Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thoughtWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thought
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Civilization; Communication and traffic; Social prediction; Twentieth century -- Forecasts
And behind the thin firing line on either side a vast multitude of
people will be at work; indeed, the whole mass of the efficients in the
State will have to be at work, and most of them will be simply at the
same work or similar work to that done in peace time--only now as
combatants upon the lines of communication. The organized staffs of the
big road managements, now become a part of the military scheme, will be
deporting women and children and feeble people and bringing up supplies
and supports; the doctors will be dropping from their civil duties into
pre-appointed official places, directing the feeding and treatment of
the shifting masses of people and guarding the valuable manhood of the
fighting apparatus most sedulously from disease;[38] the engineers will
be entrenching and bringing up a vast variety of complicated and
ingenious apparatus designed to surprise and inconvenience the enemy in
novel ways; the dealers in food and clothing, the manufacturers of all
sorts of necessary stuff, will be converted by the mere declaration of
war into public servants; a practical realization of socialistic
conceptions will quite inevitably be forced upon the fighting State. The
State that has not incorporated with its fighting organization all its
able-bodied manhood and all its material substance, its roads, vehicles,
engines, foundries, and all its resources of food and clothing; the
State which at the outbreak of war has to bargain with railway and
shipping companies, replace experienced station-masters by inexperienced
officers, and haggle against alien interests for every sort of supply,
will be at an overwhelming disadvantage against a State which has
emerged from the social confusion of the present time, got rid of every
vestige of our present distinction between official and governed, and
organized every element in its being.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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