PREFACE
THE World Set Free was written in 1913 and published early in
1914, and it is the latest of a series of three fantasias of
possibility, stories which all turn on the possible developments in the
future of some contemporary force or group of forces. The World Set
Free was written under the immediate shadow of the Great War. Every
intelligent person in the world felt that disaster was impending and
knew no way of averting it, but few of us realised in the earlier half
of 1914 how near the crash was to us. The reader will be amused to find
that here it is put off until the year 1956. He may naturally want to
know the reason for what will seem now a quite extraordinary delay. As a
prophet, the author must confess he has always been inclined to be
rather a slow prophet. The war aeroplane in the world of reality, for
example, beat the forecast in Anticipations by about twenty years
or so. I suppose a desire not to shock the sceptical reader's sense of
use and wont and perhaps a less creditable disposition to hedge, have
something to do with this dating forward of one's main events, but in
the particular
case of
The World Set Free there was, I think, another motive in
holding the Great War back, and that was to allow the chemist to get
well forward with his discovery of the release of atomic energy. 1956—
or for that matter 2056—may be none too late for that crowning
revolution in human potentialities. And apart from this procrastination
of over forty years, the guess at the opening phase of the war was
fairly lucky; the forecast of an alliance of the Central Empires, the
opening campaign through the Netherlands, and the despatch of the
British Expeditionary Force were all justified before the book had been
published six months. And the opening section of Chapter the Second
remains now, after the reality has happened, a fairly adequate diagnosis
of the essentials of the matter. One happy hit (in Chapter the Second,
§ 2), on which the writer may congratulate himself, is the forecast
that under modern conditions it would be quite impossible for any great
general to emerge to supremacy and concentrate the enthusiasm of the
armies of either side. There could be no Alexanders or Napoleons. And
we soon heard the scientific corps muttering, `These old fools,' exactly
as it is here foretold.
These, however, are small details, and the misses in the story
far outnumber the hits. It is the main thesis which is still of interest
now; the thesis that
because of the development of scientific knowledge, separate sovereign
states and separate sovereign empires are no longer possible in the
world, that to attempt to keep on with the old system is to heap
disaster upon disaster for mankind and perhaps to destroy our race
altogether. The remaining interest of this book now is the sustained
validity of this thesis and the discussion of the possible ending of war
on the earth. I have supposed a sort of epidemic of sanity to break out
among the rulers of states and the leaders of mankind. I have
represented the native common sense of the French mind and of the
English mind—for manifestly King Egbert is meant to be `God's
Englishman'—leading mankind towards a bold and resolute effort of
salvage and reconstruction.
Instead of which, as the school book footnotes say, compare
to-day's newspaper. Instead of a frank and honourable gathering of
leading men, Englishman meeting German and Frenchman Russian, brothers
in their offences and in their disaster, upon the hills of Brissago,
beheld in Geneva at the other end of Switzerland a poor little League of
(Allied) Nations (excluding the United States, Russia, and most of the
`subject peoples' of the world), meeting obscurely amidst a world-wide
disregard to make impotent gestures at the leading
problems of the debacle. Either the disaster has not been vast enough
yet or it has not been swift enough to inflict the necessary moral shock
and achieve the necessary moral revulsion. Just as the world of 1913 was
used to an increasing prosperity and thought that increase would go on
for ever, so now it would seem the world is growing accustomed to a
steady glide towards social disintegration, and thinks that that too can
go on continually and never come to a final bump. So soon do use and
wont establish themselves, and the most flaming and thunderous of
lessons pale into disregard.
The question whether a Leblanc is still possible, the question
whether it is still possible to bring about an outbreak of creative
sanity in mankind, to avert this steady glide to destruction, is now one
of the most urgent in the world. It is clear that the writer is
temperamentally disposed to hope that there is such a possibility. But
he has to confess that he sees few signs of any such breadth of
understanding and steadfastness of will as an effectual effort to turn
the rush of human affairs demands. The inertia of dead ideas and old
institutions carries us on towards the rapids. Only in one direction is
there any plain recognition of the idea of a human commonweal as
something overriding any national and patriotic consideration, and that
is in the
working class movement throughout the world. And labour internationalism
is closely bound up with conceptions of a profound social revolution. If
world peace is to be attained through labour internationalism, it will
have to be attained at the price of the completest social and economic
reconstruction and by passing through a phase of revolution that will
certainly be violent, that may be very bloody, which may be prolonged
through a long period, and may in the end fail to achieve anything but
social destruction. Nevertheless, the fact remains that it is in the
labour class, and the labour class alone, that any conception of a world
rule and a world peace has so far appeared. The dream of
The World
Set Free, a dream of highly educated and highly favoured leading and
ruling men, voluntarily setting themselves to the task of reshaping the
world, has thus far remained a dream.
H. G. WELLS.
EASTON GLEBE,
DUNMOW, 1921.