The Salvaging of CivilizationWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
The Salvaging of Civilization
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Civilization, Modern -- 20th century; Education
These items probably comprehend everything that the government of a
World State would have to do. Much of its activity would be merely the
co-ordination and adjustment of activities already very thoroughly
discussed and prepared for it by local and national discussions. I think
it will be a mistake for us to assume that the work of a world
government will be vaster and more complex than that of such governments
as those of the United States or the British Empire. In many respects it
will have an enormously simplified task. There will be no foreign enemy,
no foreign competition, no tariffs, so far as it is concerned, or tariff
wars. It will be keeping order; it will not be carrying on a contest.
There will be no necessity for secrecy; it will not be necessary to have
a Cabinet plotting and planning behind closed doors; there will be no
general policy except a steady attention to the common welfare. Even the
primary origin of a World Council must necessarily be different from
that of any national government. Every existing government owes its
beginnings to force and is in its fundamental nature militant. It is an
offensive-defensive organ. This fact saturates our legal and social
tradition more than one realizes at first. There is, about civil law
everywhere, a faint flavour of a relaxed state of siege. But a world
government will arise out of different motives and realize a different
ideal. It will be primarily an organ for keeping the peace.
And now perhaps we may look at this project of a World State mirrored in
the circumstances of the life of one individual citizen. Let us consider
very briefly the life of an ordinary young man living in a World State
and consider how it would differ from a commonplace life to-day.
He will have been born in some one of the United States of the World--in
New York or California, or Ontario or New Zealand, or Portugal or France
or Bengal or Shan-si; but wherever his lot may fall, the first history
he will learn will be the wonderful history of mankind, from its nearly
animal beginnings, a few score thousand years ago, with no tools, but
implements of chipped stone and hacked wood, up to the power and
knowledge of our own time. His education will trace for him the
beginnings of speech, of writing, of cultivation and settlement.
He will learn of the peoples and nations of the past, and how each one
has brought its peculiar gifts and its distinctive contribution to the
accumulating inheritance of our race.
He will know, perhaps, less of wars, battles, conquests, massacres,
kings and the like unpleasant invasions of human dignity and welfare,
and he will know more of explorers, discoverers and stout outspoken men
than our contemporary citizen.
While he is still a little boy, he will have the great outlines of the
human adventure brought home to his mind by all sorts of vivid methods
of presentation, such as the poor poverty-struck schools of our own time
cannot dream of employing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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