ARTICLES WRITTEN BY
H.G. WELLS
A small group of qualified
Englishmen have long been working toward Universal Peace from an angle of their
own. Forming the League of Free Nations Association they have divided the
principal problems among experts, for extended study, appraisal and suggestions
for solution. These inquiries, eventually to be published in book form, will,
in the Atlantic's belief, form a highly important treatise on World Peace; but,
in the meantime, the group has united in the compilation of the following
article, which may well serve as an introduction to all attempts at a League of
Nations. The composite authorship of the paper is especially interesting, the
names of the collaborators being,--
H.G.WELLS, Chairman H. WICKHAM STEED, VISCOUNT GREY, GILBERT MURRAY,
LIONEL CURTIS, J. A. SPENDER, WILLIAM ARCHER, Secretary, A. E. ZIMMERN,
VISCOUNT BRYCE
I
UNIFICATION of human affairs, to the
extent at least of a cessation of war and a worldwide rule of international
law, is no new idea; it can be traced through many centuries of history. It is
found as an acceptable commonplace in a fragment, De Republica,
of
Hitherto, however, if only on account of the limitations of geographical
knowledge, the project has rarely been truly world-wide, though in some
instances it has comprehended practically all the known world. Almost always
there has been an excluded fringe of barbarians and races esteemed as less than
men.
The
It cannot be claimed that history shows any continuously progressive movement
of human affairs from a dispersed to a unified condition. Rather it tells a
story of the oscillating action of separatist and unifying forces. And the
process of civilization itself, if we use the word in its narrower and older
sense of the elaboration of citizenship in a political and social organization,
and exclude mechanical and scientific progress from it, has on the whole been
rather on the side of fragmentation. It was, for example, much easier for
loosely organized tribes and village communities scattered over wide areas to
coalesce into vague and often very extensive 'nations,' like the Scythians and
Thracians, or to cooperate in 'amplictyonics,' or
federations, like the small peoples of central Greece, than for highly
developed city-states or fully organized monarchies, possessing a distinctive
culture and religion and definite frontiers, to sink these things in any larger
union. For such higher forms of political organization, enlargement occurred
mainly through conquest., which created unstable empire systems of subject and
subordinate peoples under the sway -- which might of course be the
assimilative sway -- of a dominant nation, rather than real unifications.
The Renaissance presents a phase in history in which a large vague unification
(Christendom) is seen to be breaking up simultaneously with the appearance of a
higher grade of national organization. Machiavelli, with his aspiration toward
a united
But while those political and social developments which constitute civilization
in the narrower sense of the word were tending to make human societies, as they
became more elaborately organized, more heterogeneous and mutually
unsympathetic, there were also coming into play throughout the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, for the first time, upon a quite unprecedented scale,
another series of forces diametrically opposed to human separations. They
worked, however, mutely, because the world of thought was unprepared for them.
Unprecedented advances in technical and scientific knowledge were occurring,
and human cooperation and the reaction of man upon man, not only in material
but also in mental things, was being made enormously more effective than it had
ever been before. But the phrases of international relationship were not
altering to correspond. Phrases usually follow after rather than anticipate
reality, and so it was that at the outbreak of the Great War in August, 1914,
It is necessary to state very plainly the nature of these new forces. Upon them
rests the whole case for the
All political and social institutions, all matters of human relationship, are
dependent upon the means by which mind may react upon mind and life upon life,
that is to say upon the intensity, rapidity, and reach of mental and physical
communication. In the history of mankind, the great phases seem all to be
marked by the appearance of some new invention which facilitates trade or
intercourse, and may be regarded as the operating cause of the new phase. The
invention of writing, of the wheel and the road, of the ship, of money, of
printing, of letters of exchange, of joint-stock undertakings and limited
liability, mark distinct steps in the enlargement of human intercourse and
cooperation from its original limitation within the verbal and traditional
range of the family or tribe.
A large part of the expansion of the
And we live to-day in a time of accelerated inventiveness and innovation, when
a decade modifies the material of inter-communication far more extensively than
did any century before, in range, swiftness, and intensity alike. Within the
present century, since 1900, there have been far more extensive changes in
these things than occurred in the ten centuries before Christ. Instead of
regarding Around the World in Eighty Days as an amazing feat of hurry,
we can now regard a flight about the globe in fifteen or sixteen days as a
reasonable and moderate performance. The teaching of history compels us to
recognize in these new facilities factors which will necessarily work out into
equally revolutionary social and political consequences. It is the most obvious
wisdom to set ourselves to anticipate as far as we can, so as to mitigate and
control, the inevitable collisions and repercussions of mankind that are coming
upon us. Even if we were to suppose that this rush of novel accelerating
contrivances would be presently checked, -- and there is little
justification for any such supposition, -- it would still behoove us to work out the influence which the things
already achieved will have upon our kind.
And it is not simply an increase of range and swiftness that we have to
consider here, though these are the aspects that leap immediately to the eye.
There has also been, for example, a very great increase in the possible
vividness of mental impact. In education and in the agencies of journalism and
propaganda, there has been an increase of power at present incalculable, owing
to vast strides in the printing of pictures, and to the cinematograph, the gramaphone, and similar means of intense world-wide
information and suggestion.
II
While all these things, on the one hand, point plainly now to such possibilities
of human unification and world unanimity as no one could have dreamed of a
hundred years ago, there has been, on the other hand, a change, an
intensification, of the destructive processes of war which opens up a black
alternative to this pacific settlement of human affairs. The case as it is
commonly stated in the propaganda literature for a League of Nations is a
choice between, on the one hand, a general agreement on the part of mankind to
organize a permanent peace, and on the other, a progressive development of the
preparation for war and the means of conducting war which must ultimately eat
up human freedom and all human effort, and, as the phrase goes, destroy
civilization. We shall find as we proceed that these simple oppositions do not by
any means state all the possibilities of the case; but for a moment or so it
will be convenient to confine our attention to this enhancement of the cost,
burden, and destructiveness of belligerence which scientific and technical
progress has made inevitable.
What has happened is essentially this, that the
natural limitations upon warfare which have existed hitherto appear to have
broken down. Hitherto there has been a certain proportion between the utmost
exertion of a nation at war and the rest of its activities. The art and methods
of war have had a measurable relation to the resources of the community as a
whole, so that it has been possible for nations to be well armed by the
standards of the time and yet to remain vigorous and healthy communities, and
to wage successful wars without exhaustion.
To take a primitive example, it was possible for the Zulu people, under King
Chaka, to carry warfare as it was then understood in South Africa -- a
business of spearmen fighting on foot -- to its utmost perfection, and to
remain prosperous and happy themselves, whatever might be the fate they
inflicted upon their neighbors. And even the armies
of Continental Europe, as they existed before the Great War, were manifestly
bearable burdens, because they were borne. But the outbreak of that struggle
forced upon the belligerents, in spite of the natural conservatism of all
professional soldiers, a rapid and logical utilization of the still largely
neglected resources of mechanical and chemical science; they were compelled to
take up every device that offered, however costly it might be; they could not
resist the drive toward scientific war which they had themselves released. In
warfare the law of the utmost immediate exertion rules; the combatant who does
not put in all his possible energy is lost. In four brief years, therefore,
We may take as a typical instance of this logical and necessary exaggeration
which warfare has undergone the case of the 'tank.' The idea of a land ironclad
was an old and very obvious one, which had been disliked and resisted by
military people for many years. The substantial basis of the European armies of
1914 was still a comparatively inexpensive infantry, assisted by machineguns
and field-guns and cavalry. By 1918 the infantry line is sustained by enormous
batteries of guns of every calibre, firing away an incredible wealth of ammunition;
its structure includes the most complicated system of machine-gun nests and
strong posts conceivable, and every important advance is preceded by lines of
aeroplanes and sustained by fleets of these new and still developing weapons,
the tanks. Every battle sees scores of these latter monsters put out of action.
Now, even the primitive tank of 1917 costs, quite apart from the very high
running expenses, something between seven and ten thousand pounds. At that
stage it was still an expedient on trial and in the rough. But its obvious
corollary in movable big-gun forts with ammunition tenders -- forts which
will probably be made in parts and built up near to the point of use, however
costly they may be -- is practically dictated if war is to continue. So
too is a production of light and swift types of tank that will serve many of
the purposes of cavalry.
If war is to continue as a human possibility, this elaboration of the tank in
scale and species follows inevitably. A mere peace of the old type is likely to
accelerate rather than check this elaboration. Only a peace that will abolish
the probability of war from human affairs can release the nations from the
manifest necessity of cultivating the tank, multiplying the tank, and
maintaining a great manufacture and store of tanks, over and above all the
other belligerent plants which they had to keep going before 1914. And these
tanks will supersede nothing -- unless perhaps, to a certain extent,
cavalry. The tank, growing greater and greater and more numerous and various,
is manifestly, therefore, one new burden -- one of many new
burdens -- which must rest upon the shoulders of mankind henceforth, until
the prospect of war can be shut off from international affairs. It is foolish
to ignore these grimly budding possibilities of the tank. There they are, and
they cannot be avoided if war is to go on.
But the tank is only one of quite a multitude of developments, which are bound
to be followed up if the modern war-process continues. There is no help for it.
In every direction there is the same story to be told -- if war is still
to be contemplated as a possibility -- of an unavoidable elaboration of
the means of war beyond the scale of any conceivable war end.
As a second instance, let us take the growth in size, range, and
destructiveness of the air war. Few people realize fully what a vast thing the
air-service has become. A big aeroplane of the raider type may cost anything up
to twenty thousand pounds; the smallest costs not much less than a thousand. The
pilot and the observer are of the very flower of the youth of the country; they
have probably cost society many thousands of pounds' worth of upbringing and
education, and they have made little or no productive contribution to human
resources. And these costs units have been multiplied enormously. From a poor
hundred or so of aerial planes at the outset of the war,
The same story of a tremendous permanent expansion of war-equipment could be
repeated in a score of parallel instances drawn from the land war and sea war.
Enormous new organizations of anti-submarine flotillas, of minefield material
and its production, of poison-gas manufacture and the like, have been called
into existence, and must now remain as going concerns so long as war is likely
to be renewed.
But enough examples have been cited here to establish the reality of this
present unrestricted, illimitable, disproportionate growth of the war-process
in comparison with all other human processes. Mars has become the young cuckoo
in the nest of human possibilities, and it is -- to state the extreme
alternatives -- a choice before mankind, whether we will drift on toward a
catastrophe due to that overgrowth, or so organize the world as effectually to
restrain and reduce warfare.
It is not impossible to adumbrate the general nature of the catastrophe which
threatens mankind if war-making goes on. Modern warfare is not congenial to the
working masses anywhere. No doubt the primitive form of warfare, a murderous
bickering with adjacent tribes, is natural enough to uneducated men; but modern
warfare, and still more the preparation for it, involves distresses, strains,
and a continuity of base and narrow purpose quite beyond the patience and
interest of the millions of ordinary men who find no other profit in it but
suffering. The natural man is more apt for chaotic local fighting than for
large-scale systematic fighting. Hatred campaigns and a sustained propaganda
are needed to keep up the combatant spirit in a large modern state, even during
actual hostilities; and in the case of
What is likely to happen, then, when the working masses of Central and
Such, roughly, is the idea of the phrase 'downfall of civilization' as used in
discussions like these. It is a vision of the world as a social system
collapsing chaotically, not under the assault of outer barbarians, but beneath
the pressure of this inevitable hypertrophy of war.
III
Let us now look a little more closely between the two extremes of possibility
we have stated in the preceding section, between a world-unanimity for peace,
on the one hand, -- Everyman's World League of
Nations, -- and a world-collapse under the overgrowth of war-organization
and material, on the other.
The affairs of the world are now in a posture which enables us to dismiss the
idea of a world hegemony for
We have to consider, however, the much greater probability of a group of the
more powerful states, including perhaps a chastened
And, on the other hand, we have assumed, quite crudely, in the first section
that the forces of popular insurrection are altogether destructive of
organization, whereas there may be as yet unmeasured constructive and
organizing power in the popular mind. There is a middle way between a
superstitious belief in unguided democracy and a frantic hatred of it. Concurrently,
for example, with the earlier phases of Bolshevik anarchy in Petrograd and
We have not, therefore, here, a case of a clear cut choice of two ways; there
is a multitude of roads which may converge upon the permanent organization of
world peace, and an infinitude of thwarting and
delaying digressions may occur. Complicating and mitigating circumstances may,
and probably will, make this antagonism of war and peace a lengthy and tortuous
drama. There may be many halts and setbacks in the inevitable development of
war; belligerence may pause and take breath on several occasions before its
ultimate death flurry.
Such delays, such backwater phases and secondary aspects, must not confuse the
issue and hide from us the essential fact of the disappearance of any real
limitation upon the overgrowth of war in human life. That unlimited overgrowth
is the probability which is driving more and more men to study and advocate
this project of a
And it does not follow, because the origins and motives of the will for such a
world-league are various, that they involve a conflict over essentials, as to
the character of the final result. It is the declared belief of many of the
promoters of the world-league movement that a careful analysis of the main
factors of its problems, a scientific examination of what is possible, what is
impossible, what is necessary, and what is dangerous, must lead the mass of
reasonable men in the world, whatever their class, origins, traditions, and
prejudices, to a practical agreement upon the main lines of this scheme for the
salvation of mankind. It is believed that the clear, deliberate, and methodical
working out of the broad problems and riddles of the world-league idea will beve a sufficient compelling force to bring it within the
realm of practical possibility.
IV
But at this point it is advisable to take up and dispose of a group of
suggestions which contradict our fundamental thesis, which is, that war is by
its nature illimitable. War is, we hold here, a cessation of law, and in war
therefore, it is impossible to prevent permanently the use of every possible
device for injury, killing, and compulsion which human ingenuity can devise or science produce. Our main argument for a
This is, we hold, a delusion. Our case is that the nations can agree far more
easily to abolish war than to restrict war.
It is true that in the Great War Germany has carried her theories of
ruthlessness to self-defeating extremes. She has done many deeds which recoiled
upon herself -- deeds inspired by a sort of
ferocious pedantry which inflicted very small material damage upon the Allies,
but hardened their resolution and brought thousands, nay, millions of recruits
to their ranks. None the less must we face the fact that, individual
stupidities apart, the German theory of war is the only logical one.
If it be said that, in past times, nations fought with comparatively small
armies, and often accepted defeat without having thrown anything like their
full strength into the struggle -- the objection is met by a twofold
answer. Firstly, the logic of war, the law -- as we have termed it
elsewhere -- of the utmost effort, had not yet been thoroughly thought
out. Primitive peoples in general -- and the same applies to all but the
most civilized and sophisticated of modern states -- are guided in matters
of war and peace more by their emotions than by their reason. They are lazy, as
peoples, and muddle-headed. They fight because they are angry; they stop
because they are tired; they cease pursuing the enemy because they want to
attend to the harvest. It is the mark of a highly organized and
intellectualized government to subordinate national emotions to the remorseless
logic of the case. And the logic of war was reserved for Napoleon to express in
practice and Clausewitz to formulate in theory.
But the second answer goes more to the root of the matter: namely, that the
strength which a nation can put into the field is limited by many conditions
both material and psychological, and that, if we examine into these conditions,
we shall often find that what may seem to us, on the face of it, an
insignificant effort, was in very truth the greatest of which, at the given
moment, the nation was capable. It is a quite new social fact, a creation of
the last fifty years, to have a central government supplied with exact
information about all its resources in men, money, and material, and with means
of organization and control which enable it, at the cost of some delay and
friction, to exploit those resources to the last inch. When
If we look into the history of warfare, we find that it has completed a cycle
and is now returning to its starting-point. A nomadic horde of the barbarous
ages was 'a nation in arms' in the full sense of the word. Having no fixed
place of abode, it had no civil -- as distinct from military --
population. The whole people -- old men, women, and children
included -- took part in the toils and perils of war. There were no places
of security in which the weak and the defenseless
could take refuge. Everyone's life was forfeit in case of disaster; therefore
everyone took part in the common defense. Modern
warfare, with its air fleets, its submarines, and its 'big Berthas,' is more
and more restricting the area of immunity from military peril and reverting to
these primitive conditions.
Agricultural life and city settlements brought with them the distinction
between combatants and non-combatants; but still, in the normal state, every
able-bodied citizen was a soldier. The citizen took his place as a matter of
course in the militia of his country, leaving to old men and women, or to
slaves and captives, the guardianship of field and vineyard, flock and herd.
Only when wealth and luxury had reached a certain pitch did the habit of
employing denationalized mercenaries creep in. Then came the time when the
mercenaries encountered nomadic or thoroughly mobilized 'nations in arms,' and
civilization went to the wall.
In the Middle Ages, the feudal chief, the dominant,
soldierly, often predatory personality, gathered his vassals around him for
purposes of offense and defense, while the
cultivation of the soil devolved on the villains or serfs. Thus war became the
special function of a military caste, and, as in the Wars of the Roses,
campaigns were often carried on with comparatively little disturbance to the
normal life of the country. When the royal power crushed or absorbed that of
the barons, the centralized monarchy everywhere recruited a standing army,
often consisting largely of foreign mercenaries, as the bulwark of its security
and the instrument of its will. It was quite natural that dynastic wars, and
wars in which the common people of the contending nations had little or no
interest, should be fought out on a restricted scale by these specialized military
machines. Frederick the Great employed a mercenary army as the nucleus for a
national militia; and so lately as the beginning of the last century, this
system was celebrated as ideal by the noted military authority who was the
immediate predecessor of Clausewitz.
With Napoleon came the Nation in Arms; and the military history of the
intervening years has consisted of the ever completer concentration upon
warlike purposes of the whole powers and resources of the great European
peoples.
If it be asked why this logical evolution of the idea of war has taken so many
centuries to work itself out, the main reason -- among many others --
may be stated in two words: munitions and transport. Before the age of
machines, it was impossible to arm and clothe immense multitudes of men; before
the days of McAdam and Stephenson, it was impossible
to move such multitudes and, still more, to keep them supplied with food and
munitions. Again we find ourselves insisting upon the vital importance of
transit methods in this, as in nearly all questions of human interaction. The
size of armies has steadily grown with the growth of means of communication.
The German wars of 1863-70 were the first in which railways played any
considerable part, and the scale of operations in 1870-71 was quite
unprecedented.
What is the chief new factor since the days of
St. Privat and
Seen in this light, the invention of the motor may appear to have been due to a
special interference of Satan in human affairs. But that is an unphilosophical view to take. Our race must perfect its
power over matter before it can wisely select the ends to which it will apply
that power. The idea of war had to work itself out to the full and demonstrate
its own impossibility, before man could find the insight and the energy to put
it behind him and have done with it. Thanks to Prussian ambition and Prussian
philosophy, the demonstration has now been completed. The idea of war has
revealed itself in its full hideousness. All the world
has come to look upon it as a sort of mythological monster which, if left to
itself, will periodically reemerge from hell, to
devour the whole youth and the whole wealth of civilized mankind. It is useless
to dream of clipping the wings or paring the claws of the dragon. It must be
slain outright if it is not to plan unthinkable havoc with civilization; and to
that end the intelligence and the moral enthusiasm of the world are now, as we
see, addressing themselves.
Copyright © The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved. The Atlantic
Monthly; January, 1919; The Idea of a League of Nations; Volume 123, No. 1;
pages 106-115
The Idea of a
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