Part 1 (1/2)

What is Coming?

by H. G. Wells.

I. FORECASTING THE FUTURE

Prophecy may vary between being an intellectual amus.e.m.e.nt and a serious occupation; serious not only in its intentions, but in its consequences.

For it is the lot of prophets who frighten or disappoint to be stoned.

But for some of us moderns, who have been touched with the spirit of science, prophesying is almost a habit of mind.

Science is very largely a.n.a.lysis aimed at forecasting. The test of any scientific law is our verification of its antic.i.p.ations. The scientific training develops the idea that whatever is going to happen is really here now--if only one could see it. And when one is taken by surprise the tendency is not to say with the untrained man, ”Now, who'd ha'

thought it?” but ”Now, what was it we overlooked?”

Everything that has ever existed or that will ever exist is here--for anyone who has eyes to see. But some of it demands eyes of superhuman penetration. Some of it is patent; we are almost as certain of next Christmas and the tides of the year 1960 and the death before 3000 A.D.

of everybody now alive as if these things had already happened. Below that level of certainty, but still at a very high level of certainty, there are such things as that men will probably be making aeroplanes of an improved pattern in 1950, or that there will be a through railway connection between Constantinople and Bombay and between Baku and Bombay in the next half-century. From such grades of certainty as this, one may come down the scale until the most obscure mystery of all is reached: the mystery of the individual. Will England presently produce a military genius? or what will Mr. Belloc say the day after to-morrow? The most accessible field for the prophet is the heavens; the least is the secret of the jumping cat within the human skull. How will so-and-so behave, and how will the nation take it? For such questions as that we need the subtlest guesses of all.

Yet, even to such questions as these the sharp, observant man may risk an answer with something rather better than an even chance of being right.

The present writer is a prophet by use and wont. He is more interested in to-morrow than he is in to-day, and the past is just material for future guessing. ”Think of the men who have walked here!” said a tourist in the Roman Coliseum. It was a Futurist mind that answered: ”Think of the men who will.” It is surely as interesting that presently some founder of the World Republic, some obstinate opponent of militarism or legalism, or the man who will first release atomic energy for human use, will walk along the Via Sacra as that Cicero or Giordano Bruno or Sh.e.l.ley have walked there in the past. To the prophetic mind all history is and will continue to be a prelude. The prophetic type will steadfastly refuse to see the world as a museum; it will insist that here is a stage set for a drama that perpetually begins.

Now this forecasting disposition has led the writer not only to publish a book of deliberate prophesying, called ”Antic.i.p.ations,” but almost without premeditation to scatter a number of more or less obvious prophecies through his other books. From first to last he has been writing for twenty years, so that it is possible to check a certain proportion of these antic.i.p.ations by the things that have happened, Some of these shots have hit remarkably close to the bull's-eye of reality; there are a number of inners and outers, and some clean misses. Much that he wrote about in antic.i.p.ation is now established commonplace. In 1894 there were still plenty of sceptics of the possibility either of automobiles or aeroplanes; it was not until 1898 that Mr. S.P. Langley (of the Smithsonian Inst.i.tute) could send the writer a photograph of a heavier-than-air flying machine actually in the air. There were articles in the monthly magazines of those days _proving_ that flying was impossible.

One of the writer's luckiest shots was a description (in ”Antic.i.p.ations”

in 1900) of trench warfare, and of a deadlock almost exactly upon the lines of the situation after the battle of the Marne. And he was fortunate (in the same work) in his estimate of the limitations of submarines. He antic.i.p.ated Sir Percy Scott by a year in his doubts of the decisive value of great battles.h.i.+ps (_see_ ”An Englishman Looks at the World”); and he was sound in denying the decadence of France; in doubting (before the Russo-j.a.panese struggle) the greatness of the power of Russia, which was still in those days a British bogey; in making Belgium the battle-ground in a coming struggle between the mid-European Powers and the rest of Europe; and (he believes) in foretelling a renascent Poland. Long before Europe was familiar with the engaging personality of the German Crown Prince, he represented great airs.h.i.+ps sailing over England (which country had been too unenterprising to make any) under the command of a singularly antic.i.p.atory Prince Karl, and in ”The World Set Free” the last disturber of the peace is a certain ”Balkan Fox.”

In saying, however, here and there that ”before such a year so-and-so will happen,” or that ”so-and-so will not occur for the next twenty years,” he was generally pretty widely wrong; most of his time estimates are too short; he foretold, for example, a special motor track apart from the high road between London and Brighton before 1910, which is still a dream, but he doubted if effective military aviation or aerial fighting would be possible before 1950, which is a miss on the other side. He will draw a modest veil over certain still wider misses that the idle may find for themselves in his books; he prefers to count the hits and leave the reckoning of the misses to those who will find a pleasure in it.

Of course, these prophecies of the writer's were made upon a basis of very generalised knowledge. What can be done by a really sustained research into a particular question--especially if it is a question essentially mechanical--is shown by the work of a Frenchman all too neglected by the trumpet of fame--Clement Ader. M. Ader was probably the first man to get a mechanism up into the air for something more than a leap. His _Eole_, as General Mensier testifies, prolonged a jump as far as fifty metres as early as 1890. In 1897 his _Avion_ fairly flew. (This is a year ahead of the date of my earliest photograph of S.P. Langley's aeropile in mid-air.) This, however, is beside our present mark. The fact of interest here is that in 1908, when flying was still almost incredible, M. Ader published his ”Aviation Militaire.” Well, that was eight years ago, and men have been fighting in the air now for a year, and there is still nothing being done that M. Ader did not see, and which we, if we had had the wisdom to attend to him, might not have been prepared for. There is much that he foretells which is still awaiting its inevitable fulfilment. So clearly can men of adequate knowledge and sound reasoning power see into the years ahead in all such matters of material development.

But it is not with the development of mechanical inventions that the writer now proposes to treat. In this book he intends to hazard certain forecasts about the trend of events in the next decade or so. Mechanical novelties will probably play a very small part in that coming history.

This world-wide war means a general arrest of invention and enterprise, except in the direction of the war business. Ability is concentrated upon that; the types of ability that are not applicable to warfare are neglected; there is a vast destruction of capital and a waste of the savings that are needed to finance new experiments. Moreover, we are killing off many of our brightest young men.

It is fairly safe to a.s.sume that there will be very little new furniture on the stage of the world for some considerable time; that if there is much difference in the roads and railways and s.h.i.+pping it will be for the worse; that architecture, domestic equipment, and so on, will be fortunate if in 1924 they stand where they did in the spring of 1914. In the trenches of France and Flanders, and on the battlefields of Russia, the Germans have been spending and making the world spend the comfort, the luxury and the progress of the next quarter-century. There is no accounting for tastes. But the result is that, while it was possible for the writer in 1900 to write ”Antic.i.p.ations of the Reaction of Mechanical Progress upon Human Life and Thought,” in 1916 his antic.i.p.ations must belong to quite another system of consequences.

The broad material facts before us are plain enough. It is the mental facts that have to be unravelled. It isn't now a question of ”What thing--what faculty--what added power will come to hand, and how will it affect our ways of living?” It is a question of ”How are people going to take these obvious things--waste of the world's resources, arrest of material progress, the killing of a large moiety of the males in nearly every European country, and universal loss and unhappiness?” We are going to deal with realities here, at once more intimate and less accessible than the effects of mechanism.

As a preliminary reconnaissance, as it were, over the region of problems we have to attack, let us consider the difficulties of a single question, which is also a vital and central question in this forecast.

We shall not attempt a full answer here, because too many of the factors must remain unexamined; later, perhaps, we may be in a better position to do so. This question is the probability of the establishment of a long world peace.

At the outset of the war there was a very widely felt hope among the intellectuals of the world that this war might clear up most of the outstanding international problems, and prove the last war. The writer, looking across the gulf of experience that separates us from 1914, recalls two pamphlets whose very t.i.tles are eloquent of this feeling--”The War that will End War,” and ”The Peace of the World.” Was the hope expressed in those phrases a dream? Is it already proven a dream? Or can we read between the lines of the war news, diplomatic disputations, threats and accusations, political wranglings and stories of hards.h.i.+p and cruelty that now fill our papers, anything that still justifies a hope that these bitter years of world sorrow are the darkness before the dawn of a better day for mankind? Let us handle this problem for a preliminary examination.

What is really being examined here is the power of human reason to prevail over pa.s.sion--and certain other restraining and qualifying forces. There can be little doubt that, if one could canva.s.s all mankind and ask them whether they would rather have no war any more, the overwhelming ma.s.s of them would elect for universal peace. If it were war of the modern mechanical type that was in question, with air raids, high explosives, poison gas and submarines, there could be no doubt at all about the response. ”Give peace in our time, O Lord,” is more than ever the common prayer of Christendom, and the very war makers claim to be peace makers; the German Emperor has never faltered in his a.s.sertion that he encouraged Austria to send an impossible ultimatum to Serbia, and invaded Belgium because Germany was being attacked. The Krupp-Kaiser Empire, he a.s.sures us, is no eagle, but a double-headed lamb, resisting the shearers and butchers. The apologists for war are in a hopeless minority; a certain number of German Prussians who think war good for the soul, and the dear ladies of the London _Morning Post_ who think war so good for the manners of the working cla.s.ses, are rare, discordant voices in the general chorus against war. If a mere unsupported and uncoordinated will for peace could realise itself, there would be peace, and an enduring peace, to-morrow. But, as a matter of fact, there is no peace coming to-morrow, and no clear prospect yet of an enduring universal peace at the end of this war.

Now what are the obstructions, and what are the antagonisms to the exploitation of this world-wide disgust with war and the world-wide desire for peace, so as to establish a world peace?

Let us take them in order, and it will speedily become apparent that we are dealing here with a subtle quant.i.tative problem in psychology, a constant weighing of whether this force or that force is the stronger.

We are dealing with influences so subtle that the accidents of some striking dramatic occurrence, for example, may turn them this way or that. We are dealing with the human will--and thereby comes a snare for the feet of the would-be impartial prophet. To foretell the future is to modify the future. It is hard for any prophet not to break into exhortation after the fas.h.i.+on of the prophets of Israel.