Transcript of In the Fourth Year: Anticipations of a World Peace
Preface of In the Fourth Year, Anticipations of a World Peace by H. G. Wells. Preface. In the latter half of 1914, a few of us were writing that this war was a war of ideas. A phrase, the war to end war, got into circulation amidst much skeptical comment. It was a phrase powerful enough to sway many men, essentially pacifists, toward taking an active part in the war against German imperialism. But it was a phrase whose chief content was its aspiration. People were already writing in those early days of disarmament and of the abolition of the armament industry throughout the world. They realized fully the element of industrial belligerency behind the shining armor of imperialism, and they denounced the Krupp -Kaiser alliance. But against such writing and such thought, we had to count in those days great and powerful realities. Even to those who expressed these ideas, there lay visibly upon them the shadow of impracticability. They were very advanced ideas in 1914, very utopian. Against them was an unbroken mass of mental habit and public tradition. While we talked of this war to end war, the diplomatists of the powers allied against Germany were busily spinning a disastrous web of greedy secret treaties, were answering aggression by schemes of aggression, were seeing in the treacherous violence of Germany only the justification for countervailing evil acts. To them, it was only another war for ascendancy. That was three years and a half ago, and since then, this war of ideas has gone on to a phrase few of us had dared hope for in those opening days. The Russian Revolution put a match to that pile of secret treaties and indeed to all the imperialist plans of the allies. In the end, it will burn them all. The greatest of the Western allies is now the America, and the Americans have come into this war simply for an idea. Three and a half years ago, a few of us were saying that this was a war against the idea of imperialism. Not German imperialism merely, but British and French and Russian imperialism, and we were saying this not it was so, but because we hoped to see it become so. Today, we can say so because now it is so. In those days, moreover, we said this is the war to end war, and we still did not know clearly how. We thought in terms of treaties and alliances. It is largely the detachment and practical genius of the great English -speaking nation across the Atlantic that has carried the world on beyond and replaced that phrase by the phrase the League of Nations, a phrase suggesting plainly the organization of a sufficient instrument by which war may be ended forever. In 1913, talk of the League of Nations would have seemed to the extremist pitch utopian. Today, the project has an air not only of being so practicable, but of being so urgent and necessary