Suttlement to ''Nature" March 13 1902. 



pyramids. It ought to be possible to build sound, port- 

 able and habitable houses of felted wire-netting and 

 weather-proofed paper upon a light framework." 



Mr. Wells would improve the British workman. 



" The average sanitary plumber of to-day in England,'' 

 he says, "insists upon his position as a mere labourer 

 as though it were some precious thing ; he guards himself 

 from improvement as a virtuous woman guards her 

 honour ; he works for specifically limited hours and by 

 the hour with specific limitations in the practice of his 

 trade, on the fairly sound assumption that but for that 

 restriction any fool might do plumliing as well as he ; 

 whatever he learns he learns from some other plumber 

 during his apprenticeship years — after which he devotes 

 himself to doing the minuiium of work in the maximum 

 of time until his brief excursion into this mysterious 

 universe is over." 



He has not much respect for the House of Commons. 



"Even the physical conditions under which the House 

 of Commons meets and plays at Government are ridi- 

 culously obsolete. Every disputable point is settled by 

 a division ; a bell rings, there is shouting and running, 

 the members come blundering into the chamber and 

 sort themselves with much loutish shuffling and shoving 

 into the division lobbies. They are counted, as illiterate 

 farmers count sheep ; amidst much fuss and confusion 

 they return to their places and the tellers vociferate the 

 result. The waste of time over these antics is enormous, 

 and they are often repeated many times in an evening.'' 



Our author traces the origin of the modern democracy 

 or democratic quasi-monarchy. He has a wholesome 

 contempt for the mode of Government it has produced 

 and the conduct of alifairs by party representatives. 

 Every such Government conducts its affairs, he says, 



" as though there were no such thing as special know- 

 ledge or practical education. The utmost recognition it 

 atTords to the man who has taken the pains to know, 

 and specifically to do, is occasionally to consult him 

 upon specific points and override his councils in its 

 ampler wisdom, or to entrust to him some otherwise im- 

 possible duty under circumstances of extreme limitation. 

 The man of special equipment is treated always as if he 

 were some sort of curious performing animal." 



Of war, Mr. Wells has much to say which is very 

 important and, indeed, should be read, side by side, with 

 the passionate appeal of a similar tendency recently 

 made by Mr. Rudyard Kipling in his "Islanders." 



"War," he tells us, "in the past was a thing of days 

 and heroisms ; battles and campaigns rested in the hand 

 of the great commander ; he stood out against the sky, 

 picturesquely on horseback, visibly controlling it all. 

 War in the future will be a question of preparation, of 

 long years of foresight and disciplined imagination." 



The picture given below is a fine sample of Mr. Wells' 

 style and matter : — 



" There will be first of all the coming of the war, the 

 wave of excitement, the belligerent shouting of the 

 unemployed inefificients, the flag-waving, the secret 

 doubts, the eagerness for hopeful news, the impatience 

 of the warning voice. I seem to see, almost as if he were 

 symbolic, the grey old general— the general who learnt his 

 art of war away in the vanished nineteenth century, the 

 altogether too elderly general with his epaulettes and 

 decorations, his uniform that has still its historical value. 



NO. 1689, VOL. 65] 



his spurs and his sword — riding along on his obsolete 

 horse by the side of his doomed column. Above all 

 things he is a gentleman — and the column looks at him 

 lovingly with its countless boys' faces, and the boys' 

 eyes are infinitely trustful, for he has won battles in the 

 old time. They will believe in him to the end. They 

 have been lirought up in their schools to believe in him 

 and his class, their mothers have mingled respect for the 

 gentlefolk with the simple doctrines of their faith, their 

 first lesson on entering the army was the salute. The 

 ' smart ' helmets His Majesty, or some such unqualified 

 person, chose for them lie hotly on their young brows, 

 and over their shoulders slope their obsolete carelessly- 

 sighted guns. Tramp, tramp, they march, doing what 

 they have been told to do ; Religion and the Ratepayer 

 and the Rights of the Parent working through the 

 instrumentality of the Best Club in the world have kept 

 their souls and minds, if not untainted, at least only 

 harmlessly veneered, with the thinnest sham of training 

 or knowledge. Tramp, tramp, they go, boys who will 

 never be men, rejoicing patriotically in the nation that 

 has thus sent them forth, badly armed, badly clothed, 

 badly led to be killed in some avoidable quarrel by men 

 unseen. And beside them, an absolute stranger to them, 

 a stranger even in habits of speech and thought, and at any 

 rate to be shot with them fairly and squarely, marches 

 the subaltern — the son of the school-burking share- 

 holding class — a slightly taller sort of boy, as ill taught 

 as they are in all that concerns the realities of life, 

 ignorant of how to get food, how to get water, how to 

 keep fever down and strength up, ignorant of his practi- 

 cal equality with the men beside him, carefully trained 

 under a clerical headmaster to use a crib, play cricket 

 rather nicely, look all right whatever happens, believe in 

 his gentility and avoid talking ' shop.' ... .So the 

 gentlemanly old general— the polished drover to the 

 shambles — rides, and his doomed column march by, in 

 this vision that haunts my mind. I cannot foresee what such 

 a force will even attempt to do, against modern weapons. 

 Nothing can happen but the needless and most wasteful 

 and pitiful killing of these poor lads, who make up the 

 infantry battalions, the main class of all European armies 

 to-day, whenever they come against a sanely organised 

 army. There is nowhere they can come in, there is 

 nothing they can do. The scattered invisible marksmen 

 with their supporting guns will shatter their masses, pick 

 them off individually, cover their line of retreat and 

 force them into wholesale surrenders. It will be more 

 like herding sheep than actual fighting. Yet the bitterest 

 and cruellest things will have to happen, thousands and 

 thousands of poor boys will be smashed in all sorts of 

 dreadful ways and given over to every conceivable form 

 of avoidable hardship and painful disease, before the 

 obvious fact that war is no longer a business for half- 

 trained lads in uniform, led by parson-bred sixth form 

 boys and men of pleasure and old men, but an exhaustive 

 demand upon very carefully educated adults for the most 

 strenuous best that is in them, will get its practical 

 recognition." 



Our author proceeds to emphasise 



" the inexorable tendency in things to make a soldier a 

 skilled and educated man and to link him, in sympathy 

 and organisation, with the engineer and the doctor, and 

 all the continually developing mass of scientifically edu- 

 cated men that the advance of science and mechanism is 

 producing." 



He is led to think it not improbable that the present 

 military hierarchy will be left in this country as a sort of 

 ornamental court attendants, and that an entirely new 

 and independent army will be raised and organised on 

 sound business principles. 



