Supplement to "Nature," March 13, 1902. 



SUPPLEMENT TO " NATURE." 



THE PRESENT JUDGED BY THE FUTURE. 

 Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and 



Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought. 



By H. G. Wells. Pp. 318. (London : Chapman and 



Hall. Ltd., 1902.) Price 7J-. bd. 



THIS is a profoundly interesting and suggestive book 

 by a very remarkable man. Mr. Wells was educated 

 at the Royal College of Science ; he has a thorough 

 knowledge of, and considerable training in, the great 

 branches of science — physics, chemistry, astronomy, 

 geology and biology. This course of study operated, in 

 the case of Mr. Wells, upon a mind naturally gifted with 

 an extraordinarily vivid imagination and the aptitude for 

 true literary art. In one of his latest works, " Love and 

 Mr. Lewisham," Mr. Wells has told us the story of the 

 struggle for life of a South Kensington student, and for 

 the first time given the Royal College of Science the 

 dignity of literary recognition. But it is by his audacious 

 and fascinating " imaginings " as to the arrival on our 

 planet of the inhabitants of Mars, the strange evolution 

 and changes in the nature of men and the earth's surface 

 as seen a million years hence, the morphology and habits 

 of the inhabitants of the moon, the nocturnal freezing 

 and solidification of its atmosphere, and as to other such 

 topics that Mr. H. G. Wells is best known. The really 

 wonderful range of knowledge shown in these stories, the 

 scientific accuracy of the abundant details, the absolute 

 restraint of the weird histories recounted, within the 

 limits of what scientific criticism must admit as possible 

 — nay, even probable, given the one initial miracle of any- 

 one having and recording e.-cperiences of such things — 

 lend a special charm to Mr. Wells' writings wanting in 

 those of all other masters of this kind of literary craft 

 from Swift to Jules Verne. One of his shorter stories, 

 " The Star " — calmly recording in the words of a survivor 

 the approach and passage of a huge meteor which causes 

 the ocean to sweep the land-surface of the earth in all 

 parts to a depth of two hundred feet — is written with 

 such faithful adherence to scientific possibility and such 

 convincing art in narrative that I, for one, am haunted 

 by the conviction that the thing has occurred in past 

 epochs more than once, and may at any time occur 

 ;.gain. 



The character which Mr. Wells has thus established 

 for himself will necessarily tend to a misunderstanding 

 nf the nature of his work recently published under the 

 title "Anticipations." In this book the author is not 

 seeking to amuse us by far-reaching speculation as to 

 remote possibilities. Under the guise of prophecy as to 

 the future, Mr. Welts criticises the present. He imagines 

 that before a hundred years are out (we must all wish 

 this forecast to be realised) there will gradually come 

 into existence 



"a naturally and informally organised, educated class, 

 an unprecedented soit of people, a New Republic domin- 

 ating the world. ... a new social Hercules that will 

 strangle the serpents of war and national animosity in 

 his cradle ... a conscious organisation of intelligent 

 and, quite possibly in some cases, wealthy men." 



NO. 1689, VOL. 65] 



Mr. Wells hopes great things from the cosmopolitanism 

 and intelligence of this coming power. He tells us what 

 the men of this new group will think on various subjects 

 and do in regard to many things, and thus he makes 

 them the vehicle for conveying his righteous indignation 

 and just contempt for a large part of the present ways 

 and beliefs of mankind. It is impossible to do justice 

 in a brief review to a book which deals with nearly every 

 subject under the sun — from motor-cars and cooperative 

 cookery to the struggle for domination among the nations 

 and the essence of religion. Mr. Wells commences his 

 far-reaching survey with a comparatively comfortable 

 chapter on " Locomotion in the Twentieth Century." 

 Special motor tracks and individual motor-cars will to a 

 large extent replace railways. This leads on to the 

 consideration of the " Diffusion of Great Cities." The 

 country will cease to come into the town ; the town will 

 spread into the country in proportion as the facilities for 

 locomotion enable a larger and larger area to be in easy 

 touch with the great centres. Then follow chapters on 

 the domestic economy and the relations of class to class 

 — the natural history or bionomics of the social organism 

 in the past, the present and the immediate future of the 

 twentieth century. " War in the Twentieth Century,'' 

 "The Conflict of Languages" and "Faith, Morals and 

 Public Policy in the Twentieth Century '' are the titles of 

 subsequent chapters. 



I shall best enable the reader to judge of the manner 

 in which these subjects are treated, and stimulate, I hope, 

 his desire to read Mr. Wells' book by a few quotations. 



" The facies of the social fabric has," he says, " changed 

 and — as I hope to make clear — is still changing in a direc- 

 tion from which, without a total destruction and re-birth 

 of that fabric, there can never be any return. The most 

 striking of the new classes to emerge is certainly the 

 share-holding class, the owners of a sort of property new 

 in the world's history. . . . Share property is property 

 that can be owned at any distance and that yields its 

 revenue without thought or care on the part of its pro- 

 prietor ; it is, indeed, absolutely irresponsible property, 

 a thing that no old world property ever was. . . . The 

 shareholder owns the world de jure, by the common re- 

 cognition of the rights of property ; and the incumbency 

 of knowledge, management and toil fall entirely to others. 

 He toils not, neither does he spin ; he is mechanically 

 released from the penalty of the Fall, he reaps in a still 

 sinful world all the practical benefits of the millennium 

 — without any of its moral limitations." 



Among many other ways and habits which are pointed 

 out for improvement in the nascent century, those of 

 house-builders are criticised at some length. Here is a 

 good sample : — 



" I find it incredible that there will not be a sweeping 

 revolution in the methods of building during the next 

 century. The erection of a house-wall, come to think of 

 it, is an astonishingly tedious and complex business, the 

 final result exceedingly unsatisfactory. ... I fail to see 

 the necessity of (and, accordingly, I resent bitterly) all 

 these coral-reef methods. Better walls than this and 

 less life-wasting ways of making them are surely possible. 

 . . . I can dream at last of much more revolutionary 

 affairs, of a thing running to and fro along a temporary 

 rail, that will squeeze out wall as one squeezes paint from 

 a tube, and form its surface with a pat or two as it sets. 

 Moreover, I do not see at all why the walls of small 

 dwelling-houses should be so solid as they are. There 

 still hangs about us the monumental jtradition of the 



