H. Wells - The World Set Free

that as yet THERE WAS NO SUCH INTELLIGENCE. The world waits for

intelligence. That intelligence has still to be made, that will

for goodand order has still to be gathered together, out of

scraps of impulse and wandering seeds of benevolenceand whatever

is fine and creative in our souls, into a common purpose. It's

something still to come…'

It is characteristicof the widening thoughtof the time that

this not very heroical young man who, in any previous age, might

well have been altogether occupied with the problem of his own

individual necessities, should be able to stand there and

generalise about the needs of the race.

But upon all the stresses and conflicts of that chaotic time

there was already dawning the light of a new era. The spiritof

humanity was escaping, even then it was escaping, from its

extreme imprisonment in individuals. Salvation from the bitter

intensities of self, which had been a consciousreligious end for

thousands of years, which men had sought in mortifications, in

the wilderness, in meditation, and by innumerable strange paths,

was coming at last with the effectof naturalness into the talk

of men, into the books they read, into their unconscious

gestures, into their newspapers and daily purposes and everyday

acts. The broad horizons, the magic possibilities that the spirit

of the seeker had revealed to them, were charming them out of

those ancient and instinctive preoccupations from which the very

threat of hell and torment had failed to drive them. And this

young man, homeless and without provision even for the immediate

hours, in the presence of social disorganisation, distress, and

perplexity, in a blazing wilderness of thoughtless pleasurethat

blotted out the stars, could thinkas he tells us he thought.

'I sawlife plain,' he wrote. 'I sawthe gigantic task before

us, and the very splendour of its intricate and immeasurable

difficulty filled me with exaltation. I sawthat we have still

to discover government, that we have still to discover education,

which is the necessary reciprocal of government, and that all

this-in which my own little speck of a life was so manifestly

overwhelmed-this and its yesterday in Greece and Rome and Egypt

were nothing, the mere first dust swirls of the beginning, the

movements and dim murmurings of a sleeper who will presently be

awake…'

Section 7

And then the story tells, with an engaging simplicity, of his

descent from this ecstaticvision of reality.

'Presently I found myselfagain, and I was beginning to feelcold

and a little hungry.'

He bethought himselfof the John Burns Relief Offices which stood

upon the Thames Embankment. He made his way through the

galleries of the booksellers and the National Gallery, which had

been open continuouslyday and night to all decently dressed

people now for more than twelve years, and across the

rose-gardens of Trafalgar Square, and so by the hotel colonnade

to the Embankment. He had long knownof these admirable offices,

which had swept the last beggars and matchsellers and all the

casual indigent from the London streets, and he believed that he

would, as a matter of course, be able to procure a ticket for

food and a night's lodgings and some indication of possible

employment.

But he had not reckoned upon the new labour troubles, and when he

got to the Embankment he found the offices hopelessly congested

and besieged by a large and rather unruly crowd. He hovered for

a time on the outskirts of the waiting multitude, perplexed and

dismayed, and then he became aware of a movement, a purposive

trickling away of people, up through the arches of the great

buildings that had arisen when all the railway stations were

removed to the south side of the river, and so to the covered

ways of the Strand. And here, in the open glare of midnight, he

found unemployed men begging, and not only begging, but begging

with astonishing assurance, from the people who were emerging

from the small theatres and other such places of entertainment

which abounded in that thoroughfare.

This was an altogether unexampled thing. There had been no

begging in London streets for a quarter of a century. But that

night the police were evidently unwilling or unable to cope with

the destitute who were invading those well-kept quarters of the

town. They had become stonily blind to anything but manifest

disorder.

Barnet walked through the crowd, unable to bring himselfto ask;

indeed his bearing must have been more valiant than his

circumstances, for twice he says that he was begged from. Near

the Trafalgar Square gardens, a girl with reddened cheeks and

blackened eyebrows, who was walking alone, spoke to him with a

peculiar friendliness.

'I'm starving,' he said to her abruptly.

'Oh! poor dear!' she said; and with the impulsive generosityof

her kind, glanced round and slipped a silver piece into his

hand…

It was a gift that, in spite of the precedent of De Quincey,

might under the repressive social legislation of those times,

have brought Barnet within reach of the prison lash. But he took

it, he confesses, and thanked her as well as he was able, and

went off very gladly to get food.

Section 8

A day or so later-and again his freedom to go as he pleasedupon

the roads may be taken as a mark of increasing social

disorganisation and police embarrassment-he wandered out into

the open country. He speaks of the roads of that plutocratic age

as being'fenced with barbed wire against unpropertied people,'

of the high-walled gardens and trespass warnings that kept him to

the dusty narrowness of the public ways. In the air, happyrich

people were flying, heedless of the misfortunes about them, as he

himselfhad been flying two years ago, and along the road swept

the new traffic, light and swift and wonderful. One was rarely

out of earshot of its whistles and gongs and siren cries even in

the field paths or over the open downs. The officials of the

labour exchanges were everywhere overworked and infuriated, the

casual wards were so crowded that the surplus wanderers slept in

ranks under sheds or in the open air, and since giving to

wayfarers had been made a punishable offence there was no longer

friendship or helpfor a man from the rare foot passenger or the

wayside cottage…

'I wasn't angry,' said Barnet. 'I sawan immense selfishness, a

monstrous disregard for anything but pleasureand possession in

all those people above us, but I sawhow inevitable that was, how

certainly if the richest had changed places with the poorest,

that things would have been the same. What else can happen when

men use science and every new thing that science gives, and all

their available intelligence and energy to manufacture wealth and

appliances, and leave government and education to the rustling

traditions of hundreds of years ago? Those traditions come from

the dark ages when there was reallynot enough for every one,

when life was a fierce struggle that might be masked but could

not be escaped. Of course this famine grabbing, this fierce

dispossession of others, must follow from such a disharmony

between material and training. Of course the rich were vulgar and

the poor grewsavage and every added power that came to men made

the rich richer and the poor less necessary and less free. The

men I met in the casual wards and the relief offices were all