MR WELLS’ UTOPIA

Hawera Star, Volume XLVI, 23 July 1927, Page 9

MR WELLS’ UTOPIA

Ps ARISIAN savants gave Mr. H. G- Wells ‘ a cordial welcome recently at the Sorbonne, where the famous publicist lectured on “Democracy Under Revision.” We were living in the beginning of an age whose broad characteristics might be conveyed by calling it the age of democracy under revision, said Mr. Wells. The appearance of democracy had everywhere been associated with the breakdown of outworn or outpaced systems, with processes of release and liberation, and generally also processes of disintegration. Democracy also involved the challenging and repudiation of authority. In politics it produced government by assemblies elected by an everwidening constituency of voters. In literature the democratic spirit found its natural vehicle. The literature of the period of democracy ascendant displayed what its political development masked only very thinly that modern democracy was but a phase of immense dissolution. In painting and music there had been ail over this period the same effect of release or detachment from broad constructive conceptions and any sore of synthesis. But while in the realms of political, literary, and artistic expression democracy meant fragmentation and reduction to unorganised masses; in the newer world of science the onset of democracy had been accompanied by a synthesis of the most extensive sort. The age of democracy had also been the age of nationalism. Never in the history of mankind had national and racial antagonisms, which had never been so acute and conscious, so massive, powerful, and dangerous as during the ascent of democracy, although that was inconsistent with the larger and completer democratic aspirations. It was interesting at the present moment, to watch the struggle of the Labour parties against their own ingrained nationalist feelings and belligerent patriotism. But nationalism was not the greatest force that modern democracy had evoked against itself in its ascent. Far more fundamental was the synthetic drive in economic life. The great crystallisations of business were plainly due to the releases of democracy, but just as plainly ran

DEMOCRACY REVISED

DISAPPEARANCE OF PARLIAMENTS

counter to the intimate feeling of democracy that every man should be his own master. The main expression of the conflicts between synthesis and analysis in the democratic age had been the struggle for and against Socialism. The final practical objection to Socialism, partial or general, was that politicians and elected persons were not, good enough for the job of controlling the general economic lifeIn his opinion democracy was entering on a phase of revision in which Parliamentary bodies and political life as they knew them would disappear. lie suggested that the.process of dissolution was at an end, and that mankind was challenged by the need for reorganisation and reorientation. How futile had been the attempts of modern democratic Governments 1o solpe the great 'inter-related problems that had faced mankind since the war —the problem of war, the monetary question, and the fact that economic life had become world-wide, and a certain economic unity was being imposed on the globe. No electoral reform projects went to the root of the trouble with modern democracy, which was the indifference, ignorance, and incapacity of the comman man toward public affairs. The ordinary voter did not. care a rap about his vote. Modern democratic Governments had revealed the fact that democracy meant the disappearance of power from the world. For a century or more it had worked well that the world’should be under-governed and underorganised, but we now needed more definite direction and government in human affairs. He built his expectation of the new phase in human affairs upon the belief that there was a profoundly serious minority in the mass of our generally indifferent] species. More than twenty years ago he had sketched in a modern Utopia a world-State ruled by a self-devoted organisation of volunteers. To-day he could appeal to Russia and China to substantiate the possibility. What was Italy, and much that was astir everywhere there to prevent a great politico-religious drive for social and world unity taking hold everywhere of the active and adventurous minority of mankind —that it to say, of all mankind that mattered, even quite soon ’•