The Imperialism of H. G. Wells.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLV, Issue 17, 26 April 1911, Page 53

The Imperialism of H. G. Wells.

AN EMPIRE OF LIVING THOUGHT. THE TRUE CEMENT. LONDON, March 10. The literary genius of Mr H. G. Wells, and his gift of sketching big c nstructive ideals, lend added interest to an article of his called “Cement of Empire’’ in the first issue of London’s latest periodical, “Everybody’s Weekly.” What is the real cement of Empire? Mr Wells cannot bring himself to believe that it is a system of preferential trade, or yet a system of Imperial defence.’ ‘I am no impassioned Free Trader,” he says. “The sacred principle of free trade has always impressed me as a piece of party elaptrap; but I have never been able to understand how an attempt to draw together dominions so scattered and various as ours by a network of fiscal manipulation could end in anything but mutual inconvenience, mutual irritation, and disruption.” Canada’s main routes and trades and relations lie naturally north and south. To narrow its trade to one artificial duet to England, says H. G. Wells, “will 'be like nourishing the growing body of a man witli the heart and arteries of a mouse. Then here, again,” he continues, “are New Zealand and Australia, facing South America and the teeming countries of Eastern Asia. Surely it is in relation to these vast proximities that their economical future lies. Is it possible to believe that shipping mutton to London is anything but the mere beginning of their commercial development?” NO COMMON ENEMY. So, too, with defence. The far-flung British Empire, argues Mr Wells, has no natural common enemy to weld it together ‘from without. The English are intensely jealous of Germany; but Canada has no natural quarrel with Germany, nor with India, nor South Africa, nor Australia. All these States have other special pre-oecupations. "New Zealand, for example," says Mr Wells, “having spent half a century and more in sheep farming, land legislation, suppressing its drink traffic, lowering its birth rate, and, in short, the achievement of an ideal preventative materialism, is chiefly consumed by hate and fear of Japan, which in the same interval has made a stride from the 13th to the 20th century, arid which teems with art and’ life and enterprise and offspring. Now Japan in Welt Politik is our ally. You see, the British Empire has no common

economic interests and no natural common enemy." UNITY OF PURPOSE. But—and here we reach the central idea of Mr Wells’s Imperialism—the Empire has a common medium of expression, a unity of liberal and tolerant purpose amidst its enormous variety of localised life and colour. He says: “It is in the development and strengthening, the enrichment, the rendering more conscious and more purposeful, of that broad creative spirit of . the British that the true cement and continuance of our Empire is to be found. The Empire must live by the forces that begat it.” What is wanted, according to our author, is the cement of thought and spirit. The Empire must become the universal educator, newsagent, book-distri-butor, civiliser-general, and vehicle of imaginative inspiration for its peoples. “The effort and arrangement, needed to make books, facilities for research, and all forms of art accessible throughout the Empire, would be altogether trivial in proportion to the consolidation it would effect. But Mr Wells waxes very contemptuous about his fellow countrymen. They do not understand these things, he says. Their Empire was made for them by their exceptional and outcast men; it has “happened to them as fresh lettuces come to tame rabbits.” They do not understand how they got it, and he fears they will not understand how to keep it. “They are provincials mocked by a world-wide opportunity, the stupid legatees of a great generation of exiles.” OUR IMPERIAL OPPORTUNITY. “Mostly,” he concludes, “they call themselves Imperialists, which is just their harmless way of expressing their satisfaction with things as they are. In practice their Imperialism resolves itself into a vigorous resistance to taxation and an ill-concealed hostility to education. It matters nothing to them that the whole next generation of Canadians has drawn its ideas mainly from American publications, that India and Egypt, in despite of sounder mental nourishment, have developed their own vernacular Press, that Australia and New ‘Zealand even now gravitate to America for books and thought. It matters nothing to them that the poverty and insularity of our intellectual life has turned American art to France and Italy, and the American universities towards Germany. The slow starvation'and decline of our philosophy and, science, tire decadence of British invention: and enterprise, troubles them not at all,, because they fail to connect it with the- tangible facts of empire. ‘The world cannot wait for the English.’ . . And' .the sands of our Imperial opportunity twirl through the neck of the hour glass ”