MR. H. G. WELLS AND IMPERIALISM

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 80, 28 December 1929, Page 7

MR. H. G. WELLS AND IMPERIALISM

‘SELF-SUFFICIENCY” AN EXPLODED IDEA

Mr. H. G. Wells recently commented on the campaign for a self-sufficing Empire which is at present engaging a certain amount of public attention. What is the mental basis of tils belief in a self-sufficient British Empire? he asked. It seems to me there are three possible ways in which such a creed may be held. First, there may be a conviction that, contrary to my assertion, there can exist upon the same planet without mutual destruction .and for an indefinite time a number of sovereign world systems growing out of the extension of the old sovereign States of the eighteenth century, and that the British system at any rate is powerful enough to maintain itself against all other pressures and rivalries. Against this I set the facts that the existing British Empire was made by the steamship, that its prosperity and security depend upon the sustained control of the seas, that the aeroplane, the submarine, and the competitive shipbuilding of other States have so changed the cohesion of this sea-knit confederation that it is now no more than a heterpgenous system of regions linked by long and vulnerable lines of communication. Its present disposition to build tariff walls along these threads and so monopolise the economic advantages its disproportionate share of the productive areas of the earth gives it, will practically oblige less fortunately situated imperialisms to assume an attitude of hostility. If it will not have economic pooling, then it will get war.'. .. . But there is a second system of ideas, rather more plausible, in which it is admitted that the Empire is to be regarded as a temporary league leading on to a still wider synthesis of world controls (imperialism of 1890), but that meanwhile it is to be run as this self-sufficient Empire, with tariff walls, preferences, monopolisations, “keep out the foreigner,” and all the rest of the competitive outfit- Then suddenly, I suppose, it is to do some tremendous volte-face and make a deal. But the objection to this second group if ideas lies in the fact that so long as we remain self-sufficient, we build up army, navy, air force, and a patriotic imperialist tradition, we mould economic Interests to the imperial boundaries, we force lines of economic inter-action into unnatural pgths, and so make the Empire less and less capable of that final amalgamation, physically and mentally, without a mighty struggle. New ideas do not come suddenly. Wars do. The mass of patriotic men of affairs to-day have, I believe, neither of these two foundation systems of ideas in their minds. The third system of fundamental ideas in vogue among patriotic imperialists is simply the old junk of nineteenth-century political thought They have nothing in their minds of their own. They have never thought themselves out; nor have they thought out their world. They have just gone on doing business and drifting along in accordance with the political and patriotic traditions of their forefathers (which are as much out of date as stage coaches and semaphore telegraphy). I suppose that Lord Melchett, Sir Richard Gregory, and perhaps Lord Beaverbrook would fall under the second of these three divisions of imperialists. But Lord Beaverbrook might come into the first-named class.