WELLS' LATEST.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 229, 27 September 1930, Page 11 (Supplement)

WELLS' LATEST.

"THE AUTOCRACY OF MR. PARHAM." ANGLO-AMERICAN WAR. NO NEW EVANGEL. (By E.L.C.W.) . LONDON, August 2. "We've got to. do something about it eo on. Damn soon. Before another smash. We new people. Wove ju= floated about getting .rich and , doing nothing about it. ;.. • Buying and selling and amalgamating and monopolism isn't enough. The worst thing m M is to have power and not. use it to the fuU. . . Here, in a sentence or so, is the text of "The Autocracy o f Mn Parham" (Heinemann), Mr. H.■ G * Ued a new production. Lb canno _ fi-mre novel, for, although some women fi„ in it, they do so not because they nurt ter, but because they are inci some of the scenes described. Mr. Wells las give" »s ™ pel. He merely gives a com service such as we aje us cours e, from him, a service brought of course well up to date in all One world developments and of set • is a little tired of the minatory service, and "n know what precisely he w . , stead of all those things + ™,f fe w freely damns. What in the last few pages of this Wells an tract times he would do to pu paper! right is, apparently, to set P The Wellsian way to sanation 'We've got to give * it idea of what is going ° n ' quite 'em quick"—and after a good scheme. Then the "Schools—you can t. You can is necessary quality in tea • Y eSj sities lock themselvesag ne w they do. We ve got to snatch { generation out of the n , ing prigs and pendante and tell , tell 'em, tell 'em. (Mch J™ ne w splash of life. In ne .> througll organisations. The way ro ore. books, paper, print, taiK. -u e

lio-ht/ as old Gutty said." (Did he mean . Goethe?) "I'm coming into the newspaper world. . . . This sort of war drift can only be stopped by a big push the other way. Bigger than anything dona so far. Crowds of people" in earnest. The Big Push for the new world. What of a big Sunday paper—that's the day they read—t-o give 'em science, give them the drift and meaning, of the new world. . . A Plea for Pacifism. This is the scheme of Sir Bussy Woodcock, the new world spirit incarnate of Mr. Wells' imagining, and he tells this to Mr. Parham, the J varsity don who has been hanging on the rich Woodcockian coat tails .with precisely this idea of persuading Sir Bussy to start a new weekly for Mr. Parham. and to air the Parham donnish view of world politics and affairs. But Sir Bussy scorns the medium of a staid Saturday weekly. Sir Bussy says: "I want the paper to go out to the main public by the hundred thousand. I want to gobehind all those clever fellows. -They cut no ice. I want to go out with pictures and vulgar noise, and tell 'em, and tell 'em, and tell 'em. . . The book itself is as strong a plea for pacifism as ever Norman Angell wrote, and Mr. Wells certainly gives us a picture of the beastliness of war and what gas as a weapon will mean. One captain of industry—chemical—assures us that the whole chemical of the world is now one, and he adds: "If these sovereign powers which divide up the world in such a convenient way contrive another war, they will certainly have to use gas, whatever agreements they have made about it beforehand. And we, our great network of interests, are seeing to it that they will have plenty of gas, good reliable gas at reasonable business rates, all and more than they need. We supply all of them now, and probably if war comes we shall still supply all of them —both We mav break up our associations a bit for actual war, but that will be a mere incidental necessity. Just like bankers, we are what circumstances havs made us. There's nothing sovereign about us. We aren't governments with the ppwer to declare war or make peace. Such influence as we hare with governments and war offices is limited and indirect. Our position is that of dealers simply We sell gas just as other people sell the Army meat or cabbages. But the generation which touched 1914-1918 personally hardly needs to have its feelings harrowed by a long

story of the great gas for which the Powers are so avidly seeking. One thing Mr. Wells has done in this book, •with all those vivid descriptive powers that are his —and it is worth doing—is * to show how dangerous a thing is the possession of armaments even when the governments which control them are unwilling—too proud—to fight. He pictures a crisis; it is true it is all a dream, but a dream which has so much horrible reality that one has hardly any of that feeling in the back of the mind that it is only a bad dream. This dream has all the elements of a dream that assuredly may come true. The Professor's Dream. Mr. Parham, the professor of history, dreams he is Lord Paramount of the British Empire, able to impose his will on the countries about which as a don he knew so much. "I thought," he says, "I should be sustained by patriotic science and patriotic finance and patriotic business enterprise, and I find men without souls that evade my inspiration. . . . ." But there is trouble everywhere—Egypt, India, Ireland, China. "Had Imperial patriotism come too late? . . . Hud it failed to grip or had it lost its grip on the colonial imagination? asks the Lord Paramount in his dream. Not only the masses at home, but the Dominions, had drifted out of touch with and respect for the starry pre-eminence of Oxford and Cambridge thought. . . . These larger vaguer multitudes were following America in a widening estrangement from the essential conceptions of British history and British national conduct. For some years the keen mind of Mr. Parham had sensed this possible ebb of the Imperial idea " The Lord Paramount's idea was to handle crises with the strong hand, and he orders a blockade of China. ' An American boat which refuses to recognise the blockade is fired on and sunk! No wonder the Lord Paramount is awakened at 1 a.m. by the Ambassador from that Great Power waving an ultimatum. But the decencies of an age which knows the League of Nations hold the nations in leash for an interval, not a short one! The fleets of the two Powers. sail out into the Atlantic. "Steadily these two great forces approached each other, and still the two Governments assumed that some elevfenth hour miracle would avert a collision " The fleets had arranged to steam five miles apart while negotiations were being carried on. But out of the void crept a flotilla of icebergs, endangering the British Fleet, which thereupon altered its course and came nearer. The American fleet, which did not see the icebergs, imagined this approach meant hositlities,

and fired. The Second World War was on And none more surprised than the Lord Paramount in London or the President in Washington. Thus the dream. The illustrations by Low make Sir Gussy Woodcock surprisingly like Lord Beayerbrook, and the industrial magnate of Mr. Welle' imagining in his want of culture, his uncouthness combined with unexpected flashes of insight, is certainly akin to the great Press lord. Sir Gussy Woodcock is the incarnation of all those qualities which have created our new plutocracy, and Mr. Wells has done nothing better than this character of mixed good and bad, in which the good nature is blatant, seen by all the world, and obscures the worse qualities, which nevertheless must be reckoned with in persons whose power is so large. Bitter Portraits. One wonders if it is Mr. Wells' failure to make good in politics that makes the political portraits he draws here so bitter as to be almost untrue. "Mr. Kamsy McDcmgal ... as ever a little apart from his colleagues, an image of unreadiness ... he seemed more gaunt and angular than ever, more like a lonely wind■stripped tree upon some blasted heath, more haggard and inaccurate in his questionable handsomeness." Here, surely, H.G. dipped his pen in gall and a personal dislike of some sort. "Mr. St. George went out stoutly, and as if inadvertently, his hands behind his back. It was as if he had been called away by some private concern and had failed to observe what was going on. His daughter, who was also a member, followed him briskly. Sir Simon John and Mr. Harold Samuel were whispering together and taking notes until the advancing shadows of physical expulsion (this is the scene in the House of Commons when Lord Paramount expelled Parliament) were close at hand. Their gestures made it clear to everyone that they considered the Lord Paramount wa« acting illegally and that they were greatly pleased to score a point against him." "Lady. Asper . . . exulted brightly and clapped her pretty hands when Waxton was tackled and overpowered. She seemed eager that more Labour members should join in the fray and get similar treatment, and disappointed when they did not do so. Mr. Emery, the great fiscal imperialist, stood on a seat the better to watch the proceedings and smiled broadly. ... He knew already he wa3 marked for Lord Paramount's Council. ..."

The finale is clever. In the lobby of the House "a solitary figure sat, sobbing quietly. It looked up and revealed the face of that Lord Cato, who was formerly Sir Wilfrid Jameson Jicks. "I ought to have done it," he whispered, "I ought to have done it months ago. . . "You must help me now for England's sake," said the Lord Paramount. On reading this new book of Wells' we ask again, what is he driving at? Is he jeering at autocracy or democracy, or only at their imitations? Certainly H. G. Wells is no nearer than ever he was to showing us how we can get or breed a real Napoleon or a civilisation that is worth striving after. He has no new evangel in this book.