NATURE 26 
on 
THURSDAY, JANUARY 17, 1907. 
SOCIAL PROBLEMS IN AMERICA. 
The Future in America—a Search after Realities. 
By H. G. Wells. Pp. 359. (London: Chapman 
and Hall, Ltd.) Price 1os. 6d. net. 
\\ E opened this book fearing that, like other 
books by the same author, it was an attempt 
to extrapolate or foretell the future from a mere 
man’s quite inadequate knowledge of the present and 
the past; but we have been delightfully disappointed. 
Mr. Wells is acute in observation, he is well in- 
formed on English social problems, and he reasons 
carefully. His visit to America was very short, but 
it was preceded by much reading. He nowhere 
speaks dogmatically; he evidently restrains his in- 
clination to draw general conclusions from a sense 
that he may be neglecting important premises, and 
such conclusions as he comes to seem to us to be 
sound and of value. 
Americans have never been tolerant of outside 
criticism, even when it was obviously honest and 
good; yet surely it is needed, and is found useful by 
other nations. Never was an outside critic more 
kindly and sympathetic than Mr. Wells, and we have 
no doubt that during the next twenty years this book 
will be referred to and quoted from by every good 
writer. on social problems, which, after all, are not 
peculiar to America. The American people are like 
the middle classes of England, France, and Germany ; 
there is no feudal or aristocratic upper class, there 
is no earth-tied peasant. The American idea is the 
middle-class idea everywhere, but in America it has 
been carried out without restrictions; it fosters that 
kind of individuality which thrives on open and un- 
disciplined competition for wealth. 
And the time is coming when the American formula 
will no longer suffice. Settled conditions and great 
possibilities of wealth given by nature to a large 
middle-class kind of population have produced their 
natural effects. The compound interest law of in- 
crease of wealth is in action, and gigantic fortunes 
in the hands of quite common men have not only 
destroyed the idea of equality, but have become a 
danger to the community. Every energetic worker 
feels that there are limitations now being put to 
his chances of getting on. It is possible quite 
legally for rich individuals to further their schemes 
by widespread corruption. Corruption everywhere, 
but especially in municipal governments, has assumed 
such large dimensions that it seems impossible to 
remedy the evil. The average man attends to his 
own personal affairs, and has no sense of his 
duties as a citizen. He resents all Government 
interference. Indeed, it is part of the American 
formula that the cultured and rich men, and one 
may say the best men, take no interest in 
Imperial or State or municipal affairs—to touch 
pitch is to be defiled—and that the ordinary citizen 
thinks only of his own interests in this world and the 
next. Immigration is no longer British and Teutonic. 
NO. 1942, VOL. 75] 
The German and Russian Jew, the lower classes from 
Austria and Italy and Turkey are—nearly one million 
of them a year—welcomed as necessary recruits in 
the serf army of the capitalists. In this serf army 
the children and women are the chief sufferers. No 
story told of an old Lancashire factory can compete 
with some of the horrors of New Jersey at the present 
time. r 
There has always been in America a_ wide- 
spread contempt, not for the law, but for abstract 
justice, so that even well-minded, influential people 
do not set themselves to remedy obvious wrong when 
by so doing they might hurt themselves or their party 
in the eyes of multitudes of base and busy, greedy 
and childish, malevolent and ignorant voters. The 
unfairness of the southerner to the negro is no longer 
confined to the south, and the crimes of a few negroes 
exasperate white people so much that they forget the 
kindly ways of the average man of colour, and thus 
the negro question is becoming more complex. 
But thoughtful Americans are already — feeling 
the inadequacy of their old formulas. New ideas 
are organising themselves out of the little limited 
efforts of innumerable men. Many universities 
are busy on the study of social problems. The 
younger generation is already raising an opposition 
to the tyranny of mere industrialism by cultivating 
religious, philosophic, literary, scientific, artistic, and 
political thought, and they are doing this, not as a 
mere matter of taste, but in their sacred duty as 
citizens. 
One of the most interesting chapters in this bool 
is entitled ‘‘ Culture.”’ If it were possible to get 
Boston to read anything of recent date, the perusal 
of this chapter would produce a much-needed revolu- 
tion there. Between that Scylla, the fervid ignor- 
ance of the workers of Paterson, and that Charybdis, 
the prestige and mere knowledge and genteel aloot- 
ness and culture which make Boston useless, . the 
creative minds of the university reformers must steer 
their dangerous way. At futile Washington Mr. 
Wells found a real man, the anxious, perplexed Presi- 
dent, who is a microcosm of his hundred million 
subjects, who sees all that is wrong and the difficulty 
of reform. Mr. Roosevelt assimilates all that makes 
for reform in contemporary thought, and causes it to 
reverberate over the land so that it becomes familiar 
to all people. At the root of all reform is political 
reform, creating a legislature at Washington and 
an executive which shall be in harmony with one 
another, and which under proper safeguards shall be 
able to put aside the present obstruction of the various 
States. Only a great educated and sustained agita- 
tion can bring about such a revolution. 
Mr. Wells would almost leave us still in doubt— 
may not America, after all, be a great futility? But 
just at the very end we find him optimistic. We are 
inclined to think that Mr. Wells pays too much 
attention to America of the present, and that if he 
thought more of America of the past he would be 
altogether optimistic. Mrs. Trollope and Cooper and 
Dickens differed but little in opinion, and can any 
candid student of their writings deny that America 
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