Mr. Wells has called me an inveterate antagonist. He is wrong. From the first moment that the _Time Machine_ appeared, so many years ago, I have consistently praised his talents in private conversation and in public writing, and I shall praise them still. Before I leave this point of his advantages in the writing of History, let me deal very briefly with certain false accusations that have been made against him. The first and, I think, the stupidest, is that of brevity. I have heard people say, “Here is a man pretending to write a history of the world in a few months and in a few pages,” and they have laughed at him on that ground. The accusation is unintelligent. You can give the outline of the history of anything in a sentence, or a paragraph, or a pamphlet, or a book, or an encyclopædia. If Napier, the great historian of the Peninsular War—perhaps the greatest English writer of History—had been asked to state in one sentence the outline of that struggle, he might have replied, “The Spanish national feeling engaged with French usurpation was supported by a small English regular army possessed of the command of the sea. These two forces combined achieved, after Napoleon’s disaster in Russia, the driving out of the French from the Peninsula.” If he had been given a page in which to write the thing he could have added phrases upon the talent of Wellington as a defensive General, the misconception of the French upon the Spanish national feeling, the skill with which the lines of Torres Vedras were drawn, etc. Had he been given fifty pages, he could have added more details still—and so on, up to a shelf full of books. But the outline from such a pen would have been good History had it covered ten lines or ten thousand. It is thoughtless to say that a man has no right to give an _outline_ of any movement, however great, in any space, however small. The Catechism puts the whole vast business of man through time and eternity into one short phrase, “That we were made to know, love, and serve God, and to be happy with Him for ever.” You could add to that all the rest of true philosophy in as much detail as you like, and still expand; but the original brief outline of less than a score of words remains true. Mr. Wells has a perfect right to produce an outline of general History in one volume, or half a volume, or a page, and, so far as the _manner_ of it goes, he has done it excellently: the drawing is firm, the intention honest; it is the shape of the Outline that is wrong.