H. Wells - The World Set Free

easy charities of our emancipated time that most people who have

made their labour contribution produce neither new beauty nor new

wisdom, but are simply busy about those pleasantactivities and

enjoymentsthat reassure them that they are alive. They help, it

may be, by reception and reverberation, and they hinder nothing.

…

Section 11

Now all this phase of gigantic change in the contours and

appearances of human life which is going on about us, a change as

rapid and as wonderful as the swift ripening of adolescence to

manhood after the barbaric boyish years, is correlated with moral

and mental changes at least as unprecedented. It is not as if old

things were going out of life and new things coming in, it is

rather that the altered circumstances of men are making an appeal

to elements in his nature that have hitherto been suppressed, and

checking tendencies that have hitherto been over-stimulated and

over-developed. He has not so much grownand altered his

essential beingas turned new aspects to the light. Such turnings

round into a new attitudethe world has seenon a less extensive

scale before. The Highlanders of the seventeenth century, for

example, were cruel and bloodthirsty robbers, in the nineteenth

their descendants were conspicuously trusty and honourable men.

There was not a people in Western Europe in the early twentieth

century that seemed capable of hideous massacres, and none that

had not been guiltyof them within the previous two centuries.

The free, frank, kindly, gentle life of the prosperous classes in

any European country before the years of the last wars was in a

different world of thoughtand feelingfrom that of the dingy,

suspicious, secretive, and uncharitable existenceof the

respectable poor, or the constant personal violence, the squalor

and naive passions of the lowest stratum. Yet there were no real

differences of blood and inherent quality between these worlds;

their differences were all in circumstances, suggestion, and

habits of mind. And turning to more individual instances the

constantly observed difference between one portion of a life and

another consequent upon a religious conversion, were a standing

example of the versatile possibilities of human nature.

The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities

and businesses and economic relationsshook them also out of

their old established habits of thought, and out of the lightly

held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.

To borrow a word from the old-fashioned chemists, men were made

nascent; they were released from old ties; for goodor evil they

were ready for new associations. The council carried them

forward for good; perhaps if his bombs had reached their

destination King Ferdinand Charles might have carried them back

to an endless chain of evils. But his task would have been a

harder one than the council's. The moral shock of the atomic

bombs had been a profound one, and for a while the cunning side

of the human animal was overpowered by its sincere realisation of

the vital necessity for reconstruction. The litigious and trading

spiritscowered together, scared at their own consequences; men

thoughttwice before they sought mean advantages in the face of

the unusual eagerness to realise new aspirations, and when at

last the weeds revived again and 'claims' began to sprout, they

sprouted upon the stony soil of law-courts reformed, of laws that

pointed to the future instead of the past, and under the blazing

sunshine of a transformingworld. A new literature, a new

interpretation of history were springing into existence, a new

teaching was already in the schools, a new faithin the young.

The worthy man who forestalled the building of a research city

for the English upon the Sussex downs by buying up a series of

estates, was dispossessed and laughed out of court when he made

his demand for some preposterous compensation; the owner of the

discredited Dass patents makes his last appearance upon the

scroll of history as the insolvent proprietor of a paper called

The Cry for Justice, in which he duns the world for a hundred

million pounds. That was the ingenuous Dass's idea of justice,

that he ought to be paid about five million pounds annually

because he had annexed the selvage of one of Holsten's

discoveries. Dass came at last to believe quite firmly in his

right, and he died a victim of conspiracy mania in a private

hospital at Nice. Both of these men would probably have ended

their days enormously wealthy, and of course ennobledin the

England of the opening twentieth century, and it is just this

novelty of their fates that marks the quality of the new age.

The new government early discovered the need of a universal

education to fit men to the great conceptions of its universal

rule. It made no wrangling attacks on the local, racial, and

sectarian formsof religious profession that at that time divided

the earth into a patchwork of hatreds and distrusts; it left

these organisations to make their peace with God in their own

time; but it proclaimed as if it were a mere secular truththat

sacrifice was expected from all, that respect had to be shown to

all; it revived schools or set them up afresh all around the

world, and everywhere these schools taught the history of war and

the consequences and moral of the Last War; everywhere it was

taught not as a sentiment but as a matter of fact that the

salvation of the world from waste and contention was the common

duty and occupation of all men and women. These things which are

now the elementary commonplaces of human intercourse seemed to

the councillors of Brissago, when first they dared to proclaim

them, marvellously daring discoveries, not untouched by doubt,

that flushed the cheek and fired the eye.

The council placed all this educational reconstruction in the

hands of a committee of men and women, which did its work during

the next few decades with remarkable breadth and effectiveness.

This educational committee was, and is, the correlative upon the

mental and spiritualside of the redistribution committee. And

prominent upon it, and indeed for a time quite dominating it, was

a Russian named Karenin, who was singular in beinga congenital

cripple. His body was bent so that he walked with difficulty,

suffered much painas he grewolder, and had at last to undergo

two operations. The second killed him. Already malformation,

which was to be seenin every crowd during the middle ages so

that the crippled beggar was, as it were, an essential feature of

the human spectacle, was becoming a strange thing in the world.

It had a curious effectupon Karenin's colleagues; their feeling

towards him was mingled with pityand a sense of inhumanity that

it needed usage rather than reason to overcome. He had a strong

face, with little bright brown eyes rather deeply sunken and a

large resolute thin-lipped mouth. His skin was very yellow and

wrinkled, and his hair iron gray. He was at all times an

impatient and sometimes an angryman, but this was forgivenhim

because of the hot wire of suffering that was manifestly thrust

through his being. At the end of his life his personal prestige

was very great. To him far more than to any contemporary is it

due that self-abnegation, self-identification with the world

spirit, was made the basis of universal education. That general