by H. G. Wells
The World Set Free
H. G. Wells
H.G. Wells
The World Set Free
by
WE ARE
ALL THINGS THAT
MAKE AND PASS,
STRIVING UPON A
HIDDEN MISSION,
OUT TO THE
OPEN
SEA.
THE WORLD SET FREE
H.G. WELLS
TO
FREDERICK SODDY'S
'INTERPRETATION OF RADIUM'
THIS STORY, WHICH OWES LONG PASSAGES
TO THE ELEVENTH CHAPTER OF
THAT BOOK, ACKNOWLEDGES
AND INSCRIBES
ITSELF
PREFACE
THE WORLD SET FREE was written in 1913 and published early in
1914, and it is the latest of a series of three fantasias of
possibility, stories which all turn on the possible developments
in the future of some contemporary force or group of forces. The
World Set Free was written under the immediate shadow of the
Great War. Every intelligent person in the world felt that
disaster was impending and knew no way of averting it, but few of
us realised in the earlier half of 1914 how near the crash was to
us. The reader will be amused to find that here it is put off
until the year 1956. He may naturally want to know the reason
for what will seem now a quite extraordinary delay. As a
prophet, the author must confess he has always been inclined to
be rather a slow prophet. The war aeroplane in the world of
reality, for example, beat the forecast in Anticipations by about
twenty years or so. I suppose a desire not to shock the sceptical
reader's sense of use and wont and perhaps a less creditable
disposition to hedge, have something to do with this dating
forward of one's main events, but in the particular case of The
World Set Free there was, I think, another motive in holding the
Great War back, and that was to allow the chemist to get well
forward with his discovery of the release of atomic energy.
1956-or for that matter 2056-may be none too late for that
crowning revolution in human potentialities. And apart from this
procrastination of over forty years, the guess at the opening
phase of the war was fairly lucky; the forecast of an alliance of
the Central Empires, the opening campaign through the
Netherlands, and the despatch of the British Expeditionary Force
were all justified before the book had been published six months.
And the opening section of Chapter the Second remains now, after
the reality has happened, a fairly adequate diagnosis of the
essentials of the matter. One happy hit (in Chapter the Second,
Section 2), on which the writer may congratulate himself, is the
forecast that under modern conditions it would be quite
impossible for any great general to emerge to supremacy and
concentrate the enthusiasm of the armies of either side. There
could be no Alexanders or Napoleons. And we soon heard the
scientific corps muttering, 'These old fools,' exactly as it is
here foretold.
These, however, are small details, and the misses in the story
far outnumber the hits. It is the main thesis which is still of
interest now; the thesis that because of the development of
scientific knowledge, separate sovereign states and separate
sovereign empires are no longer possible in the world, that to
attempt to keep on with the old system is to heap disaster upon
disaster for mankind and perhaps to destroy our race altogether.
The remaining interest of this book now is the sustained validity
of this thesis and the discussion of the possible ending of war
on the earth. I have supposed a sort of epidemic of sanity to
break out among the rulers of states and the leaders of mankind.
I have represented the native common sense of the French mind and
of the English mind-for manifestly King Egbert is meant to be
'God's Englishman'-leading mankind towards a bold and resolute
effort of salvage and reconstruction. Instead of which, as the
school book footnotes say, compare to-day's newspaper. Instead
of a frank and honourable gathering of leading men, Englishman
meeting German and Frenchman Russian, brothers in their offences
and in their disaster, upon the hills of Brissago, beheld in
Geneva at the other end of Switzerland a poor little League of
(Allied) Nations (excluding the United States, Russia, and most
of the 'subject peoples' of the world), meeting obscurely amidst
a world-wide disregard to make impotent gestures at the leading
problems of the debacle. Either the disaster has not been vast
enough yet or it has not been swift enough to inflict the
necessary moral shock and achieve the necessary moral revulsion.
Just as the world of 1913 was used to an increasing prosperity
and thought that increase would go on for ever, so now it would
seem the world is growing accustomed to a steady glide towards
social disintegration, and thinks that that too can go on
continually and never come to a final bump. So soon do use and
wont establish themselves, and the most flaming and thunderous of
lessons pale into disregard.
The question whether a Leblanc is still possible, the question
whether it is still possible to bring about an outbreak of
creative sanity in mankind, to avert this steady glide to
destruction, is now one of the most urgent in the world. It is
clear that the writer is temperamentally disposed to hope that
there is such a possibility. But he has to confess that he sees
few signs of any such breadth of understanding and steadfastness
of will as an effectual effort to turn the rush of human affairs
demands. The inertia of dead ideas and old institutions carries
us on towards the rapids. Only in one direction is there any
plain recognition of the idea of a human commonweal as something
overriding any national and patriotic consideration, and that is
in the working class movement throughout the world. And labour
internationalism is closely bound up with conceptions of a
profound social revolution. If world peace is to be attained
through labour internationalism, it will have to be attained at
the price of the completest social and economic reconstruction
and by passing through a phase of revolution that will certainly
be violent, that may be very bloody, which may be prolonged
through a long period, and may in the end fail to achieve
anything but social destruction. Nevertheless, the fact remains
that it is in the labour class, and the labour class alone, that
any conception of a world rule and a world peace has so far
appeared. The dream of The World Set Free, a dream of highly
educated and highly favoured leading and ruling men, voluntarily
setting themselves to the task of reshaping the world, has thus
far remained a dream.
H. G. WELLS.
DUNMOW, 1921.
CONTENTS
PRELUDE
THE SUN SNARERS
CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY
CHAPTER THE SECOND
THE LAST WAR
CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE ENDING OF WAR
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
THE NEW PHASE
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
THE LAST DAYS OF MARCUS KARENIN
PRELUDE
THE SUN SNARERS
Section I
THE history of mankind is the history of the attainment of
external power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal. From
the outset of his terrestrial career we find him supplementing
the natural strength and bodily weapons of a beast by the heat of
burning and the rough implement of stone. So he passed beyond
the ape. From that he expands. Presently he added to himself the
power of the horse and the ox, he borrowed the carrying strength
of water and the driving force of the wind, he quickened his fire
by blowing, and his simple tools, pointed first with copper and
then with iron, increased and varied and became more elaborate
and efficient. He sheltered his heat in houses and made his way
easier by paths and roads. He complicated his social
relationships and increased his efficiency by the division of
labour. He began to store up knowledge. Contrivance followed
contrivance, each making it possible for a man to do more.
Always down the lengthening record, save for a set-back ever and
again, he is doing more… A quarter of a million years ago the
utmost man was a savage, a being scarcely articulate, sheltering
in holes in the rocks, armed with a rough-hewn flint or a
fire-pointed stick, naked, living in small family groups, killed
by some younger man so soon as his first virile activity
declined. Over most of the great wildernesses of earth you would
have sought him in vain; only in a few temperate and sub-tropical
river valleys would you have found the squatting lairs of his
little herds, a male, a few females, a child or so.
He knew no future then, no kind of life except the life he led.
He fled the cave-bear over the rocks full of iron ore and the
promise of sword and spear; he froze to death upon a ledge of
coal; he drank water muddy with the clay that would one day make
cups of porcelain; he chewed the ear of wild wheat he had plucked
and gazed with a dim speculation in his eyes at the birds that
soared beyond his reach. Or suddenly he became aware of the scent
of another male and rose up roaring, his roars the formless
precursors of moral admonitions. For he was a great
individualist, that original, he suffered none other than
himself.
So through the long generations, this heavy precursor, this
ancestor of all of us, fought and bred and perished, changing
almost imperceptibly.
Yet he changed. That keen chisel of necessity which sharpened
the tiger's claw age by age and fined down the clumsy Orchippus
to the swift grace of the horse, was at work upon him-is at work
upon him still. The clumsier and more stupidly fierce among him
were killed soonest and oftenest; the finer hand, the quicker
eye, the bigger brain, the better balanced body prevailed; age by
age, the implements were a little better made, the man a little
more delicately adjusted to his possibilities. He became more
social; his herd grew larger; no longer did each man kill or
drive out his growing sons; a system of taboos made them
tolerable to him, and they revered him alive and soon even after
he was dead, and were his allies against the beasts and the rest
of mankind. (But they were forbidden to touch the women of the
tribe, they had to go out and capture women for themselves, and
each son fled from his stepmother and hid from her lest the anger
of the Old Man should be roused. All the world over, even to this
day, these ancient inevitable taboos can be traced.) And now
instead of caves came huts and hovels, and the fire was better
tended and there were wrappings and garments; and so aided, the
creature spread into colder climates, carrying food with him,
storing food-until sometimes the neglected grass-seed sprouted
again and gave a first hint of agriculture.
And already there were the beginnings of leisure and thought.
Man began to think. There were times when he was fed, when his
lusts and his fears were all appeased, when the sun shone upon
the squatting-place and dim stirrings of speculation lit his
eyes. He scratched upon a bone and found resemblance and pursued
it and began pictorial art, moulded the soft, warm clay of the
river brink between his fingers, and found a pleasure in its
patternings and repetitions, shaped it into the form of vessels,
and found that it would hold water. He watched the streaming
river, and wondered from what bountiful breast this incessant
water came; he blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he
might snare it and spear it as it went down to its resting-place
amidst the distant hills. Then he was roused to convey to his
brother that once indeed he had done so-at least that some one
had done so-he mixed that perhaps with another dream almost as
daring, that one day a mammoth had been beset; and therewith
began fiction-pointing a way to achievement-and the august
prophetic procession of tales.
For scores and hundreds of centuries, for myriads of generations
that life of our fathers went on. From the beginning to the
ripening of that phase of human life, from the first clumsy
eolith of rudely chipped flint to the first implements of
polished stone, was two or three thousand centuries, ten or
fifteen thousand generations. So slowly, by human standards, did
humanity gather itself together out of the dim intimations of the
beast. And that first glimmering of speculation, that first
story of achievement, that story-teller bright-eyed and flushed
under his matted hair, gesticulating to his gaping, incredulous
listener, gripping his wrist to keep him attentive, was the most
marvellous beginning this world has ever seen. It doomed the
mammoths, and it began the setting of that snare that shall catch
the sun.
Section 2
That dream was but a moment in a man's life, whose proper
business it seemed was to get food and kill his fellows and beget
after the manner of all that belongs to the fellowship of the
beasts. About him, hidden from him by the thinnest of veils, were
the untouched sources of Power, whose magnitude we scarcely do
more than suspect even to-day, Power that could make his every
conceivable dream come real. But the feet of the race were in
the way of it, though he died blindly unknowing.
At last, in the generous levels of warm river valleys, where food
is abundant and life very easy, the emerging human overcoming his
earlier jealousies, becoming, as necessity persecuted him less
urgently, more social and tolerant and amenable, achieve
d a
larger community. There began a division of labour, certain of
the older men specialised in knowledge and direction, a strong
man took the fatherly leadership in war, and priest and king
began to develop their roles in the opening drama of man's
history. The priest's solicitude was seed-time and harvest and
fertility, and the king ruled peace and war. In a hundred river
valleys about the warm, temperate zone of the earth there were
already towns and temples, a score of thousand years ago. They
flourished unrecorded, ignoring the past and unsuspicious of the
future, for as yet writing had still to begin.
Very slowly did man increase his demand upon the illimitable
wealth of Power that offered itself on every hand to him. He
tamed certain animals, he developed his primordially haphazard
agriculture into a ritual, he added first one metal to his
resources and then another, until he had copper and tin and iron
and lead and gold and silver to supplement his stone, he hewed
and carved wood, made pottery, paddled down his river until he
came to the sea, discovered the wheel and made the first roads.
But his chief activity for a hundred centuries and more, was the
subjugation of himself and others to larger and larger societies.
The history of man is not simply the conquest of external power;
it is first the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses,
that self-concentration and intensity of animalism, that tie his
hands from taking his inheritance. The ape in us still resents
association. From the dawn of the age of polished stone to the
achievement of the Peace of the World, man's dealings were
chiefly with himself and his fellow man, trading, bargaining,