Читать книгу A Year of Prophesying - H.G. Wells - Страница 3
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THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
AND THE FEDERATION OF MANKIND
22.9.1923
I AM one of those people who believe that if human affairs are to go on without decay and catastrophe, there must be an end to the organisation of war. I believe that the power to prepare for war and make war must be withdrawn from separate States, as already it has been withdrawn from separate cities and from districts and from private individuals, and that ultimately there must be a Confederation of all mankind to keep one peace throughout the world.
The United States of America is but the first instance of a federating process which will, I believe, extend at last to the whole world. Since 1917 I have given much more of my waking life to that vision of a confederated mankind than I have given to any other single interest or subject. And yet I am not a supporter of the League of Nations in its present form, and I do not think that the League of Nations at Geneva is ever likely to develop into an effective World Confederation. It is much more likely to develop into a serious obstacle to such a Confederation. The sooner now that it is scrapped and broken up the better, I think, for mankind. I am hostile to the present League of Nations because I desire the Confederation of Mankind.
I do not think that the obstructive possibilities of the existing League of Nations are sufficiently understood by liberal-minded people throughout the world. I do not think they realise how effectively it may be used as a consumer and waster of the creative energy that would otherwise carry us forward toward World Confederation.
The League of Nations that we saw in our visions in those distressful and yet creative years, 1917-18, was to have been a real step forward in human affairs. It was to have been a repetition on a gigantic scale of that magnificent turning-point in the history of America when it was decided that the conferring representatives of the liberated colonies should talk no longer of the people of Virginia, the people of Georgia, and the people of Massachusetts, but instead of the people of the United States. So in a wider stride we were to begin to forget the particular interests of the people of Germany and of the people of France and of the people of England in a new realisation of the common needs and dangers and sacrifices of the people of the world. So we hoped. So we still try to hope.
But that was far too wide a stride for humanity to take all at once. The League we desired was to have been the first loose conference that would have ended in a federal government for the whole earth. It was to have controlled war establishments from the start, constricted or abolished all private armament firms, created and maintained a world standard of currency, of labour legislation, of health and education, watched the world production of staple articles for the common good, restricted malignant tariff hostilities, negotiated and regulated the migrations of populations, and made the ways of the world, the high seas, and the international land routes alike open and safe for all decent men. So we saw it as a new, brave assertion of human sanity and of the right of all men to a certain fullness of life, against old hates, old prejudices, old debts and claims and limitations.
And there seemed to some of us to be sufficient will in the world then for so bold and great a beginning. I wonder—empty speculation though it is now—if we were indeed so wrong in thinking that—if some man or group of men of supreme genius might not have achieved a real world peace even in 1919. All over the world there were millions of people, prepared by immense sufferings and fears for so drastic a change. There were great masses of people everywhere mentally ready for that League. For many months President Wilson, simply because he had said "League of Nations" plainly and clearly, was the greatest man on earth. He overshadowed Kings and Emperors.
Most of us can still recall that false dawn, that phase of hope. When the first great gathering to inaugurate the English League of Nations Union met in Westminster, people were turned away from the dangerously packed hall, not by the hundred but by the thousand. But it is easier to assemble crowds of enthusiastic people than to give them faithful leaders and capable Ministers. The First Crusade might have taught us that. The new movement had no leaders worth considering, and into the vacuum poured all the eager stuff of the old order. I remember how my heart sank that day when I saw the brightest bishops and the best-advertised Nonconformist leaders, politicians needing a new line of goods, the rising Bar and the social collectors, Mrs. Asquith and her set, all the much-photographed and the much-talked-about, swarming up upon the Westminster platform, pushing well into the limelight, nodding and gesticulating to each other, as gay as if they were at a fashionable wedding, before dear Lord Grey, that dignified image of British statesmanship, read out the platitudes he had prepared for the occasion. The common folk of the earth might want a new organisation of peace in the world, but these people of all people I realised would never give it them.
Things come not so swiftly to suffering mankind. The order has indeed gone forth, men know their need, but the master artisan that will fulfil it has still to learn his business and make his tools. Perhaps he has still to be born. And, meanwhile, in the light of this false dawn, a League of Nations, that hardly pretended even to look like what we desired, was planned in Paris hurriedly and cheaply, and run up at Geneva. It has provided a job for Sir Eric Drummond, a British Foreign Office official unknown to the generality of mankind, and Lord Robert Cecil, hitherto prominent chiefly as the inveterate enemy of unsectarian education in England, secured political resuscitation as its leading advocate. With the permission of France and Great Britain this League has negotiated one or two minor settlements that were not too deeply entangled in the policy of these Great Powers, and it has afforded a number of Spanish-American politicians agreeable, if expensive, holidays in Europe. And whenever one wants to talk of the Confederation of Mankind now, it gets in the way.
We had thought that the League of Nations would abolish diplomacy. We found it had merely added another piece, and a very ineffective piece at that, to the already crowded diplomatic game upon the European board.
That great Confederation of Mankind that we desire, that great peace with variety round and about the earth, cannot arise out of such a beginning. This League of Nations at Geneva is not even the germ of such a thing. Rather it is the instinctive effort of the old European order to stifle this creative idea on its birth by encysting it in a tradition of futility and diplomatic methods. The way to human confederation is by a longer route, and the end is not to be attained by any such hasty constitution as that of the League. The Confederation of Man is a task for generations. Tens of thousands of leaderly men and women must serve that idea and live and die for it before it can approach realisation. Millions must respond to the service of their leadership. The idea must become the fundamental political idea of hundreds of millions, ousting kings and flags from men's imaginations. Then we can begin to get together an effective ruling body. A stupendous task, you say, but not an impossible one. A day will come, I believe, when this great dream will be realised, when all the paraphernalia of war or of national sovereignty—it is the same thing—will have followed the stone gods and human sacrifices to limbo, and when a new phase of human experience will begin.
So far there has been no real civilisation of the world; civilisation is still only an occasional incident, a passing gleam of promise in the lives of a handful of people here and there. But civilisation will come at last for all. It is about that coming of a world confederation and of the world civilisation it will make possible, that I shall be writing chiefly in this series of weekly articles. Now and then I shall diverge to other topics, but that will be my main theme, the realisation of civilisation. I shall consider scientific progress, educational and social work, political happenings, and the general trend of current events, and almost always I shall consider them in direct relation to that new age that lies before mankind. I shall write about the signs of the times and about typical men and women just as they seem to be making or marring these creative hopes. I do not expect my readers to agree with me always. I shall write about contentious things, and my last thought will be of pleasing or propitiating. At times I shall certainly irritate. But I hope to interest. And some few of my younger readers, at least, I hope to infect with that same idea of creative service for the new civilisation which possesses my own life.
