H. Wells - THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

make one. Get education, get a goodeducation. Fight your way to

the top. It's your only chance. I've watched you. You'll do no

goodat digging and property minding. There isn't a neighbour in

Bromstead won't be able to skin you at suchlike games. You and I

are the brainy unstable kind, topside or nothing. And if ever those

blithering houses come to you-don't have 'em. Give them away!

Dynamite 'em-and off! LIVE, Dick! I'll get rid of them for you if

I can, Dick, but rememberwhat I say."…

So it was my father discoursed, if not in those particular words,

yet exactly in that manner, as he slouched along the southward road,

with resentful eyes becoming less resentful as he talked, and

flinging out clumsy illustrative motions at the outskirts of

Bromstead as we passed along them. That afternoon he hated

Bromstead, from its foot-tiring pebbles up. He had no illusions

about Bromstead or himself. I have the clearest impression of him

in his garden-stained tweeds with a deer-stalker hat on the back of

his head and presently a pipe sometimes between his teeth and

sometimes in his gesticulating hand, as he became diverted by his

talk from his original exasperation…

This particular afternoon is no doubtmixed up in my memorywith

many other afternoons; all sorts of things my father said and did at

different times have got themselvesreferred to it; it filled me at

the time with a great unprecedented sense of fellowship and it has

become the symbol now for all our intercourse together. If I didn't

understandthe things he said, I did the mood he was in. He gave me

two very broad ideas in that talk and the talks I have mingled with

it; he gave them to me very clearly and they have remained

fundamental in my mind; one a sense of the extraordinary confusion

and waste and planlessness of the human life that went on all about

us; and the other of a great ideal of order and economy which he

called variously Science and Civilisation, and which, though I do

not rememberthat he ever used that word, I suppose many people

nowadays would identify with Socialism,-as the Fabians expound it.

He was not very definite about this Science, you must understand,

but he seemed always to be waving his hand towards it,-just as his

contemporary Tennyson seems always to be doing-he belonged to his

age and mostly his talk was destructive of the limitedbeliefs of

his time, he led me to infer rather than actually told me that this

Science was coming, a spiritof light and order, to the rescue of a

world groaning and travailing in muddle for the want of it…

When I thinkof Bromstead nowadays I find it inseparably bound up

with the disorders of my father's gardening, and the odd patchings

and paintings that disfigured his houses. It was all of a piece

with that.

Let me try and give something of the quality of Bromstead and

something of its history. It is the quality and history of a

thousand places round and about London, and round and about the

other great centres of population in the world. Indeed it is in a

measure the quality of the whole of this modern world from which we

who have the statesman's passion struggle to evolve, and dreamstill

of evolving order.

First, then, you must thinkof Bromstead a hundred and fifty years

ago, as a narrow irregular little street of thatched houses strung

out on the London and Dover Road, a little mellow sample unit of a

social order that had a kind of completeness, at its level, of its

own. At that time its population numbered a little under two

thousand people, mostly engaged in agricultural work or in trades

serving agriculture. There was a blacksmith, a saddler, a chemist,

a doctor, a barber, a linen-draper (who brewed his own beer); a

veterinary surgeon, a hardware shop, and two capacious inns. Round

and about it were a number of pleasantgentlemen's seats, whose

owners went frequently to London town in their coaches along the

very tolerable high-road. The church was big enough to hold the

whole population, were people mindedto go to church, and indeed a

large proportion did go, and all who married were married in it, and

everybody, to begin with, was christened at its font and buried at

last in its yew-shaded graveyard. Everybody kneweverybody in the

place. It was, in fact, a definite place and a realhuman community

in those days. There was a pleasantold market-house in the middle

of the town with a weekly market, and an annual fair at which much

cheerful merry making and homely intoxication occurred; there was a

pack of hounds which hunted within five miles of London Bridge, and

the local gentry would occasionally enliven the place with valiant

cricket matches for a hundred guineas a side, to the vast excitement

of the entire population. It was very much the same sort of place

that it had been for three or four centuries. A Bromstead Rip van

Winkle from 1550 returning in 1750 would have found most of the old

houses still as he had knownthem, the same trades a little improved

and differentiated one from the other, the same roads rather more

carefully tended, the Inns not very much altered, the ancient

familiar market-house. The occasional wheeled traffic would have

struck him as the most remarkable difference, next perhaps to the

swaggering painted stone monuments instead of brasses and the

protestant severity of the communion-table in the parish church,-

both from the material point of view very little things. A Rip van

Winkle from 1350, again, would have noticed scarcely greater

changes; fewer clergy, more people, and particularly more people of

the middling sort; the glass in the windows of many of the houses,

the stylish chimneys springing up everywhere would have impressed

him, and suchlike details. The place would have had the same

boundaries, the same broad essential features, would have been still

itself in the way that a man is still himselfafter he has "filled

out" a little and growna longer beard and changed his clothes.

But after 1750 something got hold of the world, something that was

destined to alter the scale of every human affair.

That something was machinery and a vague energetic dispositionto

improve material things. In another part of England ingenious

people were beginning to use coal in smelting iron, and were

producing metal in abundance and metal castings in sizes that had

hitherto been unattainable. Without warning or preparation,

increment involving countless possibilities of further increment was

coming to the strength of horses and men. "Power," all

unsuspected, was flowing like a drug into the veins of the social

body.

Nobody seems to have perceivedthis coming of power, and nobody had

calculated its probable consequences. Suddenly, almost

inadvertently, people found themselvesdoing things that would have

amazed their ancestors. They began to construct wheeled vehicles

much more easily and cheaply than they had ever done before, to make

up roads and move things about that had formerly been esteemed too

heavy for locomotion, to join woodwork with iron nails instead of

wooden pegs, to achieve all sorts of mechanical possibilities, to

trade more freely and manufacture on a larger scale, to send goods

abroad in a wholesale and systematic way, to bring back commodities

from overseas, not simply spices and fine commodities, but goods in