The World Set Free

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THE WORLD SET FREE

H.G. WELLS


We Are All Things That Make And Pass,
Striving Upon A Hidden Mission,
Out To The Open Sea.


TO

Frederick Soddy's

'Interpretation Of Radium'

This Story, Which Owes Long Passages To The Eleventh Chapter Of That
Book, Acknowledges And Inscribes Itself




PREFACE

THE WORLD SET FREE was written in 1913 and published early in 1914, and
it is the latest of a series of three fantasias of possibility, stories
which all turn on the possible developments in the future of some
contemporary force or group of forces. The World Set Free was written
under the immediate shadow of the Great War. Every intelligent person in
the world felt that disaster was impending and knew no way of averting
it, but few of us realised in the earlier half of 1914 how near the
crash was to us. The reader will be amused to find that here it is put
off until the year 1956. He may naturally want to know the reason for
what will seem now a quite extraordinary delay. As a prophet, the author
must confess he has always been inclined to be rather a slow prophet.
The war aeroplane in the world of reality, for example, beat the
forecast in Anticipations by about twenty years or so. I suppose a
desire not to shock the sceptical reader's sense of use and wont and
perhaps a less creditable disposition to hedge, have something to do
with this dating forward of one's main events, but in the particular
case of The World Set Free there was, I think, another motive in holding
the Great War back, and that was to allow the chemist to get well
forward with his discovery of the release of atomic energy. 1956--or for
that matter 2056--may be none too late for that crowning revolution in
human potentialities. And apart from this procrastination of over forty
years, the guess at the opening phase of the war was fairly lucky; the
forecast of an alliance of the Central Empires, the opening campaign
through the Netherlands, and the despatch of the British Expeditionary
Force were all justified before the book had been published six months.
And the opening section of Chapter the Second remains now, after the
reality has happened, a fairly adequate diagnosis of the essentials of
the matter. One happy hit (in Chapter the Second, Section 2), on which
the writer may congratulate himself, is the forecast that under modern
conditions it would be quite impossible for any great general to emerge
to supremacy and concentrate the enthusiasm of the armies of either
side. There could be no Alexanders or Napoleons. And we soon heard the
scientific corps muttering, 'These old fools,' exactly as it is here
foretold.

These, however, are small details, and the misses in the story far
outnumber the hits. It is the main thesis which is still of interest
now; the thesis that because of the development of scientific knowledge,
separate sovereign states and separate sovereign empires are no longer
possible in the world, that to attempt to keep on with the old system
is to heap disaster upon disaster for mankind and perhaps to destroy
our race altogether. The remaining interest of this book now is the
sustained validity of this thesis and the discussion of the possible
ending of war on the earth. I have supposed a sort of epidemic of sanity
to break out among the rulers of states and the leaders of mankind. I
have represented the native common sense of the French mind and of
the English mind--for manifestly King Egbert is meant to be 'God's
Englishman'--leading mankind towards a bold and resolute effort of
salvage and reconstruction. Instead of which, as the school book
footnotes say, compare to-day's newspaper. Instead of a frank and
honourable gathering of leading men, Englishman meeting German and
Frenchman Russian, brothers in their offences and in their disaster,
upon the hills of Brissago, beheld in Geneva at the other end of
Switzerland a poor little League of (Allied) Nations (excluding the
United States, Russia, and most of the 'subject peoples' of the world),
meeting obscurely amidst a world-wide disregard 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
eyes at the birds that soared beyond his reach. Or suddenly he became
aware of the scent of another male and rose up roaring, his roars
the formless precursors of moral admonitions. For he was a great
individualist, that original, he suffered none other than himself.

So through the long generations, this heavy precursor, this ancestor of
all of us, fought and bred and perished, changing almost imperceptibly.

Yet he changed. That keen chisel of necessity which sharpened the
tiger's claw age by age and fined down the clumsy Orchippus to the swift
grace of the horse, was at work upon him--is at work upon him still.
The clumsier and more stupidly fierce among him were killed soonest and
oftenest; the finer hand, the quicker eye, the bigger brain, the better
balanced body prevailed; age by age, the implements were a little better
made, the man a little more delicately adjusted to his possibilities. He
became more social; his herd grew larger; no longer did each man kill
or drive out his growing sons; a system of taboos made them tolerable
to him, and they revered him alive and soon even after he was dead, and
were his allies against the beasts and the rest of mankind. (But they
were forbidden to touch the women of the tribe, they had to go out and
capture women for themselves, and each son fled from his stepmother and
hid from her lest the anger of the Old Man should be roused. All the
world over, even to this day, these ancient inevitable taboos can be
traced.) And now instead of caves came huts and hovels, and the fire was
better tended and there were wrappings and garments; and so aided, the
creature spread into colder climates, carrying food with him, storing
food--until sometimes the neglected grass-seed sprouted again and gave a
first hint of agriculture.

And already there were the beginnings of leisure and thought.

Man began to think. There were times when he was fed, when his lusts and
his fears were all appeased, when the sun shone upon the squatting-place
and dim stirrings of speculation lit his eyes. He scratched upon a bone
and found resemblance and pursued it and began pictorial art, moulded
the soft, warm clay of the river brink between his fingers, and found a
pleasure in its patternings and repetitions, shaped it into the form of
vessels, and found that it would hold water. He watched the streaming
river, and wondered from what bountiful breast this incessant water
came; he blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he might snare it
and spear it as it went down to its resting-place amidst the distant
hills. Then he was roused to convey to his brother that once indeed he
had done so--at least that some one had done so--he mixed that perhaps
with another dream almost as daring, that one day a mammoth had been
beset; and therewith began fiction--pointing a way to achievement--and
the august prophetic procession of tales.

For scores and hundreds of centuries, for myriads of generations that
life of our fathers went on. From the beginning to the ripening of that
phase of human life, from the first clumsy eolith of rudely chipped
flint to the first implements of polished stone, was two or three
thousand centuries, ten or fifteen thousand generations. So slowly,
by human standards, did humanity gather itself together out of the dim
intimations of the beast. And that first glimmering of speculation, that
first story of achievement, that story-teller bright-eyed and flushed
under his matted hair, gesticulating to his gaping, incredulous
listener, gripping his wrist to keep him attentive, was the most
marvellous beginning this world has ever seen. It doomed the mammoths,
and it began the setting of that snare that shall catch the sun.

Section 2

That dream was but a moment in a man's life, whose proper business it
seemed was to get food and kill his fellows and beget after the manner
of all that belongs to the fellowship of the beasts. About him, hidden
from him by the thinnest of veils, were the untouched sources of Power,
whose magnitude we scarcely do more than suspect even to-day, Power that
could make his every conceivable dream come real. But the feet of the
race were in the way of it, though he died blindly unknowing.

At last, in the generous levels of warm river valleys, where food is
abundant and life very easy, the emerging human overcoming his earlier
jealousies, becoming, as necessity persecuted him less urgently, more
social and tolerant and amenable, achieved a larger community. There
began a division of labour, certain of the older men specialised in
knowledge and direction, a strong man took the fatherly leadership in
war, and priest and king began to develop their roles in the opening
drama of man's history. The priest's solicitude was seed-time and
harvest and fertility, and the king ruled peace and war. In a hundred
river valleys about the warm, temperate zone of the earth there
were already towns and temples, a score of thousand years ago. They
flourished unrecorded, ignoring the past and unsuspicious of the future,
for as yet writing had still to begin.

Very slowly did man increase his demand upon the illimitable wealth
of Power that offered itself on every hand to him. He tamed certain
animals, he developed his primordially haphazard agriculture into a
ritual, he added first one metal to his resources and then another,
until he had copper and tin and iron and lead and gold and silver to
supplement his stone, he hewed and carved wood, made pottery, paddled
down his river until he came to the sea, discovered the wheel and made
the first roads. But his chief activity for a hundred centuries and
more, was the subjugation of himself and others to larger and larger
societies. The history of man is not simply the conquest of external
power; it is first the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses,
that self-concentration and intensity of animalism, that tie his hands
from taking his inheritance. The ape in us still resents association.
From the dawn of the age of polished stone to the achievement of the
Peace of the World, man's dealings were chiefly with himself and his
fellow man, trading, bargaining, law-making, propitiating, enslaving,
conquering, exterminating, and every little increment in Power, he
turned at once and always turns to the purposes of this confused
elaborate struggle to socialise. To incorporate and comprehend his
fellow men into a community of purpose became the last and greatest of
his instincts. Already before the last polished phase of the stone
age was over he had become a political animal. He made astonishingly
far-reaching discoveries within himself, first of counting and then of
writing and making records, and with that his town communities began to
stretch out to dominion; in the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and
the great Chinese rivers, the first empires and the first written laws
had their beginnings. Men specialised for fighting and rule as soldiers
and knights. Later, as ships grew seaworthy, the Mediterranean which had
been a barrier became a highway, and at last out of a tangle of pirate
polities came the great struggle of Carthage and Rome. The history
of Europe is the history of the victory and breaking up of the Roman
Empire. Every ascendant monarch in Europe up to the last, aped Caesar
and called himself Kaiser or Tsar or Imperator or Kasir-i-Hind. Measured
by the duration of human life it is a vast space of time between that
first dynasty in Egypt and the coming of the aeroplane, but by the scale
that looks back to the makers of the eoliths, it is all of it a story of
yesterday.

Now during this period of two hundred centuries or more, this period
of the warring states, while men's minds were chiefly preoccupied by
politics and mutual aggression, their progress in the acquirement of
external Power was slow--rapid in comparison with the progress of the
old stone age, but slow in comparison with this new age of systematic
discovery in which we live. They did not very greatly alter the weapons
and tactics of warfare, the methods of agriculture, seamanship, their
knowledge of the habitable globe, or the devices and utensils of
domestic life between the days of the early Egyptians and the days when
Christopher Columbus was a child. Of course, there were inventions and
changes, but there were also retrogressions; things were found out and
then forgotten again; it was, on the whole, a progress, but it contained
no steps; the peasant life was the same, there were already priests and
lawyers and town craftsmen and territorial lords and rulers doctors,
wise women, soldiers and sailors in Egypt and China and Assyria and
south-eastern Europe at the beginning of that period, and they were
doing much the same things and living much the same life as they were in
Europe in A.D. 1500. The English excavators of the year A.D. 1900
could delve into the remains of Babylon and Egypt and disinter legal
documents, domestic accounts, and family correspondence that they could
read with the completest sympathy. There were great religious and
moral changes throughout the period, empires and republics replaced one
another, Italy tried a vast experiment in slavery, and indeed slavery
was tried again and again and failed and failed and was still to be
tested again and rejected again in the New World; Christianity and
Mohammedanism swept away a thousand more specialised cults, but
essentially these were progressive adaptations of mankind to
material conditions that must have seemed fixed for ever. The idea of
revolutionary changes in the material conditions of life would have been
entirely strange to human thought through all that time.

Yet the dreamer, the story-teller, was there still, waiting for his
opportunity amidst the busy preoccupations, the comings and goings, the
wars and processions, the castle building and cathedral building, the
arts and loves, the small diplomacies and incurable feuds, the crusades
and trading journeys of the middle ages. He no longer speculated
with the untrammelled freedom of the stone-age savage; authoritative
explanations of everything barred his path; but he speculated with a
better brain, sat idle and gazed at circling stars in the sky and mused
upon the coin and crystal in his hand. Whenever there was a certain
leisure for thought throughout these times, then men were to be found
dissatisfied with the appearances of things, dissatisfied with the
assurances of orthodox belief, uneasy with a sense of unread symbols
in the world about them, questioning the finality of scholastic wisdom.
Through all the ages of history there were men to whom this whisper had
come of hidden things about them. They could no longer lead ordinary
lives nor content themselves with the common things of this world once
they had heard this voice. And mostly they believed not only that all
this world was as it were a painted curtain before things unguessed at,
but that these secrets were Power. Hitherto Power had come to men by
chance, but now there were these seekers seeking, seeking among rare and
curious and perplexing objects, sometimes finding some odd utilisable
thing, sometimes deceiving themselves with fancied discovery, sometimes
pretending to find. The world of every day laughed at these eccentric
beings, or found them annoying and ill-treated them, or was seized
with fear and made saints and sorcerers and warlocks of them, or with
covetousness and entertained them hopefully; but for the greater part
heeded them not at all. Yet they were of the blood of him who had first
dreamt of attacking the mammoth; every one of them was of his blood and
descent; and the thing they sought, all unwittingly, was the snare that
will some day catch the sun.

Section 3

Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court of
Sforza in Milan in a state of dignified abstraction. His common-place
books are full of prophetic subtlety and ingenious anticipations of
the methods of the early aviators. Durer was his parallel and Roger
Bacon--whom the Franciscans silenced--of his kindred. Such a man again
in an earlier city was Hero of Alexandria, who knew of the power of
steam nineteen hundred years before it was first brought into use.
And earlier still was Archimedes of Syracuse, and still earlier the
legendary Daedalus of Cnossos. All up and down the record of history
whenever there was a little leisure from war and brutality the seekers
appeared. And half the alchemists were of their tribe.

When Roger Bacon blew up his first batch of gunpowder one might have
supposed that men would have gone at once to the explosive engine. But
they could see nothing of the sort. They were not yet beginning to think
of seeing things; their metallurgy was all too poor to make such
engines even had they thought of them. For a time they could not make
instruments sound enough to stand this new force even for so rough a
purpose as hurling a missile. Their first guns had barrels of coopered
timber, and the world waited for more than five hundred years before the
explosive engine came.

Even when the seekers found, it was at first a long journey before the
world could use their findings for any but the roughest, most obvious
purposes. If man in general was not still as absolutely blind to the
unconquered energies about him as his paleolithic precursor, he was at
best purblind.

Section 4

The latent energy of coal and the power of steam waited long on the
verge of discovery, before they began to influence human lives.

There were no doubt many such devices as Hero's toys devised and
forgotten, time after time, in courts and palaces, but it needed that
coal should be mined and burning with plenty of iron at hand before it
dawned upon men that here was something more than a curiosity. And it is
to be remarked that the first recorded suggestion for the use of steam
was in war; there is an Elizabethan pamphlet in which it is proposed to
fire shot out of corked iron bottles full of heated water. The mining
of coal for fuel, the smelting of iron upon a larger scale than men had
ever done before, the steam pumping engine, the steam-engine and the
steam-boat, followed one another in an order that had a kind of logical
necessity. It is the most interesting and instructive chapter in
the history of the human intelligence, the history of steam from its
beginning as a fact in human consciousness to the perfection of the
great turbine engines that preceded the utilisation of intra-molecular
power. Nearly every human being must have seen steam, seen it
incuriously for many thousands of years; the women in particular were
always heating water, boiling it, seeing it boil away, seeing the lids
of vessels dance with its fury; millions of people at different times
must have watched steam pitching rocks out of volcanoes like cricket
balls and blowing pumice into foam, and yet you may search the whole
human record through, letters, books, inscriptions, pictures, for any
glimmer of a realisation that here was force, here was strength to
borrow and use.... Then suddenly man woke up to it, the railways spread
like a network over the globe, the ever enlarging iron steamships began
their staggering fight against wind and wave.

Steam was the first-comer in the new powers, it was the beginning of the
Age of Energy that was to close the long history of the Warring States.

But for a long time men did not realise the importance of this novelty.
They would not recognise, they were not able to recognise that anything
fundamental had happened to their immemorial necessities. They called
the steam-engine the 'iron horse' and pretended that they had made the
most partial of substitutions. Steam machinery and factory production
were visibly revolutionising the conditions of industrial production,
population was streaming steadily in from the country-side and
concentrating in hitherto unthought-of masses about a few city centres,
food was coming to them over enormous distances upon a scale that
made the one sole precedent, the corn ships of imperial Rome, a petty
incident; and a huge migration of peoples between Europe and Western
Asia and America was in Progress, and--nobody seems to have realised
that something new had come into human life, a strange swirl different
altogether from any previous circling and mutation, a swirl like the
swirl when at last the lock gates begin to open after a long phase of
accumulating water and eddying inactivity....