Faith, Morals, and Public Policy in The Twentieth Century

Anticipations, by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. Faith, Morals, and Public Policy in The Twentieth Century

Faith, Morals, and Public Policy in The Twentieth Century

If the surmise of a developing New Republic—a Republic that must ultimately become a World State of capable rational men, developing amidst the fading contours and colours of our existing nations and institutions—be indeed no idle dream, but an attainable possibility in the future, and to that end it is that the preceding Anticipations have been mainly written, it becomes a speculation of very great interest to forecast something of the general shape and something even of certain details of that common body of opinion which the New Republic, when at last it discovers and declares itself, will possess. Since we have supposed this New Republic will already be consciously and pretty freely controlling the general affairs of humanity before this century closes, its broad principles and opinions must necessarily shape and determine that still ampler future of which the coming hundred years is but the opening phase. There are many processes, many aspects of things, that are now, as it were, they will regard the whole of being, within themselves and without, as the sufficient revelation of God to their souls, and they will set themselves It will tolerate no[Pg 316] dark corners where the people of the Abyss may fester, no vast diffused slums of peasant proprietors, no stagnant plague-preserves. Whatever men may come into its efficient citizenship it will let come—white, black, red, or brown; the efficiency will be the test. And the Jew also it will treat as any other man. It is said that the Jew is incurably a parasite on the apparatus of credit. If there are parasites on the apparatus of credit, that is a reason for the legislative cleaning of the apparatus of credit, but it is no reason for the special treatment of the Jew. If the Jew has a certain incurable tendency to social parasitism, and we make social parasitism impossible, we shall abolish the Jew, and if he has not, there is no need to abolish the Jew. We are much more likely to find we have abolished the Caucasian solicitor. I really do not understand the exceptional attitude people take up against the Jews. There is something very ugly about many Jewish faces, but there are Gentile faces just as coarse and gross. The Jew asserts himself in relation to his nationality with a singular tactlessness, but it is hardly for the English to blame that. Many Jews are intensely vulgar in dress and bearing, materialistic in thought, and cunning and base in method, but no more so than many Gentiles. The Jew is mentally and physically precocious, and he ages and dies sooner than the average European, but in that and in a certain disingenuousness he is simply on all fours with the short,[Pg 317] dark Welsh. He foregathers with those of his own nation, and favours them against the stranger, but so do the Scotch. I see nothing in his curious, dispersed nationality to dread or dislike. He is a remnant and legacy of mediævalism, a sentimentalist, perhaps, but no furtive plotter against the present progress of things. He was the mediæval Liberal; his persistent existence gave the lie to Catholic pretensions all through the days of their ascendency, and to-day he gives the lie to all our yapping "nationalisms," and sketches in his dispersed sympathies the coming of the world-state. He has never been known to burke a school. Much of the Jew's usury is no more than social scavenging. The Jew will probably lose much of his particularism, intermarry with Gentiles, and cease to be a physically distinct element in human affairs in a century or so. But much of his moral tradition will, I hope, never die.... And for the rest, those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency?

The world has a purpose greater than happiness;[Pg 318] our lives are to serve God's purpose, and that purpose aims not at man as an end, but works through him to greater issues.... This, I believe, will be the distinctive quality of the New Republican's belief. And, for that reason, I have not even speculated whether he will hold any belief in human immortality or no. He will certainly not believe there is any post mortem state of rewards and punishments because of his faith in the sanity of God, and I do not see how he will trace any reaction between this world and whatever world there may be of disembodied lives. Active and capable men of all forms of religious profession to-day tend in practice to disregard the question of immortality altogether. So, to a greater degree, will the kinetic men of the coming time. We may find that issue interesting enough when we turn over the leaf, but at present we have not turned over the leaf. On this side, in this life, the relevancy of things points not in the slightest towards the immortality of our egotisms, but convergently and overpoweringly to the future of our race, to that spacious future, of which these weak, ambitious Anticipations are, as it were, the dim reflection seen in a shallow and troubled pool.

About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books.

This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (2006). Anticipations Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human life and Thought. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, from

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at , located at