THE WORLD SET FREE
H.G. WELLS
We Are All Things That Make And Pass,
Striving Upon A Hidden Mission,
Out To The Open Sea.
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.
EASTON GLEBE, DUNMOW, 1921.
