Evening post THURSDAY, MARCH 17, 1927. MR. WELLS AND DEMOCRACY

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 64, 17 March 1927, Page 8

Evening post THURSDAY, MARCH 17, 1927. MR. WELLS AND DEMOCRACY

The first of those fierce but entertaining letters which Mr. Henry Arthur Jones afterwards published in wii »orm under;thetitle"My Dear Wells opens with a reference to a newspaper article whiph, after ascribing to Mr. H. G. Wells "a sovereign comprehension of human affairs and a superhuman sagacity in dealing with them," went on to declare that "Wells to-day is thinking for half Europe," Upon this a friend, or an imaginary friend, had ungraciously remarked, "Now we know why Europe is in such a mess." Such is the pleasant way in which Mr. Jones opened his long and almost completely onesided correspondence with Mr. Wells.\ The postscript to this first letter is barbed with another remark on the same text from, the same tic:--P?S.: —If I were you I wouldn't let your friends credit you with too much capacity for thinking for other people. Spofforth, who is always at my elbow with mal-a-propos suggestions, has just remarked that, if you are thinking for half Europe, it doesn't leave you much time to think for yourself. 'It appears from the same letter, the date of which is the 16th September 1920, that Mr. Wells had already found some time to do some thinking for Africa also, and that the obliging Mr. H. A. Jones' had. been lending him a helping hand:— In my "Patriotism and Popular Education" I examined in detail your scheme for the International Government of Africa. You will remember ■: that you regenerated the whole continent in five minutes by giving it an In- i ternational Constitution on paper. " It was all so easy—on paper.' • It was Mr. Wells's description of the Bolshevist leaders, or some of their actions, as "shining clear" and "profoundly wise," and his proposed visit to Russia, that set Mr. H. A. Jones going with these unenviable attentions. Mr. Wells went to Moscow and spent a fortnight in the country —ample time, as Mr. Jones suggested, for such a genius "to get a grip of the whole situation and to shape a nation's destinies accordingly." If it came to a pinch, wrote Mr. Jones in tho letter in which he welcomed Mr. Wells oh his return, aud I knew you were in good form, I would back you to bring out a new Constitution or a new religion for any country or continent in less than a week.- Don't distrust yourself. I know you can do it. Why, a year or two ago you whipped out a brand new International Constitution for the whole continent of Mid-Africa in a fortnight. It is true that it was a paper Constitution, and that it wouldn't work for five minutes Still, you did it. But apparently Mr. Wells did distrust himself on this occasion. He returned from Russia without a new Constitution for the country, or for a ; Fourth International, It might have been as well if he had been equally sparing in his personal judgments. Mr. Wells actually described Lenin as "a little beast/ "just a Russian Sidney Webb, a rotten little incessant egotistical intriguer," who "wants power, and when he gets it has no use for it," and "doesn't want order." A more ludicrous misjudgment could hardly be imagined. Lenin may have been a great scoundrel, a great murderer, and a great scourge, but he was also a great man, and the best proof that he wanted order is that he got it. By the cheap and childish abuse of Mussolini, which was poor stuff even as invective, Mr. Wells reminded us a few weeks ago that the appreciation of character is not his strong point, at any rate where his prejudices are touched. Does his lecture at the Sorbonne which was reported yesterday suggest that on broader lines he can give us any practical guidance? We are bound to reply that, unless the cabled summary has misrepresented it, his "Democracy Under Revision" is as poor stuff.as his invective. If "democracy at present is in a state of transition," that is no more than it has ■ always been since it first made its appearance in the little city-states of ancient Greece more than two thousand years ago. The activity and the progress which are the merits of democracy, and the turbulence and instability which have been its vices, may be said to have bad transition for a sort of common denominator. As soon as democracy ceases to be in a state of transition it will be dead. Mr. Wells is no doubt thinking of something more radical than these normal changes of democracy, of changes which threaten its very existence, of changes for which /therefore "transition" is too mild a term. To a philosopher like Mr. Wells the man who is falling down a precipice is in a state of transition, though the vulgar would use a different expression. That this is the kind of transition that Mr. Wells is contemplating appears from the mention in his next sentence of Italian Fascism, Russian Communism, and the Chinese Nationalist movement. In the first two of these cases the transition enforced upon democracy has been so violent as to have broken its neck.

In China there was no democracy to start with, and what the next resting place will be no man can say. It is certainly odd to find Mr. Wells lumping these three cases together and ascribing them all to "Parliamentary democracy." In Italy Fascism was undoubtedly the direct outcome of a Parliamentary democracy which had' dene good work in its day, but had broken down under the strain of the War. To save the country from the anarchy with which it was threatened by the most violent partisans of Mr. Wells's theories Mussolini stepped in and put the bauble of Parliamentary Government away. But what sort of democracy had Russia before Lenin substituted one form of tyranny for another? or China before Nationalism, Bolshevism, and self-determina-tion plunged her into civil war and revolution?

Mr. Wells's remedy is as vague as his diagnosis is inaccurate. The new Constitution or new religion which Mr. H. A. Jones backed him to bring out "for any country or continent in less than a week" is conspicuously absent. All around he sees "active minorities trying to reorganise democracy."

There was such a.need of reorganisation that the man in the street had submitted to it without a protest. Was not that the beginning? What was there to hinder a great political and religious movement recruiting all active and audacious minorities in an effort towards a social world unity?

Absolutely nothing, except that these "active and audacious minorities" are just as eager to cut one another's throats'as they are to destroy the existing order. Without pausing to answer his own very foolish question, Mr. Wells proceeds:—

We are beginning a great evolution. The first heralds have appeared on literature and art—in Bernard Shaw's "Saint Joan" and Ernest Toller's "Masses of Men."

With due respect to these great works we cannot see that, even with the aid of "The World of William Clissold," they are going to make Russia, China, or even Italy safe for democracy.