WELLS’S PLAN

Evening Star, Issue 20998, 12 January 1932, Page 10

WELLS’S PLAN

♦- A WORLD STATE COLLECTIVE OWNERSHIP “OLD SYSTEM MUST GO" H. G. Wells is again visiting the United States. The author of half a hundred books that rang© from histories to novels, that recount the past and prophesy the future; the _ man who from teaching turned to writing, and, beginning with a scientific -treatise, transformed science into romance and romance into science, has .returned after an absence of nine years to get a view of economic conditions in this country (writes S. J. Woolf, in the New York ‘Times’). In a publishing plant in a suburb, where he was going over the final proof of his latest book, I called upon,him. Though the red brick buildings are surrounded by wooded walks and gardens, and though the room,, in which he sat, its walls filled with books and pictures, looked more like a library than an office, there came to usfrom below the constant roar of machinery. Errand boys interrupted him with cable messages; publicity women waited upon him, and sales managers conferred with him. He appeared as out of place as a spinning wheel in a modern factory. Inadvertently I thought of Chesterton consuming countless cups of tea in his disordered office in Essex street in London, and of Shaw lolling back on his cretonne-covered sofa in Adelphi terrace. Both of them fitted into their places perfectly, but around Wells in America there is a jarring note. For there is something old-fashioned about him. Somehow he recalls parlours with overstuffed furniture and antimacassars. He brings forth memories of flowered wallpaper and vases filled with cat-tails. And all this despite the fact that, like Jules Verne, but with greater literary skill, he predicted years ago many of the innovations of to-day. In his ivy-covered rambling house in Dunmow, among the sleepy flat-lands of Essex, he is at home. There this small man, with his thinning brown hair plastered flat on his head, with his dreamy blue eyes shaded by bristling brows, with his scraggly moustache and a voice that is low in tone but high in pitch, melts into his background. As he sat at his desk in_ the publishers’ office marking proofs with a short fountain pen minus its cap so that it looked like a stubby pencil; as he bent his head over the galleys and the light from the large windows threw shadows under his eyes and accentuated the cleft above his nose; as he jotted down notes, he might have been a merchant writing an order. RAPID' CHANGES. For some time he was so engrossed in his work that I could not get him to talk._ Occasionally as I,drew I would catch him giving me a side-ways glance through the pince-nez which he had substituted for shell spectacles. Most of my questions were answered by monosyllables, and it was not until I asked him what the next chapter of the * Outline of History ’ would be like that he at last forgot the work that was before him. “It’s going to bo very.tragic unless wo take care,” he said. His manner is slow. There is a deliberation about him that he probably acquired at the Royal College of Science where, after he had decided not to become a draper, he studied under Huxley and received his degree. It is a manner which he cultivated when he taught biology for two years at the University Tutorial College in Red Lion square. There was a slight nervous cough.. Then he continued “ Things are changing so rapidly these days that there is no way of measuring the increasing swiftness. These changes have been brought about by a man here and a group there who have made inventions and discoveries which have effected an upheaval in our life. At first'wo did not realise what was happening; we are not quite clear even now about those changes.” He stopped and turned back to the all-absorbing proofs. For a time he worked, then, as if nothing had interrupted his conversation, he began again; . . “ The thing that marks the beginning of the twentieth century is what has been described as the abolition of distance. For a hundred years previously there had been a continual increase in speed and safety in travel, as well as new methods in the transraision of communication. With the development of railways, steamships, and the telegraph, towns grew larger, places, once inaccessible became populated areas, and industrial centres began to live on imported food, while news from remote places was tarried to the furthermost corners of the world. But while these things came along, they were regarded as only improvements in existing conditions and their real import and their effect upon the daily lives of the people were not recognised. A NEW WORLD. “ In the latter part of the nineteenth

century there were a few prophets, a few men more observing than the rest, who began to see that this abolition of distance was but one aspect of the much more far-reaching advances. It suddenly began to dawn upon them that there had been a stupendous progress in obtaining and using mechanical power, and with this had come an enormous increase in the substances availbale for man’s use. Vulcanised rubber, modern steel, petroleum, margarin, tungsten, aluminium, were discovered. To most people these things appeared to be lucky finds, happy chance discoveries. The tremendous change they were bringing with them was not foreseen.” He removed his glasses and turned to look at me, while the presses on the floor below appropriately kept up their steady grind. It was a fitting accompaniment to what he had to say. “ These so-called lucky finds,” he continued, “ increased the amounts and the methods of production, and big business made its appearance. You know what the result of that has been. The small producer and the small distributor have been driven out of the market; old factories have been swept away, and new and larger ones have taken their places; the face of the countryside has changed. A world in which there had never been enough became one of potential plenty, and with these things came developments in biological science and medicine. Theoretically, man could now live without any great burden, toil, or fear; wholesomely and abundantly for as long as the desire to live was in him.” He smiled. It was a repressed smile and a repressed chuckle went with it. # “I said _ theoretically,” he added”, “ for all this freedom of movement, this power, and abundance, remain for most of us no more than possibilities. Hard tasks, want, and money worries are still our lot, while the threat of war, armed by all the discoveries of this modern science, hangs over us.” HABITS OF THOUGHT. “ Because,” he replied, “ we are not able to shake off old traditions. Although every one is our next-door neighbour and commerce is continually breaking nationalistic boundaries, we still distrust and even hate foreigners, and we stiffen up like wooden soldiers for our national anthem and prepare to follow the little fellows in spurs and, feathers to destruction. “ Can’t you see that our old ideas of patriotism are no loifger tenable?” he asked. “W© do these things because we are hoodwinked and. bamboozled by those who trade upon the old traditions, and the worst' part of it is that these inherited defects and malformations are not confined to our political life. Our everyday life, and by that I mean our eating and drinking, our clothing and housing, and our going about, is also cramped, thwarted, and impoverished. All about us we have unemployment and a dislocation of spending power. The entire economic machine is creaking, and is held back by ideas that are out of date. Unless there is a reconstruction it must undoubtedly stop.” It is wrong to describe Air Wells as a crusader. There is nothing flaming about him. In any group of people one would pick him out as a type of conservative Englishman. With his pink complexion, his almost hesitating manner, one would expect to hear from him, as he sipped a cup of tea, reactionary opinions instead of radical proposals. It was the war, he told me, that made him realise the possibilities of a better order of things. “ There must be no more wars,” he said, “which means that_ we must be cosmopolitan in - our politics. Nobody with any intelligence can believe, however, that destructive stupidities can be eliminated until some common political control dominates the earth, a control not only of armed force, but of the production and main movements of commodities as well as of the drift and expansion of population. “ A religious spirit,” he continued, “ iu the light of modern knowledge can lift mankind out of certain of its difficulties. But the reconstruction of this world depends upon a political, social, and economic unification as well as a religious one. Instead of a patchwork of governments there must be one extending in new directions and with a new psychology. _ The psychology of economic co-operation is only dawning.

Our libraries are filled with ponderous and dreary volumes on ‘ rents,’ ‘ surplus values,’ and unworkable and out-of-date theories. Wo must begin our attack with a proper survey so that the staple needs of mankind may bo satisfied.” HIS PLAN. Mr Wells went on to describe a system for work and production designed to entail the least labour and produce the greatest satisfaction, and in which the modern community would be a great encyclopedic organisation which would supervise all the material activities of mankind. The primary consideration in arranging the new economic, biological, and mental organisation of his new world community would be the greatest freedom with the least suppression. The ocean, the air, and rare wild animals would be the collective property of all: raw materials would not he monopolised by an acquisitive individual nor withheld from exploitation for the general benefit by any chance claims. “ In the new world State,” he explained, “ a highly organised form of collective ownership, _ subject to free criticism and responsible to the whole republic of humanity, will replace individual private ownership. With this will go the maintenance of a money system by a central world authority that will make money keep faith with the worker who earns it. Credit will be administered adequately in the general interest by a centralised banking organisation; social psychology will assure us that the best work will be done for the world by individuals free to exploit their abilities as they wish. Individual landowners will bo replaced by tenants with security of tenure and by householders and by licensees under collective proprietors: but it will be the practice to allow the cultivator to benefit by his productivity and the householder to fashion his house and garden after his own desire.”