H. Wells - The World Set Free

new wealth that had come at last within the reach of men; there

was no clear conception that any such distribution was possible.

As one attempts a comprehensive view of those opening years of

the new age, as one measures it against the latent achievement

that later years have demonstrated, one begins to measure the

blindness, the narrowness, the insensate unimaginative

individualism of the pre-atomic time. Under this tremendous dawn

of power and freedom, under a sky ablaze with promise, in the

very presence of science standing like some bountiful goddess

over all the squat darknesses of human life, holding patientlyin

her strong arms, until men chose to take them, security, plenty,

the solution of riddles, the key of the bravest adventures, in

her very presence, and with the earnest of her gifts in court,

the world was to witness such things as the squalid spectacle of

the Dass-Tata patent litigation.

There in a stuffy court in London, a grimy oblong box of a room,

during the exceptional heat of the May of 1956, the leading

counsel of the day argued and shouted over a miserable little

matter of more royalties or less and whether the Dass-Tata

company might not bar the Holsten-Roberts' methods of utilising

the new power. The Dass-Tata people were indeed making a

strenuous attempt to secure a world monopoly in atomic

engineering. The judge, after the manner of those times, sat

raised above the court, wearing a preposterous gown and a foolish

huge wig, the counsel also wore dirty-looking little wigs and

queer black gowns over their usual costume, wigs and gowns that

were held to be necessary to their pleading, and upon unclean

wooden benches stirred and whispered artful-looking solicitors,

busily scribbling reporters, the parties to the case, expert

witnesses, interested people, and a jostling confusionof

subpoenaed persons, briefless young barristers ( forminga style

on the most esteemed and truculent examples) and casual eccentric

spectators who preferred this pit of iniquity to the free

sunlight outside. Every one was damply hot, the examining King's

Counsel wiped the perspiration from his huge, clean-shaven upper

lip; and into this atmosphere of grasping contention and human

exhalations the daylight filtered through a window that was

manifestly dirty. The jury sat in a double pew to the left of

the judge, looking as uncomfortable as frogs that have fallen

into an ash-pit, and in the witness-box lied the would-be

omnivorous Dass, under cross-examination…

Holsten had always been accustomed to publish his results so soon

as they appeared to him to be sufficiently advanced to furnish a

basis for further work, and to that confiding dispositionand one

happyflash of adaptive invention the alert Dass owed his

claim…

But indeed a vast multitude of such sharp people were clutching,

patenting, pre-empting, monopolising this or that feature of the

new development, seeking to subdue this gigantic winged power to

the purposes of their little lusts and avarice. That trial is

just one of innumerable disputes of the same kind. For a time the

face of the world festered with patent legislation. It chanced,

however, to have one oddly dramatic feature in the fact that

Holsten, after beingkept waiting about the court for two days as

a beggar might have waited at a rich man's door, after being

bullied by ushers and watched by policemen, was called as a

witness, rather severely handled by counsel, and told not to

'quibble' by the judge when he was trying to be absolutely

explicit.

The judge scratched his nose with a quill pen, and sneered at

Holsten's astonishment round the corner of his monstrous wig.

Holsten was a great man, was he? Well, in a law-court great men

were put in their places.

'We want to knowhas the plaintiff added anything to this or

hasn't he?' said the judge, 'we don't want to have your views

whether Sir Philip Dass's improvements were merely superficial

adaptations or whether they were implicit in your paper. No

doubt-after the manner of inventors-you thinkmost things that

were ever likely to be discovered are implicit in your papers. No

doubtalso you thinktoo that most subsequent additions and

modifications are merely superficial. Inventors have a way of

thinkingthat. The law isn't concerned with that sort of thing.

The law has nothing to do with the vanity of inventors. The law

is concerned with the question whether these patent rights have

the novelty the plantiff claims for them. What that admission

may or may not stop, and all these other things you are saying in

your overflowing zeal to answer more than the questions addressed

to you-none of these things have anything whatever to do with

the case in hand. It is a matter of constant astonishment to me

in this court to seehow you scientific men, with all your

extraordinary claims to precision and veracity, wander and wander

so soon as you get into the witness-box. I knowno more

unsatisfactory class of witness. The plain and simple question

is, has Sir Philip Dass made any realaddition to existing

knowledgeand methods in this matter or has he not? We don't

want to knowwhether they were large or small additions nor what

the consequences of your admission may be. That you will leave to

us.'

Holsten was silent.

'Surely?' said the judge, almost pityingly.

'No, he hasn't,' said Holsten, perceivingthat for once in his

life he must disregard infinitesimals.

'Ah!' said the judge, 'now why couldn't you say that when counsel

put the question?…'

An entry in Holsten's diary-autobiography, dated five days later,

runs: 'Still amazed. The law is the most dangerous thing in this

country. It is hundreds of years old. It hasn't an idea. The

oldest of old bottles and this new wine, the most explosive wine.

Something will overtake them.'

Section 4

There was a certain truthin Holsten's assertion that the law was

'hundreds of years old.' It was, in relationto current thought

and widely acceptedideas, an archaic thing. While almost all the

material and methods of life had been changing rapidly and were

now changing still more rapidly, the law-courts and the

legislatures of the world were struggling desperately to meet

modern demands with devices and procedures, conceptions of rights

and property and authority and obligation that dated from the

rude compromises of relativelybarbaric times. The horse-hair

wigs and antic dresses of the British judges, their musty courts

and overbearing manners, were indeed only the outward and visible

intimations of profounder anachronisms. The legal and political

organisation of the earth in the middle twentieth century was

indeed everywhere like a complicated garment, outworn yet strong,

that now fettered the governing body that once it had protected.

Yet that same spiritof free-thinking and outspoken publication

that in the field of natural science had been the beginning of

the conquest of nature, was at work throughout all the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries preparing the spiritof the new world

within the degenerating body of the old. The idea of a greater

subordination of individual interests and established

institutions to the collective future, is traceable more and more

clearly in the literature of those times, and movement after

movement fretted itself away in criticism of and opposition to