Certain minor considerations weigh against the idea that this history that follows is merely the imaginative dreaming of a brilliant publicist. I put them before the reader, but I will not press them. First of all this history has now received a certain amount of confirmation. The latest part of the MS. dates from September 20th, 1930, and much of it is earlier. And yet it alludes explicitly to the death of Ivar Kreuger28 a year later, to the tragic kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby,29 which happened in the spring of 19 3 2, to the Mollison world flights30 of the same year, to the American debt discussions in December 1932,31 to the Hitlerite regime in Germany,32 the Japanese invasion of China proper in 1933,33 the election of President Roosevelt II,34 and the World Economic Conference in London.35 These anticipations in detail I find a little difficult to explain away. I do not think that they are of such a nature that they could have been foretold. They are not events that were deducible from any preceding situation. How could Raven have known about them in 1930?

  And another thing that troubles me much more than it will trouble the reader is the fact that there was no reason at all why Raven should have attempted a mystification upon me. There was no reason on earth or in heaven why he should have lied about the way in which this material came to him and he wrote it down.

  If it were not for these considerations, I think I should be quite prepared to fall in with what will no doubt be the general opinion, that the writing of this History was deliberately chosen by Raven as an imaginative outlet. That it is indeed a work of fiction by a late member of the Geneva Secretariat with unusual opportunities for forming judgements upon the trend of things. Or, let us say, a conditional prophecy in the Hebrew manner36 produced in a quasi-inspired mood. The style in which it is written is recognizably Raven’s style, and there are few of those differences in vocabulary and locutions that one might reasonably expect in our language a hundred and seventy-odd years from now. On the other hand, the attitude revealed is entirely inconsistent with Raven’s fully conscious public utterances. The idiom of thought at least is not his, whatever the idiom of expression. Either his marginal vision transcended his waking convictions or we have here a clear case of suppressions making their way to the surface.

  The centre of perspective in this history is as remote from Geneva as it can well be. It floats in a rarer and wider air than the tired atmosphere of that mountain-girdled lake. Its scope is extravagantly wider and uncompromising, and Geneva is above all a place for arrangements and bargaining. Officially Raven was a believer in and a supporter of the League of Nations. The writer of the history details the life and death of the League of Nations with unconcealed contempt and tells of its inglorious end. The attitude towards existing institutions and the leading personalities of today affects me as outrageous. My editorial pen has had some prolonged hesitations between what I consider to be my duty to my author and my regard for one or two distinguished friends. The reader may well ask in dismay: ‘Is this what posterity will think of them?’

  Or alternatively: ‘Is this what Raven really thought of the world?’ One name alone among those who have been prominent in our time escapes to a certain extent the indictment of this history – the name of Nicolai Lenin.37 And this although this grim history presently reveals the arrest and relative failure of the creative impulse in Russia. An immense pity pervades this long record of the battle of reason with ignoble folly – there is no other book in the world so full of pity, unless it be Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man38 – but all the admiration is for obscure dispositions in ordinary minds and for the work and sacrifices of anonymous men and women. This is a history of unknown heroes. Is that what history is going to be?

  There are three possible views about this book. Either it may be a cold-blooded fabrication of Raven’s, which he tried to cheat me into accepting as a sort of revelation – this I reject absolutely – or it is largely a product of his subconscious mind, a work of inspiration, as our fathers would have called it, which came up precisely as he said it came up, to his consciousness between sleeping and waking, perplexing him just as much as I am perplexed by its vividness and assurance. Or, thirdly, it is really what he believed it to be, a part of a universal history for students of the year ad zio6. I cannot decide between the two latter alternatives. But one thing is certain: the third choice, a real history from the perspective of that year, is the form in which it is presented. That is what it claims to be. That, I think, is the spirit in which it can be read most agreeably.

  Accepting it then as a real history, it is still difficult to imagine the type of reader aimed at by the writer (or writers). It is elementary; it is explicit; but it is not written down to a quite young and unfurnished intelligence. It may be designed for use in what a Scottish educationist would call the ‘college’ stage.39 It seems to me to be addressed to a student much better trained in the elements of philosophy and biological science, graver, more alert and keener to learn, than the average youth of today. But it is often quite frankly instructive in its manner. Such a higher level of learner is only what is to be expected from the substance of the record. And there is much more attention given to operating forces and much less to mere events than would be the case in a contemporary students’ history. (It is tantalizing, for instance, to learn of a great London landslide and fire in 1968 only in various passing allusions.) There are studies of typical personalities, but it is relatively very free from anecdotalism. It is much more scientific. There are gaps in this history, but they are not enigmatic gaps. I have made only the barest intimations where these gaps occur. The reader will notice ever and again little jumps of a dozen or a score of years or so.

  I must admit that at first, while I was still under the impression that the whole thing was a speculative exercise, I was tempted to annotate Raven’s text rather extensively. I wanted to take a hand in the game. In fact I did some months’ work upon it. Until my notes were becoming more bulky than his history. But when I revised them I came to the conclusion that many of them were fussy obtrusions and very few of them likely to be really helpful to an intelligent and well-informed contemporary reader. The more attracted he was by the book, the more likely he was to make his observations for himself; the less he appreciated it, the less he was likely to appreciate a superincumbent mass of elucidation. My notes might have proved as annoying as the pencillings one finds at times in public-library books today. If the history is merely a speculative history, even then they would have been impertinent; if there is anything more in it than speculation, then they would be a very grave impertinence indeed. In the end I scrapped the entire accumulation.

  But I have had also to arrange these chapters in order, and that much intervention was unavoidable and must remain. I have had indeed to arrange and rearrange them after several trials, because they do not seem to have been read and written down by Raven in their proper chronological sequence. I have smoothed out the transitions. Later on I hope to publish a special edition of Raven’s notes exactly as he left them.

  We begin here with what is evidently the opening of a fresh book in the history, though it was not actually the first paper in the folders handed to me. It reviews very conveniently the course of worldly events in recent years, and it does so in what is, to me, a novel and very persuasive way. It analyses the main factors of the great war from a new angle. From that review the story of the ‘Age of Frustration’, in the opening years of which we are now living, flows on in a fairly consecutive fashion. Apart from this introduction the period covered by the actual narrative is roughly from about 192.9 ad to the end of the year 2105. The last recorded event is on New Year’s Day 2106; there is a passing mention of the levelling of the remaining ‘skeletons’ of the famous ‘Skyscrapers’ of Lower New York on that date. The printing and publication probably occurred early in the new year; occurred – or should I write ‘will occur’?

  H. G. W.40

  BOOK I

  TODAY AND TOMORROW: THE AGE OF FRUSTRATION DAWNS

  §1 A CHRONOLOGICAL NOTE

  In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the story of mankind upon this planet undergoes a change of phase. It broadens out. It unifies. It ceases to be a tangle of more and more interrelated histories and it becomes plainly and consciously one history. There is a complete confluence of racial, social and political destinies. With that a vision of previously unsuspected possibilities opens to the human imagination. And that vision brings with it an immense readjustment of ideas.

  The first phase of that readjustment is necessarily destructive. The conceptions of life and obligation that have served and satisfied even the most vigorous and intelligent personalities hitherto, conceptions that were naturally partial, sectarian and limited, begin to lose, decade by decade, their credibility and their directive force. They fade, they become attenuated. It is an age of increasing mental uneasiness, of forced beliefs, hypocrisy, cynicism, abandon and impatience. What has been hitherto a final and impenetrable background of conviction in the Tightness of the methods of behaviour characteristic of the national or local culture of each individual becomes, as it were, a dissolving and ragged curtain. Behind it appear, vague and dim at first, and refracted and distorted by the slow dissolution of the traditional veils, the intimations of the type of behaviour necessary to that single world community in which we live today.

  Until the Chronological Institute has completed its present labours of revision and defined the cardinal dates in our social evolution, it is best to refer our account of the development of man’s mind and will throughout this hectic period of human experience to the clumsy and irrelevant computation by centuries before and after the Christian Era that is still current. As we have explained more fully in a previous book [Nothing of this is to be found in Raven’s notes. … ED.], we inherit this system of historical pigeonholes from Christendom; that arbitrary chequerwork of hundred-year blocks was imposed upon the entire Mediterranean and Atlantic literatures for two thousand years, and it still distorts the views of history of all but the alertest minds. The young student needs to be constantly on his guard against its false divisions. As Peter Lightfoot has remarked, we talk of the ‘eighteenth century’, and we think of fashions and customs and attitudes that are characteristic of a period extending from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1642 CE 1 [Christian Era]2 to the Napoleonic collapse in 1815 CE3 we talk of the ‘nineteenth century’, and the pictures and images evoked are those of the gas-lighting and steam-transport era, from after the distressful years of post-Napoleonic recovery to the immense shock of the World War in 1914 CE 4 The phase ‘twentieth century’, again, calls forth images of the aeroplane, the electrification of the world and so forth; but an aeroplane was an extremely rare object in the air until 1914 (the first got up in 1905),5 and the replacement of the last steam railway train and the last steamship was not completed until the nineteen-forties. It is a tiresome waste of energy to oblige each generation of young minds to learn first of all in any unmeaning pattern of centuries and then to correct that first crude arrangement, so that this long-needed revision of our chronology is one that will be very welcome to every teacher. Then from the very outset he or she will be able to block out the story of our race in significant masses.

  The Chronological Institute is setting about its task with a helpful publicity, inviting discussion from every angle. It is proposing to divide up as much of the known history of our race as is amenable to annual reckoning into a series of eras of unequal length. Naturally the choice of these eras is the cause of some extremely lively and interesting interchanges; most of us have our own private estimates of the values of events, and many issues affecting the earlier civilized communities remain in a state of animated unsettlement. Our chronology is now fairly sure as to the year for most important events in the last 4,000 years, and, thanks largely to the minute and patient labours of the Selwyn-Cornford Committee for Alluvial Research, to the decade for another hundred centuries. So far as the last 3,000 years are concerned, little doubt remains now that the main dividing points to be adopted will be first the epoch of Alexander and the Hellenic conquests6 which will begin the phase of the great Helleno-Latin monetary imperialism in the Western World, the Helleno-Latin Era. This will commence at the crossing of the Hellespont by Alexander the Great7 and end either with the Battle of the Yarmuk (636 CE)8 or the surrender of Jerusalem to the Caliph Omar (638 CE).9 Next will come the epoch of Moslem and Mongol pressure on the West which opened the era of feudal Christendom vis-a-vis with feudal Islam: the Era of Asiatic Predominance. This ends with the Battle of Lepanto (1571CE ).10 Then thirdly there will follow the epoch of the Protestant and the Catholic (counter) Reformations,11 which inaugurated the era of the competing sovereign states with organized standing armies: the Era of European Predominance, or, as it may also be called, the Era of National Sovereignty. Finally comes the catastrophe of the World War of 1914, when the outward drive of the new economic methods the Atlantic civilizations had developed gave way under the internal stresses of European nationalism. That war, and its long-drawn sequelae, released the human mind to the potentialities and dangers of an imperfectly Europeanized world … a world which had unconsciously become one single interlocking system, while still obsessed by the Treaty of Westphalia and the idea of competing sovereign states. This mental shock and release marks the beginning of the Era of the Modern State. The opening phase of this latest era is this Age of Frustration with which we are now about to deal. That is the first age of the Era of the Modern State. A second age, but not a new era, began with the Declaration of Megeve which was accepted by the general common sense of mankind forty-seven years ago. This closed the Age of Frustration, which lasted therefore a little short of a century and a half.

  The date upon the title-page for the first publication of this History is 2106 CE. Before many editions have been exhausted that will be changed to Modern Era (me) 19Z or me 189 or me 187, according to whether our chronologists decide upon 1914, the date of the outbreak of the Great War, or 1917, the beginning of the social revolution in Russia,12 or 1919, the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, as the conclusive opening of the Age of Frustration and the conflict for world unity. The second date seems at present to be the more practicable one.

  In 1914 CE the concept of an organized world order did not seem to be within the sphere of human possibility; in 1919 CE it was an active power in a steadily increasing proportion of human brains. The Modern State had been conceived. It was germinating. One system, the Soviet system in Russia,13 was already claiming to be a world system. To most of the generation which suffered it, the Great War seemed to be purely catastrophe and loss; to us who see those hideous years in perspective and in proportion to the general dullness and baseness of apprehension out of which that conflict arose, the destruction of life and substance, unprecedented as they were, has none of that overwhelming quality. We see it as a clumsy, involuntary release from outworn assumptions by their reduction to tragic absurdity, and as a practically unavoidable step therefore in the dialectic of human destiny.

  §2 HOW THE IDEA AND HOPE OF THE MODERN

  STATE FIRST APPEARED

  The essential difference between the world before the Great War and the world after it lay in this, that before that storm of distress and disillusionment the clear recognition that a worldwide order and happiness, in spite of contemporary distresses, was within the reach of mankind was confined to a few exceptional persons, while after the catastrophe it had spread to an increasing multitude, it had become a desperate hope and desire, and at last a working conviction that made organized mass action possible.

  Even those who apprehended this idea before the epoch of the Great War seem to have propounded it with what impresses us today as an almost inexplicable timidity and feebleness. Apart from the great star of Shelley, which shines the brighter as his successors dwindle in perspective, there is a flavour of unreality about all these pre-war assertions of a possible world order. In most of them the Victorian terror of ‘extravagance’ is dominant, and the writer simpers and laughs at his own suggestions in what was evidently supposed to be a very disarming manner. Hardly any of these prophets dared believe in their own reasoning. Maxwell Brown has recently disinterred a pamphlet, The Great Analysis, dated 1912,1 in which a shrewd and reasoned forecast of the primary structure of the Modern State, quite amazingly prescient for the time, was broached with the utmost timidity, without even an author’s name. It was a scheme to revolutionize the world, and the writer would not put his name to it, he confesses, because it might make him ridiculous.*

  Maxwell Brown’s entertaining Modern State Prophets Before the Great War is an exhaustive study of the psychological processes by which this idea, which is now the foundation of our contemporary life, gradually ousted its opposite of combative patriotism and established itself as a practicable and necessary form of action for men of good-will a century and a half ago. He traces the idea almost to its germ; he shows that its early manifestations, so far from being pacific, were dreams of universal conquest. He tells of its age-long struggle with everyday usage and practical common sense. In the first of his huge supplementary volumes he gives thousands of quotations going back far beyond the beginnings of the Christian Era. All the monotheistic religions were, in spirit, World-State religions. He examines the Tower of Babel myth3 as the attempt of some primordial cosmopolitan, some seer before the dawn, to account for the divisions of mankind. (There is strong reason now for ascribing this story to Emesal Gudeka of Nippur, the early Sumerian fabulist.)

  Maxwell Brown shows how the syncretic religious developments, due to the growth of the early empires and the official pooling of gods, led necessarily to monotheism. From at least the time of Buddha4 onward the sentiment of, if not the living faith in, human brotherhood always existed somewhere in the world. But its extension from a mere sentiment and a fluctuating sympathy for the stranger to the quality of a practicable enterprise was a very recent process indeed. The necessary conditions were not satisfied.