The Salvaging of CivilizationWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
The Salvaging of Civilization
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Civilization, Modern -- 20th century; Education
Not one of these sovereign European states I have named between London
and Warsaw is any larger than the one single American state of Texas,
and not one has a capital that cannot be effectively bombed by aeroplane
raiders from its frontier within five or six hours of a declaration of
war. We can fly from London to Paris in two or three hours. And the
aerial bombs of to-day, I can assure you, will make the biggest bombs of
1918 seem like little crackers. Over all these European countries broods
this immediate threat of a warfare that will strain and torment the
nerves of every living man, woman or child in the countries affected.
Nothing of the sort can approach the American citizen except after a
long warning. The worst war that could happen to any North American
country would merely touch its coasts.
Now I have dwelt on these differences between America and Europe because
they involve an absolute difference in outlook towards world peace
projects, towards leagues of nations, world states and the like, between
the American and the European.
The American lives in a political unity on the big modern scale. He can
go on comfortably for a hundred years yet before he begins to feel tight
in his political skin, and before he begins to feel the threat of
immediate warfare close to his domestic life. He believes by experience
in peace, but he feels under no passionate urgency to organize it. So
far as he himself is concerned, he has got peace organized for a good
long time ahead. I doubt if it would make any very serious difference
for some time in the ordinary daily life of Kansas City, let us say, if
all Europe were reduced to a desert in the next five years.
But on the other hand, the intelligent European is up against the unity
of Europe problem night and day. Europe cannot go on. European
civilization cannot go on, unless that net of boundaries which strangles
her is dissolved away. The difficulties created by language differences,
by bitter national traditions, by bad political habits and the like, are
no doubt stupendous. But stupendous though they are, they have to be
faced. Unless they are overcome, and overcome in a very few years,
Europe--entangled in this net of boundaries, and under a perpetual fear
of war, will, I am convinced, follow Russia and slide down beyond any
hope of recovery into a process of social dissolution as profound and
disastrous as that which closed the career of the Western Roman Empire.
The American intelligence and the European intelligence approach this
question of a world peace, therefore, from an entirely different angle
and in an entirely different spirit. To the American in the blessed ease
of his great unbroken territory, it seems a matter simply of making his
own ample securities world-wide by treaties of arbitration and such-like
simple agreements. And my impression is that he thinks of Europeans as
living under precisely similar conditions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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