H. G. Wells – The Complete Collection

Chapter 32

In its more developed phases I seem to see the New Republic as (if I may use an expressive bull) a sort of outspoken Secret Society, with which even the prominent men of the ostensible state may be openly affiliated. A vast number of men admit the need but hesitate at the means of revolution, and in this conception of a slowly growing new social order organized with open deliberation within the substance of the old, there are no doubt elements of technical treason, but an enormous gain in the thoroughness, efficiency, and stability of the possible change.

So it is, or at least in some such ways, that I conceive the growing sense of itself which the new class of modern efficients will develop, will become manifest in movements and concerns that are now heterogeneous and distinct, but will presently drift into co-operation and coalescence. This idea of a synthetic reconstruction within the bodies of the English-speaking States may very possibly clothe itself in quite other formulæ than my phrase of the New Republic; but the need is with us, the social elements are developing among us, the appliances are arranging themselves for the hands that will use them, and I cannot but believe that the idea of a spacious common action will presently come. In a few years I believe many men who are now rather aimless--men who have disconsolately watched the collapse of the old Liberalism--will be clearly telling themselves and one another of their adhesion to this new ideal. They will be working in schools and newspaper offices, in foundries and factories, in colleges and laboratories, in county councils and on school boards--even, it may be, in pulpits--for the time when the coming of the New Republic will be ripe. It may be dawning even in the schools of law, because presently there will be a new and scientific handling of jurisprudence. The highly educated and efficient officers' mess will rise mechanically and drink to the Monarch, and sit down to go on discussing the New Republic's growth. I do not see, indeed, why an intelligent monarch himself, in these days, should not waive any silliness about Divine Right, and all the ill-bred pretensions that sit so heavily on a gentlemanly King, and come into the movement with these others. When the growing conception touches, as in America it has already touched, the legacy-leaving class, there will be fewer new Asylums perhaps, but more university chairs....

So it is I conceive the elements of the New Republic taking shape and running together through the social mass, picking themselves out more and more clearly, from the shareholder, the parasitic speculator and the wretched multitudes of the Abyss. The New Republicans will constitute an informal and open freemasonry. In all sorts of ways they will be influencing and controlling the apparatus of the ostensible governments, they will be pruning irresponsible property, checking speculators and controlling the abyssward drift, but at that, at an indirect control, at any sort of fiction, the New Republic, from the very nature of its cardinal ideas, will not rest. The clearest and simplest statement, the clearest and simplest method, is inevitably associated with the conceptions of that science upon which the New Republic will arise. There will be a time, in peace it may be, or under the stresses of warfare, when the New Republic will find itself ready to arrive, when the theory will have been worked out and the details will be generally accepted, and the new order will be ripe to begin. And then, indeed, it will begin. What life or strength will be left in the old order to prevent this new order beginning?

FOOTNOTES:

[47] I foresee great scope for the ingenious persons who write so abundantly to the London evening papers upon etymological points, issues in heraldry, and the correct Union Jack, in the very pleasing topic of a possible Anglo-American flag (for use at first only on unofficial occasions).

[48] In a large town like Folkestone , for example, it is practically impossible to buy any book but a "boomed" novel unless one has ascertained the names of the author, the book, the edition, and the publisher. There is no index in existence kept up to date that supplies these particulars. If, for example, one wants--as I want (1) to read all that I have not read of the work of Mr. Frank Stockton, (2) to read a book of essays by Professor Ray Lankaster the title of which I have forgotten, and (3) to buy the most convenient edition of the works of Swift, one has to continue wanting until the British Museum Library chances to get in one's way. The book-selling trade supplies no information at all on these points.

[49] One of the least satisfactory features of the intellectual atmosphere of the present time is the absence of good controversy. To follow closely an honest and subtle controversy, and to have arrived at a definite opinion upon some general question of real and practical interest and complicated reference, is assuredly the most educational exercise in the world--I would go so far as to say that no person is completely educated who has not done as much. The memorable discussions in which Huxley figured, for example, were extraordinarily stimulating. We lack that sort of thing now. A great number of people are expressing conflicting opinions upon all sorts of things, but there is a quite remarkable shirking of plain issues of debate. There is no answering back. There is much indirect answering, depreciation of the adversary, attempts to limit his publicity, restatements of the opposing opinion in a new way, but no conflict in the lists. We no longer fight obnoxious views, but assassinate them. From first to last, for example, there has been no honest discussion of the fundamental issues in the Boer War. Something may be due to the multiplication of magazines and newspapers, and the confusion of opinions that has scattered the controversy-following public. It is much to be regretted that the laws of copyright and the methods of publication stand in the way of annotated editions of works of current controversial value. For example, Mr. Andrew Lang has assailed the new edition of the "Golden Bough." His criticisms, which are, no doubt, very shrewd and penetrating, ought to be accessible with the text he criticizes. Yet numerous people will read his comments who will never read the "Golden Bough;" they will accept his dinted sword as proof of the slaughter of Mr. Fraser, and many will read the "Golden Bough" and never hear of Mr. Lang's comments. Why should it be so hopeless to suggest an edition of the "Golden Bough" with footnotes by Mr. Lang and Mr. Fraser's replies? There are all sorts of books to which Mr. Lang might add footnotes with infinite benefit to every one . Mr. Mallock , again, is going to explain how Science and Religion stand at the present time. If only some one would explain in the margin how Mr. Mallock stands, the thing would be complete. Such a book, again, as these "Anticipations" would stand a vast amount of controversial footnoting. It bristles with pegs for discussion--vacant pegs; it is written to provoke. I hope that some publisher, sooner or later, will do something of this kind, and will give us not only the text of an author's work, but a series of footnotes and appendices by reputable antagonists. The experiment, well handled, might prove successful enough to start a fashion--a very beneficial fashion for authors and readers alike. People would write twice as carefully and twice as clearly with that possible second edition (with footnotes by X and Y) in view. Imagine "The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture" as it might have been edited by the late Professor Huxley; Froude's edition of the "Grammar of Assent;" Mr. G. B. Shaw's edition of the works of Mr. Lecky; or the criticism of art and life of Ruskin,--the "Beauties of Ruskin" annotated by Mr. Whistler and carefully prepared for the press by Professor William James. Like the tomato and the cucumber, every book would carry its antidote wrapped about it. Impossible, you say. But is it? Or is it only unprecedented? If novelists will consent to the illustration of their stories by artists whose chief aim appears to be to contradict their statements, I do not see why controversial writers who believe their opinions are correct should object to the checking of their facts and logic by persons with a different way of thinking. Why should not men of opposite opinions collaborate in their discussion?

IX

THE FAITH, MORALS, AND PUBLIC POLICY OF THE NEW REPUBLIC

If the surmise of a developing New Republic--a Republic that must ultimately become a World State of capable rational men, developing amidst the fading contours and colours of our existing nations and institutions--be indeed no idle dream, but an attainable possibility in the future, and to that end it is that the preceding Anticipations have been mainly written, it becomes a speculation of very great interest to forecast something of the general shape and something even of certain details of that common body of opinion which the New Republic, when at last it discovers and declares itself, will possess. Since we have supposed this New Republic will already be consciously and pretty freely controlling the general affairs of humanity before this century closes, its broad principles and opinions must necessarily shape and determine that still ampler future of which the coming hundred years is but the opening phase. There are many processes, many aspects of things, that are now, as it were, in the domain of natural laws and outside human control, or controlled unintelligently and superstitiously, that in the future, in the days of the coming New Republic, will be definitely taken in hand as part of the general work of humanity, as indeed already, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the control of pestilences has been taken in hand. And in particular, there are certain broad questions much under discussion to which, thus far, I have purposely given a value disproportionately small:--

While the New Republic is gathering itself together and becoming aware of itself , that other great element, which I have called the People of the Abyss, will also have followed out its destiny. For many decades that development will be largely or entirely out of all human control. To the multiplying rejected of the white and yellow civilizations there will have been added a vast proportion of the black and brown races, and collectively those masses will propound the general question, "What will you do with us, we hundreds of millions, who cannot keep pace with you?" If the New Republic emerges at all it will emerge by grappling with this riddle; it must come into existence by the passes this Sphinx will guard. Moreover, the necessary results of the reaction of irresponsible wealth upon that infirm and dangerous thing the human will, the spreading moral rot of gambling which is associated with irresponsible wealth, will have been working out, and will continue to work out, so long as there is such a thing as irresponsible wealth pervading the social body. That too the New Republic must in its very development overcome. In the preceding chapter it is clearly implicit that I believe that the New Republic, as its consciousness and influence develop together, will meet, check, and control these things; but the broad principles upon which the control will go, the nature of the methods employed, still remain to be deduced. And to make that deduction, it is necessary that the primary conception of life, the fundamental, religious, and moral ideas of these predominant men of the new time should first be considered.

Now, quite inevitably, these men will be religious men. Being themselves, as by the nature of the forces that have selected them they will certainly be, men of will and purpose, they will be disposed to find, and consequently they will find, an effect of purpose in the totality of things. Either one must believe the Universe to be one and systematic, and held together by some omnipresent quality, or one must believe it to be a casual aggregation, an incoherent accumulation with no unity whatsoever outside the unity of the personality regarding it. All science and most modern religious systems presuppose the former, and to believe the former is, to any one not too anxious to quibble, to believe in God. But I believe that these prevailing men of the future, like many of the saner men of to-day, having so formulated their fundamental belief, will presume to no knowledge whatever, will presume to no possibility of knowledge of the real being of God. They will have no positive definition of God at all. They will certainly not indulge in "that something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness" (not defined) or any defective claptrap of that sort. They will content themselves with denying the self-contradictory absurdities of an obstinately anthropomorphic theology ,[ 50] they will regard the whole of being, within themselves and without, as the sufficient revelation of God to their souls, and they will set themselves simply to that revelation, seeking its meaning towards themselves faithfully and courageously. Manifestly the essential being of man in this life is his will; he exists consciously only to do ; his main interest in life is the choice between alternatives; and, since he moves through space and time to effects and consequences, a general purpose in space and time is the limit of his understanding. He can know God only under the semblance of a pervading purpose, of which his own individual freedom of will is a part, but he can understand that the purpose that exists in space and time is no more God than a voice calling out of impenetrable darkness is a man. To men of the kinetic type belief in God so manifest as purpose is irresistible, and, to all lucid minds, the being of God, save as that general atmosphere of imperfectly apprehended purpose in which our individual wills operate, is incomprehensible. To cling to any belief more detailed than this, to define and limit God in order to take hold of Him, to detach one's self and parts of the universe from God in some mysterious way in order to reduce life to a dramatic antagonism, is not faith, but infirmity. Excessive strenuous belief is not faith. By faith we disbelieve, and it is the drowning man, and not the strong swimmer, who clutches at the floating straw. It is in the nature of man, it is in the present purpose of things, that the real world of our experience and will should appear to us not only as a progressive existence in space and time, but as a scheme of good and evil. But choice, the antagonism of good and evil, just as much as the formulation of things in space and time, is merely a limiting condition of human being, and in the thought of God as we conceive of Him in the light of faith, this antagonism vanishes. God is no moralist, God is no partisan ; He comprehends and cannot be comprehended, and our business is only with so much of His purpose as centres on our individual wills.