The World Set Free Read online

  The World Set Free

  H. G. Wells

  H.G. Wells

  The World Set Free

  by

  WE ARE

  ALL THINGS THAT

  MAKE AND PASS,

  STRIVING UPON A

  HIDDEN MISSION,

  OUT TO THE

  OPEN

  SEA.

  THE WORLD SET FREE

  H.G. WELLS

  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 I

  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, achieve
d 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,