New worlds for old: A plain account of modern socialismWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
New worlds for old: A plain account of modern socialism
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Socialism
And lastly, perhaps you are chiefly a patriot and you are concerned
for the flag and country with which your emotions have interwoven. You
find that the Socialist talks constantly of internationalism and the
World State, and that presents itself to your imagination as a very
vague and colourless substitute for a warm and living reality of
England or "these States" or the Empire. Well, your patriotism will
have suffered a change, but I do not think it need starve under
Socialist conditions. It may be that war will have ceased, but the
comparison and competition and pride of communities will not have
ceased. Philadelphia and Chicago, Boston and New York are at peace, in
all probability for ever at peace, so far as guns and slaughter go,
but each perpetually criticizes, goads and tries to outshine the
other. And the civic pride and rivalry of to-day will be nothing to
that pride and rivalry when every man's business is the city and the
city's honour and well-being is his own. You will have, therefore,
first this civic patriotism, your ancient pride in your city, a city
which will be like the city of the ancient Athenian's, or the mediæval
Italian's, the centre of a system of territories and the property and
chief interest of its citizens. I, for instance, should love and
serve, even as I love to-day, my London and my Cinque Ports, these
Home Counties about London, the great lap of the Thames valley and the
Weald and Downland, my own country in which all my life has been
spent; for you the city may be Ulster or Northumbria, or Wales or East
or West Belgium, or Finland or Burgundy, or Berne or Berlin, or
Venetia, Pekin, Calcutta, Queensland or San Francisco. And keeping the
immediate peace between these vigorous giant municipal states and
holding them together there will still be in many cases the old
national or Imperial government and the old flag, a means of joint
action between associated and kindred municipalities with a common
language and a common history and a common temper and race. The nation
and the national government will be the custodian of the national
literature and the common law, the controller and perhaps the vehicle
of intermunicipal and international trade, and an intermediary between
its municipal governments and that great Congress to which all things
are making, that permanent international Congress which will be
necessary to insure the peace of the world.
That, at least, is my own dream of the order that may emerge from the
confusion of distrusts and tentatives and dangerous absurdities, those
reactions of fear and old traditional attitudes and racial
misconceptions which one speaks of as international relations to-day.
For I do not believe that war is a necessary condition to human
existence and progress, that it is anything more than a confusion we
inherit from the less organized phases of social development. I think
but a little advancement in general intelligence will make it an
impossible thing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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