new-world-order-hg-wells.pdf

H. G. WELLS

THE

NEW WORLD

ORDER

Whether it is attainable, how it can be attained, and what sort

of world a world at peace will have to be.

First Published . . January 1940.

THE END OF AN AGE

IN THIS SMALL BOOK I want to set down as compactly,

clearly and usefully as possible the gist of what I have learnt

about war and peace in the course of my life. I am not going to

write peace propaganda here. I am going to strip down certain

general ideas and realities of primary importance to their

framework, and so prepare a nucleus of useful knowledge for

those who have to go on with this business of making a world

peace. I am not going to persuade people to say "Yes, yes" for a

world peace; already we have had far too much abolition of war

by making declarations and signing resolutions; everybody

wants peace or pretends to want peace, and there is no need to

add even a sentence more to the vast volume of such

ineffective stuff. I am simply attempting to state the things we

must do and the price we must pay for world peace if we really

intend to achieve it.

Until the Great War, the First World War, I did not bother very

much about war and peace. Since then I have almost

specialised upon this problem. It is not very easy to recall

former states of mind out of which, day by day and year by

year, one has grown, but I think that in the decades before 1914

not only I but most of my generation - in the British Empire,

America, France and indeed throughout most of the civilised

world - thought that war was dying out.

So it seemed to us. It was an agreeable and therefore a readily

acceptable idea. We imagined the Franco-German War of

1870-71 and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 were the final

conflicts between Great Powers, that now there was a Balance

of Power sufficiently stable to make further major warfare

impracticable. A Triple Alliance faced a Dual Alliance and

neither had much reason for attacking the other. We believed

war was shrinking to mere expeditionary affairs on the

outskirts of our civilisation, a sort of frontier police business.

Habits of tolerant intercourse, it seemed, were being

strengthened every year that the peace of the Powers remained

unbroken.

There was in deed a mild armament race going on; mild by our

present standards of equipment; the armament industry was a

growing and enterprising on; but we did not see the full

implication of that; we preferred to believe that the increasing

general good sense would be strong enough to prevent these

multiplying guns from actually going off and hitting anything.

And we smiled indulgently at uniforms and parades and army

manœuvres. They were the time-honoured toys and regalia of

kings and emperors. They were part of the display side of life

and would never get to actual destruction and killing. I do not

think that exaggerates the easy complacency of, let us say,

1895, forty-five years ago. It was a complacency that lasted

with most of us up to 1914. In 1914 hardly anyone in Europe or

America below the age of fifty had seen anything of war in his

own country.

The world before 1900 seemed to be drifting steadily towards a

tacit but practical unification. One could travel without a

passport over the larger part of Europe; the Postal Union

delivered one’s letters uncensored and safely from Chile to

China; money, based essentially on gold, fluctuated only very

slightly; and the sprawling British Empire still maintained a

tradition of free trade, equal treatment and open-handedness to

all comers round and about the planet. In the United States you

could go for days and never see a military uniform. Compared

with to-day that was, upon the surface at any rate, an age of

easy-going safety and good humour. Particularly for the North

Americans and the Europeans.

But apart from that steady, ominous growth of the armament

industry there were other and deeper forces at work that were

preparing trouble. The Foreign Offices of the various sovereign

states had not forgotten the competitive traditions of the

eighteenth century. The admirals and generals were

contemplating with something between hostility and

fascination, the hunger weapons the steel industry was gently

pressing into their hands. Germany did not share the self-

complacency of the English-speaking world; she wanted a

place in the sun; there was increasing friction about the

partition of the raw material regions of Africa; the British

suffered from chronic Russophobia with regard to their vast

apportions in the East, and set themselves to nurse Japan into a

modernised imperialist power; and also they "remembered

Majuba"; the United States were irritated by the disorder of

Cuba and felt that the weak, extended Spanish possessions

would be all the better for a change of management. So the

game of Power Politics went on, but it went on upon the

margins of the prevailing peace. There were several wars and

changes of boundaries, but they involved no fundamental

disturbance of the general civilised life; they did not seem to

threaten its broadening tolerations and understandings in any

fundamental fashion. Economic stresses and social trouble

stirred and muttered beneath the orderly surfaces of political

life, but threatened no convulsion. The idea of altogether

eliminating war, of clearing what was left of it away, was in the

air, but it was free from any sense of urgency. The Hague

Tribunal was established and there was a steady dissemination

of the conceptions of arbitration and international law. It really

seemed to many that the peoples of the earth were settling

down in their various territories to a litigious rather than a

belligerent order. If there was much social injustice it was

being mitigated more and more by a quickening sense of social

decency. Acquisitiveness conducted itself with decorum and

public-spiritedness was in fashion. Some of it was quite honest

public-spiritedness.

In those days, and they are hardly more than half a lifetime

behind us, no one thought of any sort of world administration.

That patchwork of great Powers and small Powers seemed the

most reasonable and practicable method of running the

business of mankind. Communications were far too difficult for

any sort of centralised world controls. Around the World in

Eighty Days, when it was published seventy years ago, seemed

an extravagant fantasy. It was a world without telephone or

radio, with nothing swifter than a railway train or more

destructive than the earlier types of H.E. shell. They were

marvels. It was far more convenient to administer that world of

the Balance of Power in separate national areas and, since there

were such limited facilities for peoples to get at one another

and do each other mischiefs, there seemed no harm in ardent

patriotism and the complete independence of separate

sovereign states.

Economic life was largely directed by irresponsible private

businesses and private finance which, because of their private

ownership, were able to spread out their unifying transactions

in a network that paid little attention to frontiers and national,

racial or religious sentimentality. "Business" was much more of

a world commonwealth than the political organisations. There

were many people, especially in America, who imagined that

"Business" might ultimately unify the world and governments

sink into subordination to its network.

Nowadays we can be wise after the event and we can see that

below this fair surface of things, disruptive forces were steadily

gathering strength. But these disruptive forces played a

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: