What is Coming? A Forecast of Things after the War By H.G. WELLS 1916 CONTENTS 1. FORECASTING THE FUTURE 2. THE END OF THE WAR 3. NATIONS IN LIQUIDATION 4. BRAINTREE, BOCKING, AND THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD 5. How FAR WILL EUROPE GO TOWARD SOCIALISM? 6. LAWYER AND PRESS 7. THE NEW EDUCATION 8. WHAT THE WAR IS DOING FOR WOMEN 9. THE NEW MAP OF EUROPE 10. THE UNITED STATES, FRANCE, BRITAIN, AND RUSSIA 11. THE "WHITE MAN'S BURTHEN" 12. THE OUTLOOK FOR THE GERMANS I. FORECASTING THE FUTURE Prophecy may vary between being an intellectual amusement and a serious occupation; serious not only in its intentions, but in its consequences. For it is the lot of prophets who frighten or disappoint to be stoned. But for some of us moderns, who have been touched with the spirit of science, prophesying is almost a habit of mind. Science is very largely analysis aimed at forecasting. The test of any scientific law is our verification of its anticipations. The scientific training develops the idea that whatever is going to happen is really here now--if only one could see it. And when one is taken by surprise the tendency is not to say with the untrained man, "Now, who'd ha' thought it?" but "Now, what was it we overlooked?" Everything that has ever existed or that will ever exist is here--for anyone who has eyes to see. But some of it demands eyes of superhuman penetration. Some of it is patent; we are almost as certain of next Christmas and the tides of the year 1960 and the death before 3000 A.D. of everybody now alive as if these things had already happened. Below that level of certainty, but still at a very high level of certainty, there are such things as that men will probably be making aeroplanes of an improved pattern in 1950, or that there will be a through railway connection between Constantinople and Bombay and between Baku and Bombay in the next half-century. From such grades of certainty as this, one may come down the scale until the most obscure mystery of all is reached: the mystery of the individual. Will England presently produce a military genius? or what will Mr. Belloc say the day after to-morrow? The most accessible field for the prophet is the heavens; the least is the secret of the jumping cat within the human skull. How will so-and-so behave, and how will the nation take it? For such questions as that we need the subtlest guesses of all. Yet, even to such questions as these the sharp, observant man may risk an answer with something rather better than an even chance of being right.