by H. G. Wells
necessarily anti-constructive, just as I had been inclined to follow
the Baileys in the self-righteousness of supposing myself to be
wholly constructive. But I saw now that every man of intellectual
freedom and vigour is necessarily constructive-minded nowadays, and
that no man is disinterestedly so. Each one of us repeats in
himself the conflict of the race between the splendour of its
possibilities and its immediate associations. We may be shaping
immortal things, but we must sleep and answer the dinner gong, and
have our salt of flattery and self-approval. In politics a man
counts not for what he is in moments of imaginative expansion, but
for his common workaday, selfishself; and political parties are
held together not by a community of ultimate aims, but by the
stabler bond of an accustomed life. Everybody almost is for
progress in general, and nearly everybody is opposed to any change,
except in so far as gross increments are change, in his particular
method of living and behaviour. Every party stands essentially for
the interests and mental usages of some definite class or group of
classes in the exciting community, and every party has its
scientific-minded and constructive leading section, with well-
defined hinterlands formulating its social functions in a public-
spirited form, and its superficial-minded following confessing its
meannesses and vanities and prejudices. No class will abolish
itself, materially alter its way of life, or drastically reconstruct
itself, albeit no class is indisposed to co-operate in the unlimited
socialisation of any other class. In that capacity for aggression
upon other classes lies the essential driving force of modern
affairs. The instincts, the persons, the parties, and vanities sway
and struggle. The ideas and understandings march on and achieve
themselves for all-in spite of every one…
The methods and traditions of British politics maintain the form of
two great parties, with rider groups seeking to gain specific ends
in the event of a small Government majority. These two main parties
are more or less heterogeneous in composition. Each, however, has
certain necessary characteristics. The Conservative Party has
always stood quite definitely for the established propertied
interests. The land-owner, the big lawyer, the Established Church,
and latterly the huge private monopoly of the liquor trade which has
been created by temperance legislation, are the essential
Conservatives. Interwoven now with the native wealthy are the
families of the great international usurers, and a vast
miscellaneous mass of financial enterprise. Outside the range of
resistance implied by these interests, the Conservative Party has
always shown itself just as constructive and collectivist as any
other party. The great landowners have been as well-disposed
towards the endowment of higher education, and as willing to co-
operate with the Church in protective and mildly educational
legislation for children and the working class, as any political
section. The financiers, too, are adventurous-spirited and eager
for mechanical progress and technical efficiency. They are prepared
to spend public money upon research, upon ports and harbours and
public communications, upon sanitation and hygienic organisation. A
certain rude benevolence of public intention is equally
characteristic of the liquor trade. Provided his comfort leads to
no excesses of temperance, the liquor trade is quite eager to see
the common man prosperous, happy, and with money to spend in a bar.
All sections of the party are aggressively patriotic and favourably
inclined to the idea of an upstanding, well-fed, and well-exercised
population in uniform. Of course there are reactionary landowners
and old-fashioned country clergy, full of localised self-importance,
jealous even of the cottager who can read, but they have neither the
power nor the ability to retard the constructive forces in the party
as a whole. On the other hand, when matters point to any definitely
confiscatory proposal, to the public ownership and collective
control of land, for example, or state mining and manufactures, or
the nationalisation of the so-called public-house or extended
municipal enterprise, or even to an increase of the taxation of
property, then the Conservative Party presents a nearly adamantine
bar. It does not stand for, it IS, the existing arrangement in
these affairs.
Even more definitely a class party is the Labour Party, whose
immediate interest is to raise wages, shorten hours of labor,
increase employment, and make better terms for the working-man
tenant and working-man purchaser. Its leaders are no doubt
constructive minded, but the mass of the following is naturally
suspicious of education and discipline, hostile to the higher
education, and-except for an obvious antagonism to employers and
property owners-almost destitute of ideas. What else can it be?
It stands for the expropriated multitude, whose whole situation and
difficulty arise from its individual lack of initiative and
organising power. It favours the nationalisation of land and
capital with no sense of the difficulties involved in the process;
but, on the other hand, the equally reasonable socialisation of
individuals which is implied by military service is steadily and
quite naturally and quite illogically opposed by it. It is only in
recent years that Labour has emerged as a separate party from the
huge hospitable caravanserai of Liberalism, and there is still a
very marked tendency to step back again into that multitudinous
assemblage.
For multitudinousness has always been the Liberal characteristic.
Liberalism never has been nor ever can be anything but a diversified
crowd. Liberalism has to voice everything that is left out by these
other parties. It is the party against the predominating interests.
It is at once the party of the failing and of the untried; it is the
party of decadence and hope. From its nature it must be a vague and
planless association in comparison with its antagonist, neither so
constructive on the one hand, nor on the other so competent to
hinder the inevitable constructions of the civilised state.
Essentially it is the party of criticism, the "Anti" party. It is a
system of hostilities and objections that somehow achieves at times
an elusive common soul. It is a gathering together of all the
smaller interests which find themselves at a disadvantage against
the big established classes, the leasehold tenant as against the
landowner, the retail tradesman as against the merchant and the
moneylender, the Nonconformist as against the Churchman, the small
employer as against the demoralising hospitable publican, the man
without introductions and broad connections against the man who has
these things. It is the party of the many small men against the
fewer prevailing men. It has no more essential reason for loving
the Collectivist state than the
Conservatives; the small dealer is
doomed to absorption in that just as much as the large owner; but it
resorts to the state against its antagonists as in the middle ages
common men pitted themselves against the barons by siding with the
king. The Liberal Party is the party against "class privilege"
because it represents no class advantages, but it is also the party
that is on the whole most set against Collective control because it
represents no established responsilibity. It is constructive only
so far as its antagonism to the great owner is more powerful than
its jealousy of the state. It organises only because organisation
is forced upon it by the organisation of its adversaries. It lapses
in and out of alliance with Labour as it sways between hostility to
wealth and hostility to public expenditure…
Every modern European state will have in some form or other these
three parties: the resistent, militant, authoritative, dull, and
unsympathetic party of establishment and success, the rich party;
the confused, sentimental, spasmodic, numerous party of the small,
struggling, various, undisciplined men, the poor man's party; and a
third party sometimes detaching itself from the second and sometimes
reuniting with it, the party of the altogether expropriated masses,
the proletarians, Labour. Change Conservative and Liberal to
Republican and Democrat, for example, and you have the conditions in
the United States. The Crown or a dethroned dynasty, the
Established Church or a dispossessed church, nationalist secessions,
the personalities of party leaders, may break up, complicate, and
confuse the self-expression of these three necessary divisions in
the modern social drama, the analyst will make them out none the
less for that…
And then I came back as if I came back to a refrain;-the ideas go
on-as though we are all no more than little cells and corpuscles in
some great brain beyond our understanding…
So it was I sat and thought my problem out… I still remember
my satisfaction at seeing things plainly at last. It was like
clouds dispersing to show the sky. Constructive ideas, of course,
couldn't hold a party together alone, "interests and habits, not
ideas," I had that now, and so the great constructive scheme of
Socialism, invading and inspiring all parties, was necessarily
claimed only by this collection of odds and ends, this residuum of
disconnected and exceptional people. This was true not only of the
Socialist idea, but of the scientific idea, the idea of veracity-of
human confidence in humanity-of all that mattered in human life
outside the life of individuals… The only real party that
would ever profess Socialism was the Labour Party, and that in the
entirely one-sided form of an irresponsible and non-constructive
attack on property. Socialism in that mutilated form, the teeth and
claws without the eyes and brain, I wanted as little as I wanted
anything in the world.
Perfectly clear it was, perfectly clear, and why hadn't I seen it
before?… I looked at my watch, and it was half-past two.
I yawned, stretched, got up and went to bed.
9
My ideas about statecraft have passed through three main phases to
the final convictions that remain. There was the first immediacy of
my dream of ports and harbours and cities, railways, roads, and
administered territories-the vision I had seen in the haze from
that little church above Locarno. Slowly that had passed into a
more elaborate legislative constructiveness, which had led to my
uneasy association with the Baileys and the professedly constructive
Young Liberals. To get that ordered life I had realised the need of
organisation, knowledge, expertness, a wide movement of co-ordinated
methods. On the individual side I thought that a life of urgent
industry, temperance, and close attention was indicated by my
perception of these ends. I married Margaret and set to work. But
something in my mind refused from the outset to accept these
determinations as final. There was always a doubt lurking below,
always a faint resentment, a protesting criticism, a feeling of
vitally important omissions.
I arrived at last at the clear realisation that my political
associates, and I in my association with them, were oddly narrow,
priggish, and unreal, that the Socialists with whom we were
attempting co-operation were preposterously irrelevant to their own
theories, that my political life didn't in some way comprehend more
than itself, that rather perplexingly I was missing the thing I was
seeking. Britten's footnotes to Altiora's self-assertions, her fits
of energetic planning, her quarrels and rallies and vanities, his
illuminating attacks on Cramptonism and the heavy-spirited
triviality of such Liberalism as the Children's Charter, served to
point my way to my present conclusions. I had been trying to deal
all along with human progress as something immediate in life,
something to be immediately attacked by political parties and groups
pointing primarily to that end. I now began to see that just as in
my own being there was the rather shallow, rather vulgar, self-
seeking careerist, who wore an admirable silk hat and bustled self-
consciously through the lobby, and a much greater and indefinitely
growing unpublished personality behind him-my hinterland, I have
called it-so in human affairs generally the permanent reality is
also a hinterland, which is never really immediate, which draws
continually upon human experience and influences human action more
and more, but which is itself never the actual player upon the
stage. It is the unseen dramatist who never takes a call. Now it
was just through the fact that our group about the Baileys didn't
understand this, that with a sort of frantic energy they were trying
to develop that sham expert officialdom of theirs to plan, regulate,
and direct the affairs of humanity, that the perplexing note of
silliness and shallowness that I had always felt and felt now most
acutely under Britten's gibes, came in. They were neglecting human
life altogether in social organisation.
In the development of intellectual modesty lies the growth of
statesmanship. It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and
all organising spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange
and achieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers,
leaders of men, have always slipped into the error of assuming that
they can think out the whole-or at any rate completely think out
definite parts-of the purpose and future of man, clearly and
finally; they have set themselves to legislate and construct on that
assumption, and, experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions
of reality, they have taken to dogma, persecution, training,
pruning, secretive education; and all the stupidities of self-
sufficient energy. In the passion of their good intentions they
have not hesitated to conceal fact, suppress thought, crush
disturbing initi
atives and apparently detrimental desires. And so
it is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with the making, that
any extension of social organisation is at present achieved.
Directly, however, this idea of an emancipation from immediacy is
grasped, directly the dominating importance of this critical, less
personal, mental hinterland in the individual and of the collective
mind in the race is understood, the whole problem of the statesman
and his attitude towards politics gain a new significance, and
becomes accessible to a new series of solutions. He wants no longer
to "fix up," as people say, human affairs, but to devote his forces
to the development of that needed intellectual life without which
all his shallow attempts at fixing up are futile. He ceases to
build on the sands, and sets himself to gather foundations.
You see, I began in my teens by wanting to plan and build cities and
harbours for mankind; I ended in the middle thirties by desiring
only to serve and increase a general process of thought, a process
fearless, critical, real-spirited, that would in its own time give
cities, harbours, air, happiness, everything at a scale and quality
and in a light altogether beyond the match-striking imaginations of
a contemporary mind. I wanted freedom of speech and suggestion,
vigour of thought, and the cultivation of that impulse of veracity
that lurks more or less discouraged in every man. With that I felt
there must go an emotion. I hit upon a phrase that became at last
something of a refrain in my speech and writings, to convey the
spirit that I felt was at the very heart of real human progress-
love and fine thinking.
(I suppose that nowadays no newspaper in England gets through a week
without the repetition of that phrase.)
My convictions crystallised more and more definitely upon this. The
more of love and fine thinking the better for men, I said; the less,
the worse. And upon this fresh basis I set myself to examine what I
as a politician might do. I perceived I was at last finding an
adequate expression for all that was in me, for those forces that
had rebelled at the crude presentations of Bromstead, at the
secrecies and suppressions of my youth, at the dull unrealities of
City Merchants, at the conventions and timidities of the Pinky
