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.