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An Englishman Looks at the World by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
page 106 of 329 (32%)
hope to be better. He contemplated a continually exacerbated Class War,
with a millennium of extraordinary vagueness beyond as the reward of
the victorious workers. His common quality with the Individualist lies
in his repudiation of and antagonism to plans and arrangements, in his
belief in the overriding power of Law. Their common influence is the
discouragement of collective understandings upon the basis of the
existing state. Both converge in practice upon _laissez faire_. I would
therefore lump them together under the term of Planless Progressives,
and I would contrast with them those types which believe supremely in
systematised purpose.

The purposeful and systematic types, in common with the Individualist
and Marxist, regard the Normal Social Life, for all the many thousands
of years behind it, as a phase, and as a phase which is now passing, in
human experience; and they are prepared for a future society that may be
ultimately different right down to its essential relationships from the
human past. But they also believe that the forces that have been
assailing and disintegrating the Normal Social Life, which have been, on
the one hand, producing great accumulations of wealth, private freedom,
and ill-defined, irresponsible and socially dangerous power, and, on the
other, labour hordes, for the most part urban, without any property or
outlook except continuous toil and anxiety, which in England have
substituted a dischargeable agricultural labourer for the independent
peasant almost completely, and in America seem to be arresting any
general development of the Normal Social Life at all, are forces of wide
and indefinite possibility that need to be controlled by a collective
effort implying a collective design, deflected from merely injurious
consequences and organised for a new human welfare upon new lines. They
agree with that class of thinking I have distinguished as the
Conservators in their recognition of vast contemporary disorders and
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