H. Wells - The World Set Free

promise. He was survival.

'All Europe offered its children to him, it sacrificed education,

art, happinessand all its hopes of future welfare to follow the

clatter of his sabre. The monstrous worship of that old fool's

"blood and iron" passed all round the earth. Until the atomic

bombs burnt our way to freedom again…'

'One thinksof him now as one thinksof the megatherium,' said

one of the young men.

'From first to last mankind made three million big guns and a

hundred thousand complicated great ships for no other purpose but

war.'

'Were there no sane men in those days,' asked the young man, 'to

stand against that idolatry?'

'In a stateof despair,' said Edith Haydon.

'He is so far off-and there are men alive still who were alive

when Bismarck died!'… said the young man…

Section 5

'And yet it may be I amunjust to Bismarck,' said Karenin,

following his own thoughts. 'You see, men belong to their own

age; we stand upon a common stock of thoughtand we fancy we

stand upon the ground. I met a pleasantman the other day, a

Maori, whose great-grandfather was a cannibal. It chanced he had

a daguerreotype of the old sinner, and the two were marvellously

alike. One feltthat a little juggling with time and either

might have been the other. People are cruel and stupid in a

stupid age who might be gentle and splendid in a gracious one.

The world also has its moods. Thinkof the mental food of

Bismarck's childhood; the humiliations of Napoleon's victories,

the crowded, crowning victory of the Battle of the Nations…

Everybody in those days, wiseor foolish, believed that the

division of the world under a multitude of governments was

inevitable, and that it was going on for thousands of years more.

It WAS inevitable until it was impossible. Any one who had denied

that inevitability publicly would have been counted-oh! a SILLY

fellow. Old Bismarck was only just a little-forcible, on the

lines of the acceptedideas. That is all. He thoughtthat since

there had to be national governments he would make one that was

strong at home and invincible abroad. Because he had fed with a

kind of rough appetite upon what we can seenow were very stupid

ideas, that does not make him a stupid man. We've had advantages;

we've had unity and collectivism blasted into our brains. Where

should we be now but for the grace of science? I should have been

an embittered, spiteful, downtrodden member of the Russian

Intelligenza, a conspirator, a prisoner, or an assassin. You, my

dear, would have been breaking dingy windows as a suffragette.'

'NEVER,' said Edith stoutly…

For a time the talk broke into humorous personalities, and the

young people gibed at each other across the smiling old

administrator, and then presently one of the young scientific men

gave things a new turn. He spoke like one who was full to the

brim.

'You know, sir, I've a fancy-it is hard to prove such

things-that civilisation was very near disaster when the atomic

bombs came banging into it, that if there had been no Holsten and

no induced radio-activity, the world would have-smashed-much as

it did. Only instead of its beinga smash that opened a way to

better things, it might have been a smash without a recovery. It

is part of my business to understandeconomics, and from that

point of view the century before Holsten was just a hundred

years' crescendo of waste. Only the extreme individualism of that

period, only its utter want of any collective understandingor

purpose can explain that waste. Mankind used up

material-insanely. They had got through three-quarters of all

the coal in the planet, they had used up most of the oil, they

had swept away their forests, and they were running short of tin

and copper. Their wheat areas were getting weary and populous,

and many of the big towns had so lowered the water level of their

available hills that they suffered a drought every summer. The

whole system was rushing towards bankruptcy. And they were

spending every year vaster and vaster amounts of power and energy

upon military preparations, and continuallyexpanding the debt of

industry to capital. The system was already staggering when

Holsten began his researches. So far as the world in general went

there was no sense of danger and no desirefor inquiry. They had

no belief that science could save them, nor any idea that there

was a need to be saved. They could not, they would not, seethe

gulf beneath their feet. It was pure goodluck for mankind at

large that any research at all was in progress. And as I say,

sir, if that line of escape hadn't opened, before now there might

have been a crash, revolution, panic, social disintegration,

famine, and-it is conceivable-complete disorder… The

rails might have rusted on the disused railways by now, the

telephone poles have rotted and fallen, the big liners dropped

into sheet-iron in the ports; the burnt, deserted cities become

the ruinous hiding-places of gangs of robbers. We might have been

brigands in a shattered and attenuated world. Ah, you may smile,

but that had happened before in human history. The world is still

studded with the ruins of broken-down civilisations. Barbaric

bands made their fastness upon the Acropolis, and the tomb of

Hadrian became a fortress that warred across the ruins of Rome

against the Colosseum… Had all that possibility of reaction

ended so certainly in 1940? Is it all so very far away even

now?'

'It seems far enough away now,' said Edith Haydon.

'But forty years ago?'

'No,' said Karenin with his eyes upon the mountains, 'I thinkyou

underrate the available intelligence in those early decades of

the twentieth century. Officially, I know, politically, that

intelligence didn't tell-but it was there. And I question your

hypothesis. I doubtif that discovery could have been delayed.

There is a kind of inevitable logic now in the progress of

research. For a hundred years and more thoughtand science have

been going their own way regardless of the common events of life.

You see-they have got loose. If there had been no Holsten there

would have been some similar man. If atomic energy had not come

in one year it would have come in another. In decadent Rome the

march of science had scarcely begun… Nineveh, Babylon, Athens,

Syracuse, Alexandria, these were the first rough experiments in

association that made a security, a breathing-space, in which

inquiry was born. Man had to experiment before he found out the

way to begin. But already two hundred years ago he had fairly

begun… The politics and dignities and wars of the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries were only the last phoenix blaze of the

former civilisation flaring up about the beginnings of the new.

Which we serve… 'Man lives in the dawn for ever,' said

Karenin. 'Life is beginning and nothing else but beginning. It

begins everlastingly. Each step seems vaster than the last, and

does but gather us together for the nest. This Modern State of

ours, which would have been a Utopian marvel a hundred years ago,

is already the commonplace of life. But as I sit here and dream

of the possibilities in the mindof man that now gather to a head

beneath the shelter of its peace, these great mountains here seem

but little things…'

Section 6

About eleven Karenin had his midday meal, and afterwards he slept