The World Set Free | Page 2

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.

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 1
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