June 20, 19 1 8 
Land & Water 
15 
Life and Letters mjJX^Soh 
mre 
Mr. Wells and World Peace 
MR. H. G. WELLS'S book In the Fourth Year 
(Chatto & Windus, 3s. 6d. net) is described 
in the sub- title as "Anticipations of a World 
Peace." It is, in fact, a tract showing the 
necessity and the nature of what we now 
commonly call "a League of Nations." Other more or less 
relevant subjects are discussed, including the institution of 
monarchy and the nature of democracy ; but this is the 
centre of the book. 
* * , « * * * 
Mr. Wells argues, unanswerably, that the progress of 
destructive invention and of means of communication 
has made another war a thing not to be tolerably cf5ntem- 
plated. The only thing for it, therefore, is for the States to 
come together, and to delegate some of their authority to a 
central co-operative organisation which will have as its 
object the preservation of the peace. Legal power will have 
to coincide with actual power ; the great countries of the 
world must, if the scheme is to work, rule the roast ;' any 
voting arrangement must be framed in the light of this 
truth. The delegates Mr. Wells wants to be chosen by 
popular election. 'And the functions of the League, over 
and above its main function of the pacific settlement of 
disputes and the outlawry of breakers of peace, will include 
limitation of national armaments (the size of which, as he 
argues, are at present mostly decided not by our own free 
will, but by the actions of foreigners), the trusteeship of 
backward territories, and the fair distribution of tropical 
raw materials. One cannot go far into details, but I may 
say that his argument in favour of an international control 
of tropical Africa, which will avoid the highly undesirable 
international administration of its several parts, puts the 
. case for that proposal more convincingly than I have ever 
seen it put. 
♦'***** 
Mr. Wells is naturally clear that Prussia, wliich stands, 
not only in practice but in theory, as the negation of all our 
beliefs, must be beaten. A League of AlUed Nations may 
be (it is a much-disputed point) formed even during the 
war ; but it must break down if Germany wins, and a genuine 
draw, if that were conceivable, would leave it as a mere 
alliance — possibly not stable — against the German danger 
of the future. Again, though to this point Mr. Wells does 
not sufficiently address himself, the realisation of the Allies' 
programme of "national self-determination" is an essential 
preliminary, unless (i) the League is to be regarded by every 
subject people in Europe as an instrument for maintaining 
an inequitable status quo, or (2) it is to be given powers of 
"domestic" interference which few would be willing to 
concede, and which involve possibilities of -endless trouble. 
And again, as Mr. Wells very persuasively points out, it is 
essential that before we get to the Peace Congress the Allies 
shall have so thoroughly harmonised their war aims, terri- 
torial and other, that no Gerrrian intrigue will be able to 
split them. This is common sense ; but it wants Saying , 
very loudly. All these conditions satisfied, a League of 
Nations is practicable ; once the habit of international 
co-operation is established, it will grow ; and th*e suspicions 
and fears, which are the lever by which the bloodthirsty and 
the rapacious move for their own ends large masses of men 
who desire neither to kill anybody nor themselves to stand 
for years in wet trendies aijiid clouds of poison, will 
insensibly diminish. 
***♦*• 
The book is brief, hot, impulsive ; Mr. Wells is concerned 
chiefly and rightly with driving home the large elementary 
considerations which make a League of Nations imperative 
in such a way that the ordinary reader, who is timid about 
new political considerations and shirks technical detail, will 
be at once arrested and convinced. It is natural, therefore, 
that he should sometimes unintentionally convey an impres- 
sion that some of the difficulties' he deals with are still 
untackled, whereas in fact a great deal of useful donkey- 
work has been done upon them. He migiit pertinently 
have referred the reader to wliat are perliaps the three most 
interesting schemes which have been produced : those of 
Lord Bryce's Committee, of Mr. L. S. Woolf, and of the 
American League to "Enforce Peace. A roni revision, too, 
might have led him to rectify some loose or obscure sen- 
tences. It is, to give an instance, on the face of it not easy 
to reconcile his statement that "we are fighting to bring 
about a revolution in Germany ; we want Germany to 
become a democratically controlled State, such as is the 
United States to-day, with open methods and pacific inten- 
tions," with his other statement that (internally) "if Ger- 
mans, for instance, like to wallow in absolutism after the war, 
they can do so" ; though other remarks seem to visualise 
the possibility of democracy for international purposes only, 
which may be verbally treated as a possibihty, but will not 
bear contemplation. A more serious defect of the book is 
Mr. Wells's impatience with those from whom he differs : 
not on the main issue, but on others. In this book of all 
places he has seen fit to introduce a violent attack upon the 
motives of those who are opposed to Proportional Repre- 
sentation — an attack which is all the worse in that he endea- 
vours to injure the sensible opponents of P.R. by lampooning 
its foolish opponents. This is not the time or place to con- 
trovert him ; but has it ever occurred to him that P.R., 
with its big constituencies, may actually assist the great 
pohtical caucuses to swamp candidates without machinery 
or large funds for organisation and advertisement ? One 
could wish that Mr. Wells were a little less free with his 
invective against men who honestly differ from him, and a 
httle freer with his jecognition of assistance and assent. 
It is impossible that we' should all agree with Mr. Wells 
about everything. 
* . * * * * * 
One does not wish, however, to dwell on the relatively 
unimportant defects of this brilliant and valuable piece of 
pamphleteering ; one would not bother about them at all 
did one not feel that a man of Mr. Wells's powers of reason 
and imagination could avoid them if he tried, and would, 
if he did avoid them, be even more effective than he is. 
Whatever quahfications have to be made and whatever 
lacuna have to be filled up, Mr. Wells's statement on the 
main issue is more calculated to convert the indifferent or 
the vaguely hostile reader than anything which has yet been 
published. A few passages on the possibilities of future 
war's — should civihsation shirk the job of putting them out 
of the question— suggest that Mr. Wells the novelist might 
make in a future book his most valuable contribution to the 
service of mankind. "There is not," he says, 
— a capital city in Europe that twenty years from now 
will not be liable to a bombing raid done by hundreds or 
even thousands of aeroplanes upon, or even before,* a 
declaration of war ; and there is not a line of sea com- 
munication that will not be as promptly interrupte<^ by 
the hostile submarine. . . All the European empires are 
becoming vulnerable at every point. 
There may be many who will not face this prospect, simply 
because (it is the usual reason for not facing a fact) they 
do not hke it. There may be some who still toy with the 
fanta.stic idea that the^eroplanc and the submarine can be 
"ruled out" and that \Ve shall be able to go on having wars 
in the dear old way, kilhng a limited number of men in 
certain strictly defined modes, but always stopping short of 
imperilling the fabric of civilisation. But the facts exist 
and stare at us. If we do not get rid of war, war will get rid 
of us. In the absence of a world organisation after this 
war which will enforce the legal settlement of disputes and 
threaten the would-be law-breaker with overwhelming force, 
we shall all of us, ' compelled to clutch at every chance of 
national self-preservation, spend our days and nights pre- 
paring for war, feverishly racing each other in perfecting 
and multiplication of existing means of destruction and 
the devisal of new ones. The necessities of dtiily life pro- 
vided, all our surplus energies and surplus brains, all our 
imagination and all our money, will be devoted to that end. 
.And what the clash -would be like when it caflie most of us 
must find it impossible to conceive. Mr. Wells, however, 
never so conspicuously a man of genius as when he is pre- 
dicting meclianical developments and their inevitable re- 
actions upon life, could visualise it ; and must be doing so 
now. If, even in the midst of the present carnage, he could 
write a novel, keeping his imagination strictly within the 
Ijounds of probability, describing the next war, he would do 
indirectly more for the cause he is maintaining than he could 
do by a hundred more immediately relevant but more 
al-)stract books. 
