What is Coming? A Forecast of Things after the WarWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
What is Coming? A Forecast of Things after the War
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
World War, 1914-1918; World politics
There will be no end until these profit-makings are arrested. The
necessary "conscriptions of property" must come about in Great Britain
because there is no alternative but failure in the war, and the British
people will not stand failure. I believe that the end of the war will
see, not only transit, but shipping, collieries, and large portions of
the machinery of food and drink production and distribution no longer
under the administration of private ownership, but under a sort of
provisional public administration. And very many British factories will
be in the same case.
Two years ago no one would have dared to prophesy the tremendous
rearrangement of manufacturing machinery which is in progress in Britain
to-day. Thousands of firms of engineers and manufacturers of all sorts,
which were flourishing in 1914, exist to-day only as names, as shapes,
as empty shells. Their staffs have been shattered, scattered,
reconstructed; their buildings enlarged and modified; their machinery
exchanged, reconstituted, or taken. The reality is a vast interdependent
national factory that would have seemed incredible to Fourier.
It will be as impossible to put back British industrialism into the
factories and forms of the pre-war era as it would be to restore the
Carthaginian Empire. There is a new economic Great Britain to-day,
emergency made, jerry-built no doubt, a gawky, weedy giant, but a giant
who may fill out to such dimensions as the German national system has
never attained. Behind it is an _idea_, a new idea, the idea of the
nation as one great economic system working together, an idea which
could not possibly have got into the sluggish and conservative British
intelligence in half a century by any other means than the stark
necessities of this war.... Great Britain cannot retrace those steps
even if she would, and so she will be forced to carry this process of
reconstruction through. And what is happening to Great Britain must,
with its national differences, be happening to France and Russia. Not
only for war ends, but for peace ends, behind the front and sustaining
the front, individualities are being hammered together into common and
concerted activities.
At the end of this war Great Britain will find herself with this great
national factory, this great national organisation of labour, planned,
indeed, primarily to make war material, but convertible with the utmost
ease to the purposes of automobile manufacture, to transit
reconstruction, to electrical engineering, and endless such uses.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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