendously complete organisation, which enabled them to put so large a proportion of their total resources into their first onslaught and to make so great and rapid a recovery in the spring of 1915, leaves them with less to draw upon now. Out of a smaller fortune they have spent a larger sum. They are blockaded to a very considerable extent, and against them fight not merely the resources of the Allies, but, thanks to the complete British victory in the sea struggle, the purchasable resources of all the world.
Conceivably the Central Powers will draw upon the resources
of their Balkan and Asiatic allies, but the extent to which they can do that
may very easily be over-estimated. There is a limit to the power for treason of
these supposititious German monarchs that Western folly has permitted to
possess these Balkan thrones--thrones which need never have been thrones at
all--and none of the Balkan peoples is likely to witness with enthusiasm the
complete looting of its country in the German interest by a German court.
Compared with the world behind the Allies the
At present, so far as any judgment is possible, Germany is
feeling the pinch of the war much more even than France, which is habitually
parsimonious, and instinctively cleverly economical, and Russia, which is hardy
and insensitive.
The German group, I reckon, therefore, will become exhausted
first. I think, too, that
Never were a people so
disillusioned as the Germans must already be, never has a nation been called
upon for so complete a mental readjustment. Neither conclusive victories nor
defeats have been theirs, but only a slow, vast transition from joyful effort
and an illusion of rapid triumph to hardship, loss and loss and loss of
substance, the dwindling of great hopes, the
realisation of ebb in the tide of national welfare. Now they must fight on
against implacable, indomitable Allies. They are under stresses now as harsh at
least as the stresses of
We know little of the psychology of this new Germany that
has come into being since 1871, but it is doubtful if it will accept defeat,
and still more doubtful how it can evade some ending to the war that will admit
the failure of all its great hopes of Paris subjugated, London humbled, Russia
suppliant, Belgium conquered, the Near East a prey. Such an admission will be a
day of reckoning that German Imperialism will postpone until the last hope of
some breach among the Allies, some saving miracle in the old
Nor can the Pledged Allies consent to a peace that does not
involve the evacuation and compensation of
But these things form only the main outline of a story with
a vast amount of collateral interest. It is to these collateral issues that the
amateur in prophecy must give his attention. It is here that the German will be
induced by his Government to see his compensations. He will be consoled for the
restoration of
The concluding phase of a process of general exhaustion must
almost inevitably be a game of bluff. Neither side will admit its extremity.
Neither side, therefore, will make any direct proposals to its antagonists nor any open advances to a neutral. But there will be much
inspired peace talk through neutral media, and the
consultations of the anti-German allies will become more intimate and detailed.
Suggestions will "leak out" remarkably from both sides, to
journalists and neutral go-betweens. The Eastern and Western Allies will
probably begin quite soon to discuss an anti-German Zollverein and the
co-ordination of their military and naval organisations in the days that are to
follow the war. A discussion of a Central European Zollverein is already afoot.
A general idea of the possible rearrangement of the European States after the
war will grow up in the common European and American mind; public men on either
side will indicate concordance with this general idea, and some neutral power,
Probably, therefore, the peace negotiations will take the
extraordinary form of two simultaneous conferences--one of the Pledged Allies,
sitting probably in
The broad conditions of a possible peace will begin to get
stated towards the end of 1916, and a certain lassitude will creep over the
operations in the field.... The process of exhaustion will probably have
reached such a point by that time that it will be a primary fact in the
consciousness of common citizens of every belligerent country. The common life
of all
Quickly thereafter the last phase will be developing into
predominance, in which each group of nations will be most concerned, no longer
about victories or conquests, but about securing for itself the best chances of
rapid economic recuperation and social reconstruction. The commercial treaties,
the arrangements for future associated action, made by the great Allies among
themselves will appear more and more important to them,
and the mere question of boundaries less and less. It will dawn upon Europe
that she has already dissipated the resources that have enabled her to levy the
tribute paid for her investments in every quarter of the earth, and that
neither the Germans nor their antagonists will be able for many years to go on
with those projects for world exploitation which lay at the root of the great
war. Very jaded and anaemic nations will sit about the table on which the new map
of
The war has become a war of exhaustion. One hears a great deal of the idea that "financial collapse" may bring it to an end. A number of people seem to be convinced that a war cannot be waged without money, that soldiers must be paid, munitions must be bought; that for this money is necessary and the consent of bank depositors; so that if all the wealth of the world were nominally possessed by some one man in a little office he could stop the war by saying simply, "I will lend you no more money."
Now, as a matter of fact, money is a power only in so far as people believe in it and Governments sustain it. If a State is sufficiently strong and well organised, its control over the money power is unlimited. If it can rule its people, and if it has the necessary resources of men and material within its borders, it can go on in a state of war so long as these things last, with almost any flimsy sort of substitute for money that it chooses to print. It can enrol and use the men, and seize and work the material. It can take over the land and cultivate it and distribute its products. The little man in the office is only a power because the State chooses to recognise his claim. So long as he is convenient he seems to be a power. So soon as the State is intelligent enough and strong enough it can do without him. It can take what it wants, and tell him to go and hang himself. That is the melancholy ultimate of the usurer. That is the quintessence of "finance." All credit is State-made, and what the State has made the State can alter or destroy.
The owner and the creditor have never had any other power to give or withhold credit than the credit that was given to them. They exist by sufferance or superstition and not of necessity.
It is the habit of overlooking this little flaw in the imperatives of ownership that enables people to say that this war cannot go on beyond such and such a date--the end of 1916 is much in favour just now--because we cannot pay for it. It would be about as reasonable to expect a battle to end because a landlord had ordered the soldiers off his estate. So long as there are men to fight and stuff to fight with the war can go on. There is bankruptcy, but the bankruptcy of States is not like the bankruptcy of individuals. There is no such thing among States as an undischarged bankrupt who is forbidden to carry on. A State may keep on going bankrupt indefinitely and still carry on. It will be the next step in our prophetic exercise to examine the differences between State bankruptcy and the bankruptcy of a subject of the State.
The belligerent Powers are approaching a phase when they will no longer be paying anything like twenty shillings in the pound. In a very definite sense they are not paying twenty shillings in the pound now. That is not going to stop the war, but it involves a string of consequences and possibilities of the utmost importance to our problem of what is coming when the war is over.
The exhaustion that will bring this war to its end at last is a process of destruction of men and material. The process of bankruptcy that is also going on is nothing of the sort. Bankruptcy destroys no concrete thing; it merely writes off a debt; it destroys a financial but not an economic reality. It is, in itself, a mental, not a physical fact. "A" owes "B" a debt; he goes bankrupt and pays a dividend, a fraction of his debt, and gets his discharge. "B's" feelings, as we novelists used to say, are "better imagined than described"; he does his best to satisfy himself that "A" can pay no more, and then "A" and "B" both go about their business again.
In England, if "A" is a sufficiently poor man not to be formidable, and has gone bankrupt on a small scale, he gets squeezed ferociously to extract the last farthing from him; he may find himself in jail and his home utterly smashed up. If he is a richer man, and has failed on a larger scale, our law is more sympathetic, and he gets off much more easily. Often his creditors find it advisable to arrange with him so that he will still carry on with his bankrupt concern. They find it is better to allow him to carry on than to smash him up.
There are countless men in the world living very comfortably indeed, and running businesses that were once their own property for their creditors. There are still more who have written off princely debts and do not seem to be a "ha'p'orth the worse." And their creditors have found a balm in time and philosophy. Bankruptcy is only painful and destructive to small people and helpless people; but then for them everything is painful and destructive; it can be a very light matter to big people; it may be almost painless to a State.
If England went bankrupt in the completest way to-morrow, and repudiated all its debts both as a nation and as a community of individuals, if it declared, if I may use a self-contradictory phrase, a permanent moratorium, there would be not an acre of ploughed land in the country, not a yard of cloth or a loaf of bread the less for that. There would be nothing material destroyed within the State. There would be no immediate convulsion. Use and wont would carry most people on some days before they even began to doubt whether So-and-so could pay his way, and whether there would be wages at the end of the week.
But people who lived upon rent or investments or pensions would presently be very busy thinking how they were going to get food when the butcher and baker insisted upon cash. It would be only with comparative slowness that the bulk of men would realise that a fabric of confidence and confident assumptions had vanished; that cheques and bank notes and token money and every sort of bond and scrip were worthless, that employers had nothing to pay with, shopkeepers no means of procuring stock, that metallic money was disappearing, and that a paralysis had come upon the community.
Such an establishment as a workhouse or an old-fashioned monastery, living upon the produce of its own farming and supplying all its own labour, would be least embarrassed amidst the general perplexity. For it would not be upon a credit basis, but a socialistic basis, a basis of direct reality, and its need for payments would be incidental. And land-owning peasants growing their own food would carry on, and small cultivating occupiers, who could easily fall back on barter for anything needed.
The mass of the population in such a country as England would, however, soon be standing about in hopeless perplexity and on the verge of frantic panic--although there was just as much food to be eaten, just as many houses to live in, and just as much work needing to be done. Suddenly the pots would be empty, and famine would be in the land, although the farms and butchers' shops were still well stocked. The general community would be like an automobile when the magneto fails. Everything would be there and in order, except for the spark of credit which keeps the engine working.
That is how quite a lot of people seem to imagine national bankruptcy: as a catastrophic jolt. It is a quite impossible nightmare of cessation. The reality is the completest contrast. All the belligerent countries of the world are at the present moment quietly, steadily and progressively going bankrupt, and the mass of people are not even aware of this process of insolvency.
An individual when he goes bankrupt is measured by the monetary standard of the country he is in; he pays five or ten or fifteen or so many shillings in the pound. A community in debt does something which is in effect the same, but in appearance rather different. It still pays a pound, but the purchasing power of the pound has diminished. This is what is happening all over the world to-day; there is a rise in prices. This is automatic national bankruptcy; unplanned, though perhaps not unforeseen. It is not a deliberate State act, but a consequence of the interruption of communications, the diversion of productive energy, the increased demand for many necessities by the Government and the general waste under war conditions.
At the beginning of this war England had a certain national
debt; it has paid off none of that original debt; it has added to it
tremendously; so far as money and bankers' records go it still owes and intends
to pay that original debt; but if you translate the language of £.s.d. into
realities, you will find that in loaves or iron or copper or hours of toil, or
indeed in any reality except gold, it owes now, so far as that original debt
goes, far less than it did at the outset. As the war goes on and the rise in
prices continues, the subsequent borrowings and contracts are undergoing a
similar bankrupt reduction. The attempt of the landlord of small weekly and
annual properties to adjust himself to the new conditions by raising rents is
being checked by legislation in
The rest of the loss falls chiefly upon the creditor class, the people with fixed incomes and fixed salaries, the landlords, who have let at long leases, the people with pensions, endowed institutions, the Church, insurance companies, and the like. They are all being scaled down. They are all more able to stand scaling down than the proletarians.
Assuming that it is possible to bring up wages to the level of the higher prices, and that the rise in rents can be checked by legislation or captured by taxation, the rise in prices is, on the whole, a thing to the advantage of the propertyless man as against accumulated property. It writes off the past and clears the way for a fresh start in the future.
An age of cheapness is an old usurers' age. England before
the war was a paradise of ancient usuries; everywhere were great houses and
enclosed parks; the multitude of gentlemen's servants and golf clubs and such
like excrescences of the comfort of prosperous people was perpetually
increasing; it did not "pay" to build labourers' cottages, and the
more expensive sort of automobile had driven the bicycle as a pleasure vehicle
off the roads. Western Europe was running to fat and not to muscle, as
But if that old usurer's age is over, the young usurer's age may be coming. To meet such enormous demands as this war is making there are three chief courses open to the modern State.
The first is to take--to get men by conscription and material by requisition. The British Government takes more modestly than any other in the world; its tradition from Magna Charta onward, the legal training of most of its members, all make towards a reverence for private ownership and private claims, as opposed to the claims of State and commonweal, unequalled in the world's history.
The next course of a nation in need is to tax and pay for what it wants, which is a fractional and more evenly distributed method of taking. Both of these methods raise prices, the second most so, and so facilitate the automatic release of the future from the boarding of the past. So far all the belligerent Governments have taxed on the timid side.
Finally there is the loan. This mortgages the future to the
present necessity, and it has so far been the predominant source of war
credits. It is the method that produces least immediate friction in the State;
it employs all the savings of surplus income that the unrest of civil
enterprise leaves idle; it has an effect of creating property by a process that
destroys the substance of the community. In
At the end of the war
But part, at least, of the bulk of this wealth will be imaginary rather than real because of the rise in prices, in wages, in rent, and in taxation. Most of us who are buying the British and French War Loans have no illusions on that score; we know we are buying an income of diminishing purchasing power. Yet it would be a poor creature in these days when there is scarcely a possible young man in one's circle who has not quite freely and cheerfully staked his life, who was not prepared to consider his investments as being also to an undefined extent a national subscription.
A rise in prices is not, however, the only process that will
check the appearance of a new rich usurer class after the war. There is
something else ahead that has happened already in
Sooner or later, and probably in all cases before 1917, all
the belligerents will be forced to adopt inconvertible paper money for their
internal uses. There will be British assignats or greenbacks. It will seem to many financial sentimentalists almost as though
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
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.
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
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
The war will not end the conflict of anti-Germany and
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
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, pâté de foie gras and
enclosed parks, instead of gin and water, bank holiday outings and
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