On the Next Hundred Years . . .

perfect ease and equality and equity; and gazing with cold compassion and unsympathetic sympathy upon us who are struggling in a tangle of cross-purposes, which is often quite as much a complexity of virtues as a complexity of vices. Anyhow, I think this trick of starting from an imaginary and ideal state in the future is a little unfair. Mr. Wells would think it unfair, if I wrote a book in the capacity of an Angel, or from the standpoint of a saint beatified in heaven; and then pointed out how paltry all our little scientific experiments, our pottering about with political and social reforms, our arguing about philosophical and literary problems, appeared to a higher intelligence upon the plane of Paradise. It seems to me quite as unfair when it is only an Earthly Paradise. For instance, Mr. Wells very rightly condemns the dirty intrigues of modern finance, and the secret omnipotence of modern financiers. I do not complain of his saying, as I should say myself, that a more healthy and vigilant society would make such conspiracies much more difficult. But his Happy Man of the Future simply says that they would be impossible, because an office called the Bureau of Transactions would have made them impossible,

Now this affects me very much as if he were to say that in the perfect State he and I could not even differ, because everything would have been resolved by the Bureau of Agreements. It is quite an arguable logical fancy, such as might have figured among the thousand happy fancies of his early work, that knowledge might be so finally mastered and spread out that it would be impossible for Mr. Wells and myself to argue about anything, any more than we argue now about the trains in Bradshaw, or the plan of the maze at Hampton Court. Everybody would know everything, and there would be no such thing as a matter of opinion. It would be quite as certain, say, that supernatural religion had been a good or a bad thing for men, as that a certain amount of poison will kill a man or that a certain particular antidote will save him. There will be an enormous Encyclopaedia of Everything, in which every question once disputed will be definitely settled; and it will contain no mistakes, except possibly misprints, like the big Telephone Directory. I can imagine Mr. H. G. Wells, especially in his youth, writing quite a fascinating fairy-tale of science along exactly those lines. But I should not believe in his fairy-tale about the Bureau of Agreements; nor do I believe in his fairy-tale about the Bureau of Transactions. I heartily believe that the secret and sordid transactions now allowed in finance and commerce could be brought much more under public and responsible inspection than they are. So, for that matter, I am quite willing to believe that there might be a much larger agreement about the facts of history and science, which would save us from a number of benighted quarrels founded on popular science and cheap patriotic history. It would be quite as much advantage to my side of the quarrel as to his. It would be a great relief for us to know that there really was a universally accepted book of reference, which would for ever forbid men to believe that Galileo was tortured and burned, or that the Immaculate Conception is the same as the Incarnation. It would save us a lot of trouble in explaining things. But I do not believe that the Encyclopaedia of Everything would really and completely settle every dispute; and I do not believe that the Bureau of Transactions would finally and for ever prevent the possibility of scandalous transactions. And I do not believe it, because I do believe my eyes; because I do believe such actual experience as I have had in fifty years of meeting my fellow-creatures, and gradually forming an opinion about all these jolly fellows, and what is the matter with them.

In short, the simple answer to the Superior Person, who looks down scornfully on our scandals and our sins from the Utopia of a few centuries hence, can be stated in the plainest possible words: "What happens when the Bureau of Transactions also becomes corrupt?" What happens when the Bureau of Transactions begins to have its own secret transactions? It may be against the whole plan and purpose and ideal of the institution to admit any such slackness or secrecy. So it is against the very name and title of a Court of Justice to be unjust. So it is against the very name and title of the distribution of Honours to fail upon the point of honour. So it is a violation of democracy for demagogues to deceive the people; or a violation of the very nature of a newspaper that its proprietor should suppress the news. But, somehow, we have all heard of these things being done. What we want to know is how the Angels who work in the Bureau of Transactions in the Utopia to be established centuries hence are guaranteed to be good at every minute of their mortal and troubled lives, and never to fall one inch for one instant below the highest and hardest and most heroic standard of human watchfulness and self-control. As I have already explained, I am in no sense arguing that the Bureau of Transactions will not be a reform, or a much-needed reform, or a reform that may really deal with scandals like that of Kreuger. I am not saying it will not be a reform; I am only objecting to the placid implication that it will never need to be reformed.

In other words, the implication, or ideal, that was once expressed in the title of Men Like Gods does really lie behind even the most reasonable demands for the improvement of men as men. Mr. Wells's imaginary author, writing at an unknown date in an undiscovered country, does really talk as if the very idea of such base revolts or betrayals of the social order was to him unthinkable. What I deny is that there will ever be a social order in which they are unthinkable. There might be a very vigorous social order, in which for some time they were very nearly impracticable. But in the long run, I fancy, the healthiest social order would come back to being pretty thankful if it could say they were rare. And I do not believe that this result could be achieved, or even approached, by anything like a mere improvement in social machinery, or the establishment of Bureaus for Everything. I think it happens only when there is a strong sense of duty and dignity implanted in people, not by any government or even any school, but by something which they recognize as making a secret call upon a solitary soul. I do not believe in Men Like Gods; but I do believe in Men With Gods; or, preferably (such is my fastidious taste in such matters), a God. That is another and much bigger question, though it involves no more credulity than a complete belief in Utopia, My only point, here, is that it is at least as arbitrary for the great novelist to write his letters from Utopia, as it would be for me to date my criticism from Paradise.