by H. G. Wells
predominant nose.
The international situation exercised us greatly. Our meetings were
pervaded by the feeling that all things moved towards a day of
reckoning with Germany, and I was largely instrumental in keeping up
the suggestion that India was in a state of unstable equilibrium,
that sooner or later something must happen there-something very
serious to our Empire. Dayton frankly detested these topics. He
was full of that old Middle Victorian persuasion that whatever is
inconvenient or disagreeable to the English mind could be
annihilated by not thinking about it. He used to sit low in his
chair and look mulish. "Militarism," he would declare in a tone of
the utmost moral fervour, is a curse. It's an unmitigated curse."
Then he would cough shortly and twitch his head back and frown, and
seem astonished beyond measure that after this conclusive statement
we could still go on talking of war.
All our Imperialists were obsessed by the thought of international
conflict, and their influence revived for a time those uneasinesses
that had been aroused in me for the first time by my continental
journey with Willersley and by Meredith's "One of Our Conquerors."
That quite justifiable dread of a punishment for all the slackness,
mental dishonesty, presumption, mercenary respectability and
sentimentalised commercialism of the Victorian period, at the hands
of the better organised, more vigorous, and now far more highly
civilised peoples of Central Europe, seemed to me to have both a
good and bad series of consequences. It seemed the only thing
capable of bracing English minds to education, sustained
constructive effort and research; but on the other hand it produced
the quality of a panic, hasty preparation, impatience of thought, a
wasteful and sometimes quite futile immediacy. In 1909, for
example, there was a vast clamour for eight additional Dreadnoughts-
"We want eight
And we won't wait,"
but no clamour at all about our national waste of inventive talent,
our mean standard of intellectual attainment, our disingenuous
criticism, and the consequent failure to distinguish men of the
quality needed to carry on the modern type of war. Almost
universally we have the wrong men in our places of responsibility
and the right men in no place at all, almost universally we have
poorly qualified, hesitating, and resentful subordinates, because
our criticism is worthless and, so habitually as to be now almost
unconsciously, dishonest. Germany is beating England in every
matter upon which competition is possible, because she attended
sedulously to her collective mind for sixty pregnant years, because
in spite of tremendous defects she is still far more anxious for
quality in achievement than we are. I remember saying that in my
paper. From that, I remember, I went on to an image that had
flashed into my mind. "The British Empire," I said, "is like some
of those early vertebrated monsters, the Brontosaurus and the
Atlantosaurus and such-like; it sacrifices intellect to character;
its backbone, that is to say,-especially in the visceral region-is
bigger than its cranium. It's no accident that things are so.
We've worked for backbone. We brag about backbone, and if the
joints are anchylosed so much the better. We're still but only half
awake to our error. You can't change that suddenly."
"Turn it round and make it go backwards," interjected Thorns.
"It's trying to do that," I said, "in places."
And afterwards Crupp declared I had begotten a nightmare which
haunted him of nights; he was trying desperately and belatedly to
blow a brain as one blows soap-bubbles on such a mezoroic saurian as
I had conjured up, while the clumsy monster's fate, all teeth and
brains, crept nearer and nearer…
I've grown, I think, since those days out of the urgency of that
apprehension. I still think a European war, and conceivably a very
humiliating war for England, may occur at no very distant date, but
I do not think there is any such heroic quality in our governing
class as will make that war catastrophic. The prevailing spirit in
English life-it is one of the essential secrets of our imperial
endurance-is one of underbred aggression in prosperity and
diplomatic compromise in moments of danger; we bully haughtily where
we can and assimilate where we must. It is not for nothing that our
upper and middle-class youth is educated by teachers of the highest
character, scholars and gentlemen, men who can pretend quite
honestly that Darwinism hasn't upset the historical fall of man,
that cricket is moral training, and that Socialism is an outrage
upon the teachings of Christ. A sort of dignified dexterity of
evasion is the national reward. Germany, with a larger population,
a vigorous and irreconcilable proletariat, a bolder intellectual
training, a harsher spirit, can scarcely fail to drive us at last to
a realisation of intolerable strain. So we may never fight at all.
The war of preparations that has been going on for thirty years may
end like a sham-fight at last in an umpire's decision. We shall
proudly but very firmly take the second place. For my own part,
since I love England as much as I detest her present lethargy of
soul, I pray for a chastening war-I wouldn't mind her flag in the
dirt if only her spirit would come out of it. So I was able to
shake off that earlier fear of some final and irrevocable
destruction truncating all my schemes. At the most, a European war
would be a dramatic episode in the reconstruction I had in view.
In India, too, I no longer foresee, as once I was inclined to see,
disaster. The English rule in India is surely one of the most
extraordinary accidents that has ever happened in history. We are
there like a man who has fallen off a ladder on to the neck of an
elephant, and doesn't know what to do or how to get down. Until
something happens he remains. Our functions in India are absurd.
We English do not own that country, do not even rule it. We make
nothing happen; at the most we prevent things happening. We
suppress our own literature there. Most English people cannot even
go to this land they possess; the authorities would prevent it. If
Messrs. Perowne or Cook organised a cheap tour of Manchester
operatives, it would be stopped. No one dare bring the average
English voter face to face with the reality of India, or let the
Indian native have a glimpse of the English voter. In my time I
have talked to English statesmen, Indian officials and ex-officials,
viceroys, soldiers, every one who might be supposed to know what
India signifies, and I have prayed them to tell me what they thought
we were up to there. Iam not writing without my book in these
matters. And beyond a phrase or so about "even-handed justice"-and
look at our sedition trials!-they told me nothing. Time after time
I have heard of that apocryphal native ruler in the north-west, who,
when asked what would happen if we left Ind
ia, replied that in a
week his men would be in the saddle, and in six months not a rupee
nor a virgin would he left in Lower Bengal. That is always given as
our conclusive justification. But is it our business to preserve
the rupees and virgins of Lower Bengal in a sort of magic
inconclusiveness? Better plunder than paralysis, better fire and
sword than futility. Our flag is spread over the peninsula, without
plans, without intentions-a vast preventive. The sum total of our
policy is to arrest any discussion, any conferences that would
enable the Indians to work out a tolerable scheme of the future for
themselves. But that does not arrest the resentment of men held
back from life. Consider what it must be for the educated Indian
sitting at the feast of contemporary possibilities with his mouth
gagged and his hands bound behind him! The spirit of insurrection
breaks out in spite of espionage and seizures. Our conflict for
inaction develops stupendous absurdities. The other day the British
Empire was taking off and examining printed cotton stomach wraps for
seditious emblems and inscriptions…
In some manner we shall have to come out of India. We have had our
chance, and we have demonstrated nothing but the appalling dulness
of our national imagination. We are not good enough to do anything
with India. Codger and Flack, and Gates and Dayton, Cladingbowl in
the club, and the HOME CHURCHMAN in the home, cant about
"character," worship of strenuous force and contempt of truth; for
the sake of such men and things as these, we must abandon in fact,
if not in appearance, that empty domination. Had we great schools
and a powerful teaching, could we boast great men, had we the spirit
of truth and creation in our lives, then indeed it might be
different. But a race that bears a sceptre must carry gifts to
justify it.
It does not follow that we shall be driven catastrophically from
India. That was my earlier mistake. We are not proud enough in our
bones to be ruined by India as Spain was by her empire. We may be
able to abandon India with an air of still remaining there. It is
our new method. We train our future rulers in the public schools to
have a very wholesome respect for strength, and as soon as a power
arises in India in spite of us, be it a man or a culture, or a
native state, we shall he willing to deal with it. We may or may
not have a war, but our governing class will be quick to learn when
we are beaten. Then they will repeat our South African diplomacy,
and arrange for some settlement that will abandon the reality, such
as it is, and preserve the semblance of power. The conqueror DE
FACTO will become the new "loyal Briton," and the democracy at home
will be invited to celebrate our recession-triumphantly. Iam no
believer in the imminent dissolution of our Empire; Iam less and
less inclined to see in either India or Germany the probability of
an abrupt truncation of those slow intellectual and moral
constructions which are the essentials of statecraft.
6
I sit writing in this little loggia to the sound of dripping water-
this morning we had rain, and the roof of our little casa is still
not dry, there are pools in the rocks under the sweet chestnuts, and
the torrent that crosses the salita is full and boastful,-and I try
to recall the order of my impressions during that watching, dubious
time, before I went over to the Conservative Party. I was trying-
chaotic task-to gauge the possibilities inherent in the quality of
the British aristocracy. There comes a broad spectacular effect of
wide parks, diversified by woods and bracken valleys, and dappled
with deer; of great smooth lawns shaded by ancient trees; of big
facades of sunlit buildings dominating the country side; of large
fine rooms full of handsome, easy-mannered people. As a sort of
representative picture to set off against those other pictures of
Liberals and of Socialists I have given, I recall one of those huge
assemblies the Duchess of Clynes inaugurated at Stamford House. The
place itself is one of the vastest private houses in London, a huge
clustering mass of white and gold saloons with polished floors and
wonderful pictures, and staircases and galleries on a Gargantuan
scale. And there she sought to gather all that was most
representative of English activities, and did, in fact, in those
brilliant nocturnal crowds, get samples of nearly every section of
our social and intellectual life, with a marked predominance upon
the political and social side.
I remember sitting in one of the recesses at the end of the big
saloon with Mrs. Redmondson, one of those sharp-minded, beautiful
rich women one meets so often in London, who seem to have done
nothing and to be capable of everything, and we watched the crowd-
uniforms and splendours were streaming in from a State ball-and
exchanged information. I told her about the politicians and
intellectuals, and she told me about the aristocrats, and we
sharpened our wit on them and counted the percentage of beautiful
people among the latter, and wondered if the general effect of
tallness was or was not an illusion.
They were, we agreed, for the most part bigger than the average of
people in London, and a handsome lot, even when they were not subtly
individualised. "They look so well nurtured," I said, "well cared
for. I like their quiet, well-trained movements, their pleasant
consideration for each other."
"Kindly, good tempered, and at bottom utterly selfish," she said,
"like big, rather carefully trained, rather pampered children. What
else can you expect from them?"
"They are good tempered, anyhow," I witnessed, "and that's an
achievement. I don't think I could ever be content under a bad-
tempered, sentimentalism, strenuous Government. That's why I
couldn't stand the Roosevelt REGIME in America. One's chief
surprise when one comes across these big people for the first time
is their admirable easiness and a real personal modesty. I confess
I admire them. Oh! I like them. I wouldn't at all mind, I believe,
giving over the country to this aristocracy-given SOMETHING-"
"Which they haven't got."
"Which they haven't got-or they'd be the finest sort of people in
the world."
"That something?" she inquired.
"I don't know. I've been puzzling my wits to know. They've done
all sorts of things-"
"That's Lord Wrassleton," she interrupted, "whose leg was broken-
you remember?-at Spion Kop."
"It's healed very well. I like the gold lace and the white glove
resting, with quite a nice awkwardness, on the sword. When I was a
little boy I wanted to wear clothes like that. And the stars! He's
got the V. C. Most of these people here have at any rate shown
pluck, you know-brought something off."
"Not quite enough," she suggested.
"I think that's it," I said. "Not quite enough-not quite hard
enough," I added.
She laughed and lo
oked at me. "You'd like to make us," she said.
"What?"
"Hard."
"I don't think you'll go on if you don't get hard."
"We shan't be so pleasant if we do."
"Well, there my puzzled wits come in again. I don't see why an
aristocracy shouldn't be rather hard trained, and yet kindly. I'm
not convinced that the resources of education are exhausted. I want
to better this, because it already looks so good."
"How are we to do it?" asked Mrs. Redmondson.
"Oh, there you have me! I've been spending my time lately in trying
to answer that! It makes me quarrel with"-I held up my fingers and
ticked the items off-"the public schools, the private tutors, the
army exams, the Universities, the Church, the general attitude of
the country towards science and literature-"
"We all do," said Mrs. Redmondson. "We can't begin again at the
beginning," she added.
"Couldn't one," I nodded at the assembly in general, start a
movement?
"There's the Confederates," she said, with a faint smile that masked
a gleam of curiosity… "You want," she said, "to say to the
aristocracy, 'Be aristocrats. NOBLESSE OBLIGE.' Do you remember
what happened to the monarch who was told to 'Be a King'?"
"Well," I said, "I want an aristocracy."
"This," she said, smiling, "is the pick of them. The backwoodsmen
are off the stage. These are the brilliant ones-the smart and the
blues… They cost a lot of money, you know."
So far Mrs. Redmondson, but the picture remained full of things not
stated in our speech. They were on the whole handsome people,
charitable minded, happy, and easy. They led spacious lives, and
there was something free and fearless about their bearing that I
liked extremely. The women particularly were wide-reading, fine-
thinking. Mrs. Redmondson talked as fully and widely and boldly as
a man, and with those flashes of intuition, those startling, sudden
delicacies of perception few men display. I liked, too, the
relations that held between women and men, their general tolerance,
their antagonism to the harsh jealousies that are the essence of the
middle-class order…
After all, if one's aim resolved itself into the development of a
type and culture of men, why shouldn't one begin at this end?
It is very easy indeed to generalise about a class or human beings,
