In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) | Page 2

ended for ever. In 1913 talk of a
World League of Nations would have seemed, to the extremest pitch,
"Utopian." To-day the project has an air not only of being so
practicable, but of being so urgent and necessary and so manifestly the
sane thing before mankind that not to be busied upon it, not to be
making it more widely known and better understood, not to be working

out its problems and bringing it about, is to be living outside of the
contemporary life of the world. For a book upon any other subject at
the present time some apology may be necessary, but a book upon this
subject is as natural a thing to produce now as a pair of skates in winter
when the ice begins to bear.
All we writers find ourselves engaged perforce in some part or other of
a world-wide propaganda of this the most creative and hopeful of
political ideas that has ever dawned upon the consciousness of mankind.
With no concerted plan we feel called upon to serve it. And in no
connection would one so like to think oneself un-original as in this
connection. It would be a dismaying thing to realize that one were
writing anything here which was not the possible thought of great
multitudes of other people, and capable of becoming the common
thought of mankind. One writes in such a book as this not to express
oneself but to swell a chorus. The idea of the League of Nations is so
great a one that it may well override the pretensions and command the
allegiance of kings; much more does it claim the self-subjugation of the
journalistic writer. Our innumerable books upon this great edifice of a
World Peace do not constitute a scramble for attention, but an attempt
to express in every variety of phrase and aspect this one system of ideas
which now possesses us all. In the same way the elementary facts and
ideas of the science of chemistry might conceivably be put completely
and fully into one text-book, but, as a matter of fact, it is far more
convenient to tell that same story over in a thousand different forms, in
a text-book for boys here, for a different sort or class of boy there, for
adult students, for reference, for people expert in mathematics, for
people unused to the scientific method, and so on. For the last year the
writer has been doing what he can--and a number of other writers have
been doing what they can--to bring about a united declaration of all the
Atlantic Allies in favour of a League of Nations, and to define the
necessary nature of that League. He has, in the course of this work,
written a series of articles upon the League and upon the necessary
sacrifices of preconceptions that the idea involves in the London press.
He has also been trying to clear his own mind upon the real meaning of
that ambiguous word "democracy," for which the League is to make the
world "safe." The bulk of this book is made up of these discussions. For
a very considerable number of readers, it may be well to admit here, it

can have no possible interest; they will have come at these questions
themselves from different angles and they will have long since got to
their own conclusions. But there may be others whose angle of
approach may be similar to the writer's, who may have asked some or
most of the questions he has had to ask, and who may be actively
interested in the answers and the working out of the answers he has
made to these questions. For them this book is printed.
H. G. WELLS.
_May_, 1918.
It is a dangerous thing to recommend specific books out of so large and
various a literature as the "League of Nations" idea has already
produced, but the reader who wishes to reach beyond the range of this
book, or who does not like its tone and method, will probably find
something to meet his needs and tastes better in Marburg's "League of
Nations," a straightforward account of the American side of the
movement by the former United States Minister in Belgium, on the one
hand, or in the concluding parts of Mr. Fayle's "Great Settlement"
(1915), a frankly sceptical treatment from the British Imperialist point
of view, on the other. An illuminating discussion, advocating peace
treaties rather than a league, is Sir Walter Phillimore's "Three Centuries
of Treaties." Two excellent books from America, that chance to be on
my table, are Mr. Goldsmith's "League to Enforce Peace" and "A
World in Ferment" by President Nicholas Murray Butler. Mater's
"Société des Nations" (Didier) is an able presentation of a French point
of view. Brailsford's "A