THE WORLD SET FREE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 16120, 8 July 1914, Page 10

THE WORLD SET FREE

MUST WE TIKOIX ALL OVER AGAIN? Mr If. (1. Wells's ww l-ook, " The World Set Free" (Macinilau; 6s), suggests the tiring question—"Must we begin all over again?" Are the foundations of our society, laid by a, long line of forefathers, ?o useless? And is the superstructure so jerry-built? Has civilisation proved so great a failure that the lives of the. mass of our people art! not worth living? Ts the only remedy to destroy what exists and to begin again? Mr Wells's book seems to suggest that we must destroy to build up, and that only upon the ashes of the old can the new arire. "Through a sequence of romances Mr Wells has been wrestling-with the puzzle of how to rescue human progress from the tyranny of its own implements," says the Pall Mall. "It must be taken as a landmark in hi:; philosophy that he should have decided on the necessity of a general 'bust-up , in order to get clear of the shackk-s." —A World ■Clearance.— "The particular kind of cataclysm that Mr Wells imagines is more original than the Annageddons of other nc.veii.ds," savs the Westminster Gazette. ")lis atomic bombs break all the records of imaginary engines of destruction. Never was so much destruction packer! into to small a space; never was slaughter and devastatin spread over su.jh "vn«;t spaces of the globe. We cannot pretend to be. precise about it, but the atomic bomb works bv radio-activity, and produces not one explosion but a whole series of explosions extending over many miles and lasting for a period of 40' years. It not only kills and poisons on a large scale, but requires whole neighbourhoods to be abandoned for a period of years, until it has worked itself cut."

Whv so fearful a judgment slioitld be let loose upon the world requires roras justification, and Mr Wells, as Jeremiah, has a strong case. Lot us look at the world as he says it was before men learned how to tap the internal energy of atoms, and use it to Mich fearful ends. This discovery was made in 1933.' —The. Pill Ase.— "It was an unwholesome world. I seem to "remembar everybody about niv childhood as if they were ill.' They were ill. They were ' sick with confusion. Everybody was anxious about money and everybody was doing uncongenial things. They ate a queer mixture of foeds, either too much or too little, and at odd hours. One sees how ill they were by their advertisements of pills. Everybody must have been taking pills." —Pulping Clothee.— "Very few people were nroperly washed; they carried the filth of months on their clothes; all the clothes they wore were old clothes; our way of pulping our clothes again after a week or so of wear would have seerr.fd fantastic to them. Their clothing hardly bears thinking about. And the congestion of them ! Everybody was jostling against everybody in those awful towns. In an uproar people were run over and crushed by the bundred." —ICO Years of" Waste.— "I've a fancv that civilisation was very near disaster when the atomic bombs came banking into it. The century before Holsten was just a hundred years' crescendo of waste. Only the extreme individualism of that period, only its utter want of any collective understanding or purpose can explain that waste. Mankind used un material—insanely, They had got through threequarters of all the coal in the planet, they had used up most of the oil, they had swept away their forests, and they were running short of tin and copper. Their wheat areas were netting weary amd populous, and many of the big towns had so lowered the water level of their available hills that they suffered a drought every sumnieT. The whole system was rushinrr towards bankruptcy. And they were spending every year vaster and vaster amounts of power and energy upon military preparations, and continually expanding' the debt of industry to capital." —An Unknown World.—

The world itself was little known to the people of that day. "At this time men had still to spread into enormous areas of the land surface of

the globe. There wen? v;ist mountain wilderness. fores), wildome.'-H, sandy deserts, and frozen lands. Men still eliuii' closely lo wafer and aral>l<' soil in ternpe rate t:r stib-tropienl clin>at,es, they liveii abundantly only in river valleys, and all t.heir uri'tit eiiies had growrt upon lnrur navigable rivers nr close to -ports upon \\v poa. Over great aren.s even of this suitable land Hies and mn«<|iiitoos, sinned with infection, had so far defeated human invasion, ami under their urotectioii the virgin forests remained untouched. Indeed, the whole vorld even in its most, crowded districts was lilthy with and : wirminu: w j|-|i nivdloss insect life to an extent which is now almost incredible. A i>opnliition iii;i;i of the world in 1950 would have f.dlowi'd seashore and river course so cloelv in it:- darker .<--)i;:dirw as to give an iiiiii;es iou that h< nvi .I'l'iens v.as an ;unidii!)i(i\is Rjiiiiv.i!. Hi-, roach a«d railway:* hiy a!.-o ;•.)■■•,>.!< th: , lower contours, onlv I'i'rc ;;■!.•! there to nierce .'-ovee mountain hrrri ".• or reach fome holiday resort did thev < i ::r:ber above 5000 ft. And across the or Tin his traffic na.wed in delinile lines : {-hero, were hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean no chip ever traversed except by mischance. —Mysteries of the ' J lobe. — "Into the mysteries of the .'did globe under his feet he had not yet nierced for five miles, anrl it was still not 40 years since with a tragic ■ pertinacity he had clambered to the polos of the earth. The Utilities.- mineral wealth of the Arctic and Antarctic circles was still buried beneath vast accumulations of immemorial ice, and the secret riches of the inner zones of the crust were untapped and indeed unsuspected. The higher mountain regions wore, known only to a sprinkling of guide-led I climbers and the frequenters of n fe.w gaunt hotels, and the vast rainless belts of land that lay across the continental masses, from Gobi to Sahara and_ alone the backbone of America, with their perfect air, their daily baths of blazinc sunshine, their nights of cool serenitv and plowing stars, a.nd t.heii , reservoirs of deeplyinrj water, were as vet only desolations of fear and death to the common imagination." —The Great Chracre.— Then came the atomic bombs and changed all that. " Museums, cathedrals, palaces, libraries, galleries of masterpieces, and a vast accumulation of human achievement, all perished, whose charred remains lie buried, a legacy of curious material that only future generations may hope to examine. "Under the shock of the atomic bombs, the great masses.of population which had gathered into the enormous dingy town centres of that period were dispossessed and scattered .disastrously over the surrounding; rural areas. It was as if some brutal force, .grown impatient at last at man's blindness, had, with the deliberate intention of a rearrangement of population upon more wholesome linos, shaken the world." —Where Inquiry was Born. — The coming of atomic energy, we are told, wa.s inevitable. "If atomic energy had not come in one year it would have come, in another. In decadent Rome the march of science had scarcely bogrm. . . . Nineveh, Babylon, Athens, Syracuse, Alexandria, these were the first rough experiments in association that made a security, a breathingspace, in which inquiry was born. Man had to experiment brfore. he found out the way to begin. But already 200 years ago he'had fairly begun. . ." . The politics and dignities and wars of the nineteenth I and twentieth centuries were only the last I phrcnix blaze of thp former civilisation I flaring up about the beginnings of the new. Which we serve. . . . , —Life Begins Everlastingly.— " 'Man lives in the dawn for ever,' said Karenin. 'Life is beginning _ and nothing else but beginning. It begins everlastingly. Each step seems vaster than the last, and doe:> but gather us together for the next. This modern State of oura, which would have been a Uiopiam marvel a hundred years ago, in already the commonplace of' lii'o. But"as I sit here and dream of the possibilities in the mind of man that now gather to a head beneath the shelter of its peace, these groat mountains here seem but little tilings . . .'" —Reorganising Society.— Here is Mr Wells'* account of how

society was reconstructed a f ter it lied been ldid Jow :—

"Already before the war half of the j industrial* class had been out of work, I the attempt to put them back into wages employment <m the old lines wa.s futile, I'roin the outset —the nb.--olute shattering of the currency system alone would have been sufficient to'prevent that, and it was necessary therefore to take over the housing, feeding, and clothing of this world-wide multitude without exacting any return in labour whatever. In a little' while the mere absence of occupation for so great a multitude of people everywhere became an evident social danger, and the Government was obliged to resort to f.nch device.* as simple! decorative work in wood and stone, the manufacture of hand-woven textiles, fruit-growing. flower-grcwiii'. r . and landscape gardening on a grand scale to keep the less adaptable out of mischief, and of paying wages to th" younger adults for attendance at wh.-.-nl" that would equip them to use the new r.toinic machinery. ... So finite insensibly the council drifted into a complete reorganisation of urban and industrial life, and indeed of the entire social system." — Ileal Social Stability.— " 'There emi bo no real r.ocisl stability or any general human happiness while large areas of the world and large classes of "peopio are in a phase of civilisation different from the prevailing It is impossible now to have great blocks of population misunderstanding the generally accepted social purpose or at an economic disadvantage lo the rest.' "So the council expressed its conception of the problem it bad to solve. The peasant, the field-worker, and all barbaric cultivators were at an 'economic disadvatt-

tngc, to tlio more innhilft and educated classes, and tlio of the situation cons|i!'llcd the council to take, up sy-tcmati-cnllv the suptTscsriim of this stratum _ bv ;i, more eliicient or#mis:iti<m of production. It developed ;i scheme for the progressive c;:t;ibli.shmei.t tlmiudiout the world of the 'modem sycfcni' in agriculture!, a system Unit .'hould f.n'v-0 the full advantages of a civilised life to every agricultural worker, and this replacement h'un been pjoing on rii;l>t, ii)> to the jrrtsent day. The central idea of the modem system is the substitution of cultivating guilds for the individual cultivator and for cottage and village life allo|:rthor." —Abolishing the Ruriic— "Already thi.s system has abolished a distinctively 'rustic' population throughout vast are:\s of tl:e old world where it lias prevailed immemoriaily. That shy, unstimulated life of the lonely hovel, the narrow .scandals and pettv spites and persecutions of the small village, that hr.arr'ing, haif inanimate existence awny from hocks, thought, or social participation and in constant contact, with cattle, I'i'iS. vvx\ ):oultrv. and their excronifTit is away out oi human experience. In a lilt!" while it vill be gone altogether. In the nineteenth century it had already ceased to lie a.neceivary human .state, and only the absence , of onv collective intelligence ! ani.! an imagined for tou«h and unintelligent foWiers and for a prolific class at a low level, prevented its systematic replacement at that time. . . ." We are given hints «f n day when we fihnil save, the time given to digestion and half living, when nights wasted in sleep shall be revealed as useless, when we shall "take a tabloid or lie in wme field of force that will enable us to do with an

hour or so of slumber and rise refreshed a.qaiu." "The race, the racial wisdom, science, gather power continually to eubciue the individual man to its own end." Such are glimpses of the world when it was ".set free." As someone says in the story, "it is us if a great window opened." One critic f-nxs that this book is an "intellectual entertainment; but Mr Wells's contact with reality is slight, and hia criticism of current id-eas noes wide of the mark, because he cither denies or fails to understand the real difficulties in the art of government."