478 



NATURE 



[August io, 191 6 



FORECAST BY MR. WELLS. 



What is Coming? A Forecast of Things after the 

 War. By H. G. Wells Pp. 295. (London : 

 Cassell and Co., Ltd., 1916.) Price 6s. net. 



AX/HEN Mr. Wells writes upon social and poli- 

 ^ * ticaf questions he is a prophet whom it is a 

 pleasure to follow, even when we feel that time 

 will prove his extrapolation careless. What mis- 

 takes he may have made in this book will declare 

 themselves in a year or two, so that he has placed 

 his reputation in more jeopardy than usual. He 

 believes that Germany will be beaten, but not com- 

 pletely crushed by this war ; " she is going" to be 

 left militarist and united with Austria and Hun- 

 gary, and unchanged in her essential nature ; and 

 out of that state of affairs comes, I believe, the 

 hope for an ultimate confederation of the nations 

 of the earth." The Central Powers remaining a 

 menace, the Allies and America will reform all 

 their methods. It is in discussing these reforms 

 that Mr. Wells is at his best ; he is on his own 

 familiar ground, and he excites the admiration and 

 sympathy of his most exacting critics. The chap- 

 ter, "Nations in Liquidation," contains in one 

 sentence his great idea : " The landlord who 

 squeezes, the workman who strikes and shirks, 

 the lawyer who fogs and obstructs, will know, 

 and will know that most people know, that what 

 he does is done, not under an empty, regardless 

 heaven, but in the face of an unsleeping enemy 

 and in disregard of a continuous urgent necessity 

 for unity." 



Thus we shall have a millennium induced by the 

 German menace : we wish we could believe in it. 

 In the chapter, "The Outlook for the Germans," 

 we find that he relies upon the great middle class 

 to save Germany from Junkerdom. He does not 

 take into account the fact that the German nation 

 must get tired of being intense and perhaps may 

 even get disgusted with " Kultur." Readers know 

 his views on Socialism, and they can imagine how 

 he mocks at our present want of organisation, our 

 rottenness and dishonesty, and how in particular 

 he makes war against the lawyers and school- 

 masters. There is a good chapter on " What the 

 War is doing for Women." 



Mr. Wells's whole scheme is based on his be- 

 lief that the Central Powers will continue to 

 menace the world, and this belief is itself based 

 upon a certain hypothesis which might almost have 

 been called an axiom five months ago, when Mr. 

 Wells wrote. This hypothesis is that in en- 

 trenched warfare the defensive has an advantage 

 over the most brilliant strategy and over consider- 

 ably superior numbers, and that there must be a 

 deadlock, followed by the complete exhaustion of 

 both sides. If Mr. Wells had waited only a few 

 months he would have seen that the great wealth 

 and patriotism of England and the enormous 

 population of Russia and the intense feeling 

 of France now enable the Allies to break 

 through the long German fortifications at all 

 points with advantages in power which get 

 greater and greater every day, so that the dead- 



NO. 2441, VOL. 97] 



lock is already at an end. Exhaustion in men is 

 fKJssible, and as there are more than twice as 

 many available soldiers with the Allies as with 

 the Central Powers, the speedier exhaustion of 

 Germany in men is quite certain. As for exhaus- 

 tion in wealth : in two years of the Napoleonic 

 war we spent one-third of a million pounds per 

 day. In a week we spent as much as Charles II. 

 spent in a year. Now we have reached an ex- 

 penditure of six millions per day, and yet un- 

 scientific persons refuse to recognise that the 

 wealth of England is unimaginably great, and 

 that the steam-engine has given us the whole 

 earth in fee.i Germany in 1871 thought, and 

 everybody thought, that she had ruined France 

 financially. We know now that if she had en- 

 forced an indemnity ten times as great France 

 would have paid it easily. We talk of the cost of 

 the war to Germany spelling her financial ruin, 

 whereas those scientific persons who have studied 

 Germany know that at the end of this war, if we 

 compel Germany to pay the total expenditure of 

 the Allies (we do not recommend this), she will still 

 be in a flourishing condition. Mr. Wells thinks 

 that the world peace is coming soon through uni- 

 versal self-sacrifice ; it is a guileless notion. Peace 

 will come to the world by such a loss of its wealth 

 as people do not think about — by the exhaustion of 

 its coal. The man in the street who reads scraps of 

 scientific literature believes, like the spendthrift, in 

 a miracle — namely, that unknown stores of wealth 

 will be opened up when our coal fails. Before the 

 war we recognised with sorrow that he was 

 wrong, but we have less sorrow now when we 

 know that our greatest blessing has become a 

 curse. J. P. 



OUR BOOKSHELF. 



The Cruise of the " Tomas Barrera " : Th- 

 Narrative of a Scientific Expedition to Wester 

 Cuba and the Colorados Reefs, with Observu 

 tions on the Geology, Fauna, and Flora of th 

 Region. By John B. Henderson. Pp. ix+32 

 (New York and London : G. P. Putnam's Son 

 1916.) Price 125. 6d. net. 



This book is the narrative of a " delightful outin 

 and a most successful collecting expedition " to tl 

 north-west end of Cuba. The account throughoi 

 is essentially domestic, the doings of each d:i 

 are recorded, and there are the usual more or le- 

 informed pages on mosquitoes, snakes, ar 

 sharks. It was a scramble of nine " naturalists 

 for six weeks to secure specimens of as mai 

 different animals as possible, rather than to stu( 

 scientific problems or living beasts. The cc 

 lectors secured a well-found fishing schooner \ 

 65 ft. length, with a launch, and dodged in ai 

 out of the barrier reefs of the Colorados, wherev- 

 possible securing specimens by shallow dredgin. 

 the use of copper sulphate for doping rock poo. 

 and the attraction of the electric bulb at nigH 

 It is a slightly known area, but reefs, lagooJj 



1 It has been proved that the steam-engine has multiplied the wealtl' 

 the world by some number between 200 and loco. 



