12 Mr. H. G. Wells [Jan. 24, 



The wars of Plantagenet and Lancastrian England with France, 

 for example, were based entirely upon a dummy claim, supported by 

 obscure legal arguments, upon the crown of France. And the argu- 

 ments that centre about the present war in South Africa ignore any 

 ideal of a great united South African state almost entirely, and 

 quibble this way and that about who began the fighting, and what 

 was or was not written in some obscure revision of a treaty a score 

 of years ago. Yet beneath the legal issues the broad creative idea 

 has been very apparent in the public mind during this war. It will 

 be found more or less definitely formulated beneath almost all the 

 great wars of the past century ; and a comparison of the wars of 

 the nineteenth century with the wars of the Middle Ages will show, 

 I think, that in this field also there has been a discovery of the 

 future, an increasing disposition to shift the reference and values 

 from things accomplished to things to come. 



Yet, though foresight creeps into our politics and a reference to 

 consequences into our morality, it is still the past that dominates our 

 lives. But why? Why are we so bound to it ? It is into the future 

 we go ; to-morrow is the eventful thing lor us. There lies all that 

 remains to be felt by us and our childien, and all those that are dear 

 to us. Yet we marshal and order men into classes entirely with 

 regard to the past, we draw shame and honour out of the past, 

 against the rights of property, the vested interests, the agreements 

 and establishments of the past, the future has no rights. Literature 

 is for the most part history, or history at one remove ; and what is 

 culture but a mould of interpretation into which new things are 

 thrust, a collection of standards, a sort of bed of Procrustes, to which 

 all new expressions must be lopped or stretched. Our conveniences, 

 like our thoughts, are all retrospective. We travel on roads so 

 narrow that they suffocate our traffic ; we live in uncomfortable, in- 

 convenient, life-wasting houses out of a love of familiar shapes and 

 familiar customs and a dread of strangeness ; all our public affairs 

 are cramped by local boundaries impossibly restricted and small. 

 Our clothing, our habits of speech, our sj)elling, our weights and 

 measures, our coinage, our religious and political theories, all witness 

 to the binding power of the past upon our minds. 



Yet we do not serve the past as the Chinese have done. There 

 are degrees. We do not worship our ancestors, nor prescribe a rigid 

 local costume ; we venture to enlarge our stock of knowledge, and 

 we qualify the classics with occasional adventures into original 

 thought. Compared with the Chinese, we are distinctly aware of 

 the future ; but compared with what we might be, the past is all our 

 world. 



The reason why the retrospective habit, the legal habit, is so 

 dominant, and always has been so predominant, is of course a per- 

 fectly obvious one. We follow the fundamental human principle 

 and take what we can get. All persons believe the past is certain, 

 defined, and knowable, and only a few people believe that it is 



