Herbert Wells - A Short History of the World

Such were the overpowering expectations that President Wilson raised. How completely he disappointed them and how weak and futile was the League of Nations he made is too long and too distreesful a story to tell here. He exaggerated in his person our common human tragedy, he was so very great in his dreams and so incapable in his performance. America dissented from the acts of its President and would not join the League Europe accepted from him. There was a slow realization on the part of the American people that it had been rushed into something for which it was totally unprepared. There was a corresponding realization on the part of Europe that America had nothing ready to give to the old world in its extremity. Born prematurely and crippled at its birth, that League has become indeed, with its elaborate and unpractical constitution and its manifest limitations of power, a serious obstacle in the way of any effective reorganization of international relationships. The problem would be a clearer one if the League did not yet exist. Yet that world-wide blaze of enthusiasm that first welcomed the project, that readiness of men everywhere round and about the earth, of men, that is, as distinguished from governments, for a world control of war, is a thing to be recorded with emphasis in any history. Behind the short-sighted governments that divide and mismanage human affairs, a real force for world unity and world order exists and grows.

From 1918 onward the world entered upon an age of conferences. Of these the Conference at Washington called by President Harding (1921) has been the most successful and suggestive. Notable, too, is the Genoa Conference (1922) for the appearance of German and Russian delegates at its deliberations. We will not discuss this long procession of conferences and tentatives in any detail. It becomes more and more clearly manifest that a huge work of reconstruction has to be done by mankind if a crescendo of such convulsions and world massacres as that of the great war is to be averted. No such hasty improvisation as the League of Nations, no patched-up system of Conferences between this group of states and that, which change nothing with an air of settling everything, will meet the complex political needs of the new age that lies before us. A systematic development and a systematic application of the sciences of human relationship, of personal and group psychology, of financial and economic science and of education, sciences still only in their infancy, is required. Narrow and obsolete, dead and dying moral and political ideas have to be replaced by a clearer and a simpler conception of the common origins and destinies of our kind.

A PEACEFUL GARDEN IN ENGLAND

Given wisdom, all mankind might live in such gardens

But if the dangers, confusions and disasters that crowd upon man in these days are enormous beyond any experience of the past, it is because science has brought him such powers as he never had before. And the scientific method of fearless thought, exhaustively lucid statement, and exhaustively criticized planning, which has given him these as yet uncontrollable powers, gives him also the hope of controlling these powers. Man is still only adolescent. His troubles are not the troubles of senility and exhaustion but of increasing and still undisciplined strength. When we look at all history as one process, as we have been doing in this book, when we see the steadfast upward struggle of life towards vision and control, then we see in their true proportions the hopes and dangers of the present time. As yet we are hardly in the earliest dawn of human greatness. But in the beauty of flower and sunset, in the happy and perfect movement of young animals and in the delight of ten thousand various landscapes, we have some intimations of what life can do for us, and in some few works of plastic and pictorial art, in some great music, in a few noble buildings and happy gardens, we have an intimation of what the human will can do with material possibilities. We have dreams; we have at present undisciplined but ever increasing power. Can we doubt that presently our race will more than realize our boldest imaginations, that it will achieve unity and peace, that it will live, the children of our blood and lives will live, in a world made more splendid and lovely than any palace or garden that we know, going on from strength to strength in an ever widening circle of adventure and achievement? What man has done, the little triumphs of his present state, and all this history we have told, form but the prelude to the things that man has got to do.

About the year 1000 B.C. the Aryan peoples were establishing themselves in the peninsulas of Spain, Italy and the Balkans, and they were established in North India; Cnossos was already destroyed and the spacious times of Egypt, of Thothmes III, Amenophis III and Rameses II were three or four centuries away. Weak monarchs of the XXIst Dynasty were ruling in the Nile Valley. Israel was united under her early kings; Saul or David or possibly even Solomon may have been reigning. Sargon I (2750 B.C.) of the Akkadian Sumerian Empire was a remote memory in Babylonian history, more remote than is Constantine the Great from the world of the present day. Hammurabi had been dead a thousand years. The Assyrians were already dominating the less military Babylonians. In 1100 B.C. Tiglath Pileser I had taken Babylon. But there was no permanent conquest; Assyria and Babylonia were still separate empires. In China the new Chow dynasty was flourishing. Stonehenge in England was already some hundreds of years old.

The next two centuries saw a renascence of Egypt under the XXIInd Dynasty, the splitting up of the brief little Hebrew kingdom of Solomon, the spreading of the Greeks in the Balkans, South Italy and Asia Minor, and the days of Etruscan predominance in Central Italy. We begin our list of ascertainable dates with

B.C.

800.

The building of Carthage.

790.

The Ethiopian conquest of Egypt (founding the XXVth Dynasty).

776.

First Olympiad.

753.

Rome built.

745.

Tiglath Pileser III conquered Babylonia and founded the New Assyrian Empire.

722.

Sargon II armed the Assyrians with iron weapons.

721.

He deported the Israelites.

680.

Esarhaddon took Thebes in Egypt (overthrowing the Ethiopian XXVth Dynasty).

664.

Psammetichus I restored the freedom of Egypt and founded the XXVIth Dynasty (to 610).

608.

Necho of Egypt defeated Josiah, king of Judah, at the battle of Megiddo.

606.

Capture of Nineveh by the Chaldeans and Medes.

Foundation of the Chaldean Empire.

604.

Necho pushed to the Euphrates and was overthrown by Nebuchadnezzar II.

(Nebuchadnezzar carried off the Jews to Babylon.)

550.

Cyrus the Persian succeeded Cyaxares the Mede.

Cyrus conquered Crœsus.

Buddha lived about this time.

So also did Confucius and Lao Tse.

539.

Cyrus took Babylon and founded the Persian Empire.

521.

Darius I, the son of Hystaspes, ruled from the Hellespont to the Indus.

His expedition to Scythia.

490.

Battle of Marathon.

480.

Battles of Thermopylï and Salamis.

479.

The battles of Platea and Mycale completed the repulse of Persia.

474.

Etruscan fleet destroyed by the Sicilian Greeks.

431.

Peloponnesian War began (to 404)

401.

Retreat of the Ten Thousand.

359.

Philip became king of Macedonia.

338.

Battle of Chïronia.

336.