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LALIGRARY OF THE

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A FORECAST

OF THE WORLD'S
AFFAIRS

 

 

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By
H.G.WELLS

Author of
The Outline of History

oP

 

 

 

 

   

Together with Some Account of

ny hese Eventlul Years

The Twentieth Century in the Making as
Told by Many of its MakersWhat the Foremost Men

of our Time really Think

ace leaders of men and of thought have co-

operated in an unusual enterprise. They deter-
mined to make a concerted attack on present day
ignorance, concealment and propaganda. These
men have written the truth as they see it.

The result is a brilliant challenging book—These
Eventful Years. It is a narrative of the eventful
years of this century told by the makers of current
history. It tells what has happened in every field
of endeavor, art, science, world politics.

**These Eventful Years”’

These Eventful Years is a book that will cause
discussion, argument, denunciation. But every

American interested in the facts of our civilization
will read this book.

 

Men Who Made This Book

A Forecast of the Future H. G. Wells
Germany Never Defeated

Gen. Ludendorff
Dynamic Italy Ex-Premier Nitti
Anglo-American Relations Col. House
Psychical Research Sir Oliver Lodge
Propagan Bertrand Russell
Social Unrest Philip Snowden
Decay of the Drama’ St. John Ervine
Hidden Recesses of the Mind

Sigmund Freud
Big Business Chas. M. Schwab
Woman’s Progress Lady Rhondda

Radium Discoveries Mme. Curle
Modern Poetry John Gould Fletcher
Our Own Times J. L. Garvin
Victorious France Gen. Mangin

20th Century Literature

Henry Seldel Canb
America at War Frank H. Simonds
Belgium Brand Whitlock

 
   
     
 
 
 
 
  
  
 
    
  
   
  
   
   
 
  
  
   
  
  

Ireland’s Problem Sir Horace Plunkett
Scandinavia eorg Brandes
Maximilian Harden

There is urgent need to break through the bar-

nurs of feapyanee, inertia and deception. That is League of Nations “Leon Bourgsels
China ellington Koo

e purpose o ese Eventful Years. ae free es
Here you have what the great men of our age U-Boat Warfare Von Tirpitz

really think, expressed without filtering—a book for ae sen

mental grown-ups. |
With J. L. Garvin, “the greatest journalist of

modern times,” you will pass in review all the amazing panorama of contemporary life

and history; with H. G. Wells, you put on the mantle of prophecy and peer into the

future; with Maximilian Harden, Ludendorff and Von Tirpitz you will get a new
insight into the collapse of Germany.

 

 

Greatest Contemporary Minds In One Book

Henry Seidel Canby reviews 20th Century literature, St. John Ervine, the Drama,
Clive Bell discusses Modern Art, John Gould Fletcher, the New Poetry; Henry T.
Finck, Music. Every phase of modern life is frankly criticised. Bertrand Russell
exposes the sordid story of propaganda; Philip Snowden, Chancellor of the Exchequer,
reveals the real aims of Labor; Madame Curie tells her own story of the discovery of
radium and its revolutionary results; J. Arthur Thomson writes on the amazing
achievements of Science; while such men as Sir Oliver Lodge, Sigmund Freud,
Wellington Koo, Sir Horace Plunkett, Ambassador Hanihara, Brand Whitlock, and a
score of others, add their contribution.

All this can now be yours—in two volumes of 700 pages each—profusely illustrated
with 160 full plates and numerous maps.

“These Eventful Years”

The Book of The Century

Lloyd George calls These Eventful Years “an invaluable addition to the records of
the 20th Century.” Senator Carter Glass says that it is a “unique and invaluable
publication.” James Harvey Robinson, author of “Mind In The Making,” states that

“it far exceeds all reasonable expectations and should raise our thinking to a new and
higher plane.”

19-EBe Ge We EsA Forecast
of the World’s Affairs

By H. G. WELLS
Author of The Outline of History

Together with Some Account of
THESE EVENTFUL YEARS—the
Twentieth Century in the Making
as told by many of tts Makers

THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA
NEW YORK LONDONa
A\S
Wa
yo}

Copyright in the United States of America 1924, 1925
by

Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

 

Copyright
in all countries subscribing to the
Bern Convention
by
The Encyclopedia Britannica Company, Ltd.
All Rights Reserved.TO THE READER

& R. Wells began his career as a sci-
4 entist; then for twenty years he was

: B best known as a novelist; recently
he published a history of man’s life on the
elobe, and this history is more widely read than
the works of Macaulay, Hume, Gibbon, Ban-
croft, Fiske and a dozen other well-known
historians combined.

Finally Mr. Wells comes to us as a prophet,
forecasting the probable course of events in
the years to come. As such his writing has all
the charm and fascination that belongs to his
stories and to his history. The essay that
follows, which we know the reader will enjoy,
dips ‘‘into the future far as human eye can
see” and foretells the things that are to be.
It appears also as one of the chapters in THESE
EveNTFUL YEARS—a new book just issued
by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.—and
forms a brilliant and challenging contribution
to that work.

TuEse EveNTFUL YEARS is unquestionably
one of the most interesting and important
books published in many years. It is a history
of our own times, written by many of the men
who have had an important part in the direc-
tion of affairs in the eventful years of this
century. No book of the size has ever been

C5]published to which so many and such eminent
men and women have contributed.

The reader of THESE EvENTFUL Years will
find in it not only an interesting and stimula-
ting record of the events of recent years, but
he will have brought home to him the momen-
tous character of those events and their far-
reaching consequences. These consequences
will not only influence the whole course of
history for centuries to come, but will affect
each and every one of us personally.

If we would not be mere chips floating on
the river of time, drifting hither and thither
with the tide and the current, ignorant of the
why and wherefore of our movements, we
must know the truth regarding these momen-
tous times. To tell it to us is the purpose and
aim of THese Eventrut Years. All intelli-
gent men and women, and especially the
younger generation, should for their own sake
‘read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” a
book which will help them to understand the
current of recent and future events.

The marginal comments accompanying the
essay of Mr. Wells will convey some slight
idea of the remarkable scope and interest of
Tuese Eventrut Years, regarding which
more detailed information will be found at the
back of the booklet.

THE PUBLISHERS

C6]© Brown Bros.

Nikolai Lenin, the chief agent in establishing the Bolshevist régime in Russia addressing a street
crowd on a First of May celebration.

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© Underwood & Underwood
Nicholas, once Tsar of all the Russias, as he appeared
during his captivity at Tsarskoe Selo after the first
Revolution. With the accession of Lenin his doom
was sealed; and he and his entire family were
assassinated July 16, 1918.A MEETING OF THE CREDITORS

 

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elA FORECAST

OF THE WORLD’S AFFAIRS
by
H. G. WELLs,

Author of 4 Modern Utopia, Mr. Britling Sees it Through,
The Outline of History, etc.

1. HISTORY A RECORD OF HUMAN ASSOCIATIONS,
NOT OF THE DOINGS OF HEROES

SCIENCE is not an account of facts but a criti-
cism and analysis of facts, and history in so
far as it is a science is not a mere record of
events but an analysis of the relationship of
events. It is an analysis of the main opera-
ting causes that determine the general flow of
human affairs. It is therefore not merely
legitimate for historians to attempt forecasts
of the general trend of events in the future, but
not to attempt them is a frank confession
of the futility of history.

The elementary form of history, if we strip
it of merely narrative and anecdotal accre-
tions, is an account of the development and
fortunes of human associations. Necessarily
great masses of biographical material accumu-
late round any historical record. Human
lives give history a dramatic interest. But

eva

THE marginal com-
ments below are inter-
esting sidelights on Mr.
Wells’s essay. Many
of them are from
“These Eventful
Years”, of whicn this
essay forms one of the
eighty-four brilliant
chapters.

Professor Shotwell
states that it would re-
quire over two hundred
miles of shelving to file
the documents of value
on the World War

alone.E

Ln nh A I tT

 

    
 
  
   
   
   
      
  
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
 
  
  
  
   
 
  
  
  
  

Art and literature are
the first to cease in war
time. Mr. St. John
Ervine, who contri-
buted to “‘ These Event-
ful Years” the chapter
on Zhe Decay of the
Drama, says in this
connection that in the
War of Culture (Kul-
tur), culture was the
first casualty.

H. G. WE tts and Bert-
rand Russell do not
agree on many points,
but they are at one in
regarding most history
as propaganda. Bert-
rand Russell contri-
butes a chapter to
“These Eventful Years”
on the subject of Gov-
ernment by Propaganda,
in which he shows viv-
idly the uses and menace
of propaganda.

 

A Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

taking it by and large the course of history has
not been dependent on individuals; individual
lives may become extraordinarily prominent
and indicative of the determining causes be-
neath, but only as floating objects and eddies
are indicative of the general flow of a stream.
And again the achievements of art, literature
and so forth are products of human associa-
tions; but they are not even the sought-after
end of such associations, and they pass out of
consideration as we simplify down our en-
quiries to the essential outlines of the human
story.

We are writing here of history as a science,
and with a view to extracting some reasonable
forecast from it. History as it is generally
understood is by no means a scientific process,
and this main thesis of scientific history, the
development of associations, is still treated as
a secondary or background matter in weaving
the picturesque tapestry of romantically con-
ceived narrative. The dominant tradition of
historical writing is still the literary tradi-
tion. The influence of Herodotus, that
romantic propagandist, is still powerful in our
academic world, and erudite but unanalytic
scholars continue to paint the record after the
fashion of an Egyptian wall-painting with
hosts of little armies and common-men run-
ning about beneath the feet of large and
sprawling heroes—heroes manufactured ac-
cording to the historian’s fancy out of this or
that character in the mélée. But as our his-
tory ceases to be romantic and becomes

C81Copyright reserved for artist or owner by Walter Judd, Ltd. From a Painting by W. L. Wyllie, R.

The daring attack on the German submarine bases at Zeebrugge and Ostend on the Belgian
coast in 1918 with the object of blocking both harbours. No fewer than nine V. C.’s were
awarded for extreme gallantry in this bold and hazardous enterprise.© Keystone }

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The opening in Belfast of the New Parliament for Northern Ireland in 1921 by their Majesties
King George and Queen Mary.

D. Lloyd George
Austen Chamber-
lain

Birkenhead

Winston S.
Churchill

L. Worthington-
Evans

Hamar Green-
wood

Gordon Hewart.

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The famous treaty for the establishment of the Irish Free
State, signed in London, December 6, 1921.
signatures of the Irish delegates.

Note the Gaelic

Arthur Griffith

Michael Collins
a rt Barton
E. J. Duggan

Gavan Duffy

British signature;

are in the lef
column; Irish ir
the right.A Forecast of the World's Affairs

scientific this distinction of hero figures must
give place to an austerer treatment, and
history must reconstruct itself like any other
science upon a classification, a classification
of human associations under distinctive types.
Our subject then becomes an examination
of the possibilities inherent in each type.

History, which has hitherto had a quality
of picturesque and multitudinous incoherence,
begins under this treatment to assume a
definite outline. The outline of the world’s
history becomes a study of the development of
the sub-conscious human herd, by the en-
largement of speech and tradition and the
establishment of inhibitions and taboos, into
the human tribe, the resort to the taming of
animals and the cultivation of food, and so
on to the growth of larger and larger com-
munities under the influence of continually
widening and more powerful traditions and
as a result of the more abundant and stabilised
food supply of the herdsman and cultivator.
The main bulk of human history is essentially
the story of the reaction of human instinct
and traditions to new and more effective
methods of writing, computation and record
generally involving an increasing inlensily of
communication, and to new and more effec-
tive methods of transport involving an in-
creasing range of communication. The pic-
ture record, numbering and mnemonic signs,
writing, the boat, the ship, and later the
horse and mule, come into the story, thrust-
ing mankind, almost unaware of what is

oH

  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
   

ProFEssOR BREASTED,
the eminent archae-
ologist, compares wor-
ship of the primitive
cultures of the past to
the folly of a thirsty
individual who would,
on a hot day, lie down
under an acorn and re-
gale himself with a
single watermelon seed.

Tuis reaction of human
instinct to increasing
facilities for communi-
cation is what Professor
J. Arthur Thompson
means by the Aumanis-
ing of instinct, as he dis-
cusses this topic in his
extremely interesting
chapter in “These
Eventful Years” on
What Science Can Do
For Man,Few subjects are more
fascinating than the
story of early man’s
progress as he adds one
invention to another.
In “These Eventful
Years”’ Professor James
H. Breasted tells us this
story. It will be a rev-
elation to even’ the
best-informed reader to
learn that fwenty fun-
damental inventions
used today were made
by the ancient Egyp-

tians.

In corroboration of Mr.
Wells’s words, there is
the fact that pyramids
were built in America
as well as in Egypt.
These American pyra-
mids and the other
marvelous remains of
early civilisation in the
New World are de-
scribed in “These
Eventful Years” by
Marshall H. Saville,
Professor of American
Archaeology at Colum-
bia University.

A Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

happening, into possibilities of wider, more
massive and more powerful reactions, and
ultimately to the establishment of wider and
more powerful communities. Bronze weapons
succeeded stone, and iron, bronze; and weap-
ons also are a means of communication be-
tween man and man and force them to attend
to one another. It is only when two men are
easily capable of killing each other at any
time that the necessity of a standing agree-
ment, a law, and the maintenance of mutual
confidence is really brought home to them.

This general development of human inter-
actions is, we repeat, the body of human
history. Kings, dynasties, armies and nations
appear and pass and are indeed no more than
bubbles
and splendid bubbles—showing the swirl of
the forces beneath but being in themselves
neither creative nor directive. Had there
been no Cheops nor Cephrenes there would
still have been pyramids; had there been no
Hammurabi there would still have been codes
of law.

And when we get history out of the anec-
dotal and hero-worshipping traditions of the
old historians; when we realise the supremacy
of those numerous ingenious, curious and
altogether forgotten people who devised
letters and the plough, launched the first
ships, mingled horse and ass and set bales on
the backs of mules; when we realise their
supremacy as makers of history over the con-
querors and great thinkers and so forth with

C10]

sometimes, it is true, very iridescentA Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

whom our Histories are rubricated, then it is
possible for us to take up the vast tangle of
record which constitutes These Eventful Years
with some hope of extracting a possible and
acceptable forecast of the history of the com-
ing years.

2. HUMAN POSSIBILITIES BEYOND THE
DREAMS OF UTOPIANS

Now in its most general form the world situ-
ation as we have it to-day is a complicated
conflict of very powerful social and political
traditions on the one hand, against a spread-
ing tide of new knowledge and an unprece-
dented onrush of new inventions that are
entirely incompatible with these social and
political traditions that still dominate men’s
minds. Social and political traditions turn
to the past, and generally it is an idealised
past, for their sanctions; these new forces
that attack them point steadily to the recon-
struction of human society as a single world-
system. They insist upon that goal; they
threaten to attack human happiness more and
more ruthlessly until that goal is reached.

The forces of change express themselves
now in a various multitude of devices and
expedients, telegraphy and telephony, cheap
paper, more rapid and efficient printing; in
the wide diffusion of elementary knowledge
and in the steady increase of the security,
swiftness and quantitative capacity of trans-
port by land and sea and air, and also in an
enormously increased range of military de-

Cllq

“THESE EVENTFUL
YeEarS strikes me as a
noble editorial concep-
tion, splendidly carried
out.”—Ida M. Tarbell,
biographer, writer and
lecturer,

Many people today
turn, like Sir Oliver
Lodge, from a dark
present to a_ brighter
hope in the future.
Sir Oliver states in his
chapter in ‘These
Eventful Years” that
he is convinced some
kind of help, guidance
ot inspiration reaches
us from the invisible
world across ‘‘the
veil”,Wor cp health control is
admirably discussed in
“‘These Eventful Years”
by Dr. Ray Lyman
Wilbur, President of
Stanford University. In
The Harvest Time in
Medicine and Surgery,he
shows how mass medi-
cine has_ eliminated
many terrible diseases
that formerly decimated

whole populations.

James R. ANGELL, Pres-
ident of Yale Univer-
sity, describes in strik-
ing fashion the remark-
able growth of educa-
tion in recent years.
His Democratic Tenden-
cies in Education is one
of the most significant
chapters in “These
Eventful Years”.

 

A Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

structiveness; they give us not only air travel
but air weapons which abolish frontiers and
war fronts and so bring in every living citizen
as a combatant; they give us submarine
weapons which abolish an effective domina-
tion of the sea by either party in a war and
threaten to destroy the entire shipping of the
world.

Another group of forces more recent in
origin and yielding as yet only vague intima-
tions of their ultimate effect on human com-
munities are new possibilities of world health
control and particularly of world birth control,
which revolutionise every question arising
out of the pressure of population in the
mutual reaction of states. As yet, moreover,
we have scarcely exploited at all the great
advances that have been made in individual
and collective psychology, knowledge which
is bound to be applied to education and which
must ultimately bring the process of educa-
tion into quite a new relationship with the
social and political organisation of the com-
munity. Some of these things point by way
of facility to newer and wider and happier
methods in the human community; others,
by way of the development of a destructive-
ness inconceivable to our forefathers, press
towards the enlargement of our community
as a necessary precaution against possible
and unendurable miseries, but all press
towards enlargement and a bolder and greater
conception of law and government. All these
forces together, by way of good or by way of

C12]A Forecast of the World's Affairs

evil, challenge the human will and intellect to
a comprehensive reorganisation of the world’s
collective affairs. As a reward they hold out
hope of such a state of power, welfare, freedom
and successful effort for our race as even the
boldest of Utopians never dared to dream of
before these days.

But it does not follow that because such
possibilities seem to open out to mankind
that they will ever be realised. The possi-
bilities may be there indeed, but is the will
and the intellect necessary for their realisation
there? It does not follow that in the presence
of these gifts and opportunities and dangers
mankind can go on almost automatically to a
world civilisation. It does not any more than
it would follow that if you took a dozen
quarrelsome children of eight or ten years old
and locked them in a bathroom with a bundle
of adult clothing and a plentiful supply of
sharp razors that they would presently emerge
grown up and clothed and nicely shaved. We
may reap all the evil possibilities in the new
forces before we come to the good. We may
never come to the good. We may prove in-
adequate to realise the good.

Before that onrush of new inventions and
still more disturbing enlightenment which
began four or five centuries ago, there was a
period of comparative unprogressiveness in
human contrivances and resources for over
eighteen hundred years. The new phase
began with such things as book-printing,
gunpowder and the ocean-going sailing-ship.

[13]

An interesting com-
ment on this question
of mankind’s readiness
for a world organisation
is to be found in Mr.
Garvin’s chapter in
“These Eventful
Years’’, where he de-
scribes with character-
istic vividness Mr. Wil-
son’s struggle for the
League of Nations.

Tue astounding multi-
plicity of modern useful
inventions is told by
Harrison E. Howe, edi-
tor of Industrial and
Engineering Chemistry,
in his chapter on Jn-
dustry and Invention in
“These Eventful

”

Years’’,Se ert ae

 

 

   
   
 
   
   
 
 
  
   
 
   
  
  
  
  
  
   
   
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
  
  

“Wirth all due respect
to similar publications
there has not yet ap-
peared a work which is
so informing, so stimu-
lating, and so entertain-
ing as this survey of the
century in which we
play our part.’’—Pro-
FEssOR WiLBuR Cor-
TEz Assotr in The
Bookman.

‘‘So comprehensive are
the two volumes of
‘These Eventful
Years’ that I feel that
a knowledge of their
contents would be a
liberal education.’”’—
MA yronT. Herrick, Amer-
ican Ambassador lo
France.

A Forecast of the World's Affairs

Until these things appeared, the weapons,
transport devices, means of communication,
economic and trade methods and so on had
not altered for all that great length of time.
In the days of Joan of Arc they did not differ
fundamentally from those of the days of
Philip of Macedon when cavalry, drilled
infantry, money as the common medium of
business, were first coming into general use.
Yet throughout all that period human affairs
remained in a state of almost unprogressive
conflict, and were no nearer stability at its
end than at its beginning. During those
eighteen centuries western humanity—and
for that matter eastern humanity—was never
able to arrive at any political organisation
at all. It achieved only a sort of oscillation
between expansion and fragmentation.

At first it seemed as though two great
imperial systems might establish themselves
in the western world, first the Hellenic system
and then, dominating it for a time but never
really incorporating it, the Latin system.
About the time of Christ the two seemed to
have coalesced; the Pax Romana reached from
the English Channel to the Tigris, and a
hopeful man might not unreasonably have
prophesied a thousand years of peace, brother-
hood and development for all mankind north
of the Sahara and west of Central Asia—for
all the known world that was, as the west
knew the world. That hope was vain or it
was premature. For eighteen centuries his-
tory tells of these two attempts at a com-

[14]A Forecast of the World s Affairs

prehensive political order struggling imto
being and falling again into division and war-
ring disorder. The Latin system, first under
Italian, then under French, German and
Spanish predominance, and the Hellenic
under Greeks, under Romans, under Greeks
again and under Turks, wax and wane and
die and come to life again. Each is there
always throughout these eighteen centuries,
and each is always Jaxly and insufficiently
there. Changes of climate, the steady west-
ward drift of the nomadism of Central Asia,
and several other great influences complicate
the story; but the moral for us in this present
enquiry is that even given a cessation of new
inventions, human communities do not neces-
sarily and automatically adjust themselves
socially and politically to their material power
and resources.

It is to be noted that the earlier innova-
tions of this new phase in human affairs which
began in the fifteenth century of the Christian
era, although they greatly increased and facili-
tated human intercourse, made at first for
division rather than codperation among men.
The cheap and rapidly multiplied printed
book lifted great classes of the community
out of blank submissive ignorance about the
world in general to the level of reading,
thought and protest, and if it tended to
destroy local dialects it fixed national lan-
guages and replaced the previous shallow
widespread Latin-speaking common intelli-
gence of Christendom by deeper and fuller

C15 J

THe Hedical Journal
and Record says of the
writers of “These
Eventful Years,” “‘The
chroniclers of the twern-
tieth century in the
making are the actual
figures in its shaping.
They are not writing
men necessarily. They
are something more.
They have lived what
they describe.”

“THESE EVENTFUL
Years is a record and
mirror of our own
times.” — Seattle Intel-
ligencer.Turis fragmentation oc-
casioned by the Re-
formation is not with-
out its counterpart in
modern times. Profes-
sor Shailer Matthews,
writing on Jflodern Re-
ligious Tendencies in
“These Eventful
Years”’, points out that
religion throughout the
world shows a marked
tendency today toward
the formation of nation-
al churches.

THE réle of nationalism
as a fundamental cause
of the World War is
brilliantly described by
Professor Hayes of Col-
umbia University in
“These Eventful

”

Years’”’.

A Forecast of the World's Affairs

pools of vernacular expression and mental
activity. And the pressure towards unity in
Christendom was further relieved by the
ocean-going sailing-ship, which opened up
overseas spheres of adventure and exploita-
tion to every expansive-minded European
people. The middle ages began with a phase
of breaking-up and led on to a partial restora-
tion of unity as Christendom; the Reforma-
tion marks a fresh fragmentation—into the
national states.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
saw a steady development of nationalist
monarchies and a continuous intensification
of the division of Europeans into nations.
The Sultan of Roum still flourished in Con-
stantinople in the eighteenth century in the
seat of Hellenic civilisation, but the empire in
Europe was a poor shadow beside France,
Russia and Britain.

With the first French Revolution and the
career of Napoleon Bonaparte came a transi-
tory break-back to the Empire of Charle-
magne. With the overthrow of Napoleon the
process of nationalism was resumed.

The nineteenth century was before every-
thing else the century of nationalism. Na-
tionalism became a ruling principle in politics;
it became an overpowering sentiment in
men’s minds. The World War arose out of it,
burst over it and left it apparently more
potent than ever. The German, Austrian,
Russian and Turkish Empires disappeared—
and left a kaleidoscope of nations. And this

[16]A Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

in the face of a fresh gathering of material
forces, inventions, devices, appliances and
methods, that all seem to demand political
and economic rearrangement far beyond the
scale of national boundaries and nationalist
limitations.

Our estimate of the forces that are now
making the form of history in the coming
years must depend very largely upon our
estimate of the power of nationalism. We
have seen how the printing-press helped it,
and how to begin with, so far as Europe is
concerned, even the ocean-going sailing-ship
helped it to consolidate mankind into inde-
pendent and hostile communities. Are we
assuming too hastily that the new inventions
that have abolished distance and seem likely to
abolish frontiers will really do so? Or will
nationalism be strong enough to reject their
invitation to unity and progress, to hinder
and arrest and reverse this development so
far as it makes for unity, and to restore and
maintain the ages-long rhythm of war, con-
quest, expansion and fragmentation, as the
permanent condition of human life? Mani-
festly a long struggle between these two forces
lies ahead of us and will determine the history
of the next century. Which group of forces
will be the ascendant one, a hundred years

from now?

3. THE PRESENT NARROW NATIONALISM
LIKELY TO CONTINUE FOR GENERATIONS

Tue factors of nationalism lie deep in human

eal

Tue dramatic breakup
of the German Empire
is depicted in “These
Eventful Years” by
that stormy petrel of
the Fatherland, Max-
imilian Harden, whose
views present a strong
contrast to those of the
unbending Ludendorff.
The title of the latter’s
article, Germany Never
Defeated, tells a story in
itself.

THE inventions of the
past may well be
dwarfed by those of the
future, particularly in
view of the new insight
into nature obtained
through study of the
atom. This whole field
has been opened up by
Madame Curie’s dis-
covery of radium and
the reader of “These
Eventful Years” is
privileged to hear Ma-
dame Curie’s story in
her own words.THE way in which na-
tionalism produced
greater and greater ten-
sion in Austria Hungary
until that empire, under
the pressure of war,
burst into many parts
is told by two Austrian
historians of interna-
tional reputation,
Pribram and_ Brock-

hausen.

Tue part which subli-
mation and suppression
of impulses plays in hu-
man life is treated in
“‘TheseEventful Years”
by Sigmund Freud,
founder of psychoanal-
ysis. He tells of the
origins, basis, and ap-
plications of his new
theories.

 

A Forecast of the World s Affairs

 

nature. The natural man is disposed to fear
and dread a stranger and to do him harm
if he can. He is gregarious, but only in a
small and intimate and familiar group. His
jealousy of everyone outside that group, par-
ticularly of everyone with a marked difference
from that group in colour, language, stature,
or what not, is innate.

One need not go to savage or even barbaric
countries to find the proofs of this. England
will give all the illustrations we need. Bicker-
ing between villages on the part of the hobble-
dehoys and young men lives still in the
memories of old inhabitants in many parts of
England, and race conflicts smoulder per-
petually and sometimes break out into rioting
in many British seaports. A man wants a
side to be on, he wants a party to belong to,
almost as much as a dog or a wolf. He is dis-
tressed without that backing. And it must
be a side or a party within the compass of his
mind. He must be able to feel it as real.
Without education he is as incapable of think-
ing of humanity as his side or party as he
would be of taking refuge in a hut that was
big enough to contain the universe. This
very limited partisanship is as essential in
normal human nature as lust and the occas-
ional impulse to murder are, and as curiosity
and the desire for self-respect are, and it is just
as susceptible to regulation, direction, subli-
mation, suppression or expansion.

It is fairly evident that under the Roman
Empire this tendency of the passion for

C18]A Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

limited gregariousness to take a national form
did not prevail so widely. A few people like
the Jews and the European Greeks seem to
have had something closely analogous to
what we should now call nationalist spirit;
but probably in most regions this set of im-
pulses found its scope at a lower level in civic
or provincial or tribal patriotism and preju-
dice. Few people within the empire seem to
have cared very much for the language they
spoke or for the national dress or national
architecture and so forth. Such an old-
established Carthaginian city as Seville would
be content to see its old Gods respected side
by side with the Roman Gods, and would
tolerate a Roman colony at Italica a mile or
so away without violent resentment. Over
great parts of the empire the pride of being a
Roman citizen was sufficient to override the
concentration of passion upon more parochial
attachments. It gave men a sense of fellow-
ship with the free and influential everywhere,
and of superiority to the ignorant and to the
outer barbarian. These parochial attach-
ments played their réle no doubt, but it was a
rdle in definite subordination to the imperial
idea.

But the idea of Roman citizenship is not
the only universal idea that has struggled to
impose itself upon the vast tangle of human
antagonisms in the Western world. We have
already referred to a second great idea that
went far towards achieving the same end in
Europe, the mediaeval conception of Christen-

peal

It is notable that these
two ancient peoples, the
Jews and the Greeks,
have persisted as
peoples to the present
day and to each is de-
voted a special chapter
in “These Eventful

Years”,

THESE EVENTFUL
Years throws light on
the life of the Romans
as revealed in the latest
excavations at Pompeii.
Among’ the  book’s
numerous interesting
illustrations is an ex-
traordinary aerial
photograph of this
ancient city.“Tue eighty-four chap-
ters of ‘‘These Eventful
Years” form an almost
overwhelming résumé of
modern life.’”’—Jllinois
State Journal.

“THe lessons of the
Communist experiment
teach the futility of try-
ing unduly to force
economic develop-
ment’’.—PHILIP SNOw-
DEN, in “These Event
ful Years”’.

A Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

dom in which indeed a great deal of Roman
imperialism was incorporated. Here again,
as recognisably a greater thing than a man’s
feudal duties and loyalties, was loyalty to the
Church and the Cross. It was of course not a
completely universal idea. Just as _ the
Roman citizen antagonised himself to the
outer barbarian, so the good Christian eased
the passion for partisanship against heretics
and the heathen.

Again in recent days the Communist idea
has transcended nationalism and patriotism
in the minds of a considerable number of
people. It directs men’s imagination towards
a world-wide community of workers. This
Communist idea also is not a completely
universal idea; it conceives of the solidarity of
the wage-earner as antagonised to the private
ownership of the bourgeoisie and the owning
and ruling classes, and it presents its opposi-
tion to nationalism not as an opposition to
nationalism pure and simple, but as though
nationalism was an invention of the wicked
capitalist and had never existed before the
days of capitalism. It ignores and seems to
deny the essential nature of the patriotic
passion in man, and so it assumes a readiness
on the part of the workers of the world to
drop their national differences that has had
no justification in experience. Its attitude is
not one of construction and education but of
liberation. The workers of the world are to
unite and “‘cast off their chains” and all will
be well with mankind. The typical Com-

[20]A Forecast of the World's Affairs

munist cartoon represents the Worker as a
tremendous fellow breaking through some-
thing or gesticulating right out of something.
Communism is a doctrine excellent in its
repudiations and so conceivably it may pave
the way for a wider human order in the future
by clearing away monarchist, aristocratic,
nationalist and proprietary pretensions that
would otherwise hamper the development of
any world-wide reorganisation of human
affairs. It may even be a necessary destruc-
tive force; and before we hear the last of it,
it may extend far beyond the areas where it is
at present ascendant. But in itself it will
make nothing. It may break up and clear
areas for a new order, but it has next to
nothing to build upon these clearings. It has
already been tried and found wanting in Rus-
sia, where the Bolsheviks have shown them-
selves quite astonishingly planless, incapable,
and blind to the tough essentials of untutored
human nature. In comparison with the idea
of Roman citizenship or the idea of the Church
in Christendom, the idea of Communism
carries an extremely light and simple and
largely negative teaching; yet even that has
to be sustained and is sustained by a most
persistent and devoted propaganda. Com-
munism does not break out spontaneously
as a natural thing; it has to be sedulously
made and spread. But what do break out of
natural things are the class hostility and
nationalist hostility to Communist teaching.

A consideration of all these three instances

p21]

“Henry Forp’s plans
would have amounted
to little had he not been
able to build on the
foundation of happy
and satisfied employ-
ees”. — CuHartes M.
ScHwaB, in “These
Eventful Years’’.

TueE failure of the Com-
munist experiment in
Russia here mentioned
by Mr. Wells is further
described by Philip
Snowden, recently
Chancellor of the Ex-
chequer, who contri-
butes to “These Event-
ful Years” an extremely
instructive article on
Social and Revolutionary
Unrest.THE way in which these
“obstinate real natural
things” have triumphed
in our recent past is
shown in an extremely
valuable chapter of
“These Eventful Years”
on The Breakdown of In-
ternational Law by Dr.
James Brown Scott, a
high authority on the
subject.

“Tue little knowledge
imbibed in the primary
school has proved dan-
gerous. The only sound
prescription is a further
application of homeo-
pathic doses.” — Sir
Joun Marriott, in
“These Eventful

Years’’.

A Forecast of the World's Affairs

enforces our argument that ideas of world
peace and world organisation and so forth are
extremely artificial things, things against
nature. The old obstinate real natural things
are the things that make up class, partisan,
and nationalist passion. If mankind is ever
to achieve a new order of life in a world
civilisation, these natural tendencies will have
to be overridden.

They have to be overridden and mitigated,
or else like the native weeds of a soil they will
flourish and fill the land. Tribalism and
nationalism are so to speak the natural things,
and wider and more generous ideas are by
comparison artificial things that have to be
cultivated, cared for and protected. That is
the essential consideration in this enquiry.
They have no more chance to exist, without
such care, than has a field of wheat without
plough or seed. We who have been born into
a state of comparative security and stability
are all far too apt to think of these conditions
as being the perfectly normal and natural
qualities of life instead of their being nothing
more than the result of an infinite industry of
organisation and control in the past.

Now in weighing the prospects of mankind
at this most interesting time, it is of primary
importance for us to recognise that the idea
of a world civilisation as a living possibility
before mankind is confined to quite a limited
number of intellectuals, and that apparently
it is not making any headway with the mass of
mankind at all. The world-wide enthusiasm

[22]A Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

for the League of Nations idea at the end of
the war has evaporated in the face of the dis-
illusioning reality. The development of air
transport, of the possibility of dealing with
the world as one financial and economic
system, the immense general convenience that
would accrue from a world handling of cur-
rency and of main-line land and sea transport
and of the production of staple commodities
has failed as yet to evoke, and shows no signs
at present of evoking, any corresponding
ideals and sentiments in the general body of
people who write, teach, make the newspapers,
and shape the world’s conceptions of action.
Indeed in these more vocal and influential
classes the Communist assertion of inter-
nationalism has produced a sort of terrified
defensive antagonism to conceptions of world
solidarity. And the very science that has
opened up most of these new long-range possi-
bilities has undermined and destroyed the
theological foundation on which such broad
synthetic ideas as those of Christendom and
Islam were based, and so debarred them from
expanding to meet the new occasions. Over-
riding ideas of human unity and human co-
operation on a large scale do not prevail in
the disordered world of to-day any more than
wheat could grow in the wide and fertile fields
of the State of Minnesota before the white
man came, because there was then no one
upon the ground who was disposed to plough
and sow it.

There are no reasons for anticipating the

C23]

Tue World War is de-
scribed in “These
Eventful Years” by
the leading authorities
—Major-General Sir
Frederick Maurice,
General Ludendorff,
General Mangin, Grand
Admiral von Tirpitz,
Admiral Sims, Viscount
Jellicoe, Mr. Frank H.
Simonds, Mr. J. L.
Garvin, and many
others.

ONE of the most hope-
ful passages penned in
modern times is the
concluding paragraph
in J. A. Thomson’s
chapter, What Science
Can Do For Man in
“These Eventful
Years”. Here Profes-
sor Thomson reviews
the marvels that science
has accomplished and
those which it promises
to accomplish in the fu-
ture.“Tue future of sport is
clear. Its trend is inter-
national.’””—LAWRENCE
Perry, in “These
Eventful Years.”

A HOPEFUL feature in
the prospect for world
unity is an amicable
feeling between the
two great English-
speaking nations—the
United States and
Great Britain. In
“These Eventful Years”
Colonel Edward M.
House traces the course
of Anglo-American re-
lations during the pre-
sent century, showing
the possible causes of
discord and the grounds
for optimism.

A Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

effective imposition of this new immense con-
ception of one world civilisation as an idea
overriding all our present clanships, partisan-
ships, race prejudices and national passions,
in the face of this mental irresponsiveness.
What is wanted to achieve a world unity, is
something more than the pious aspirations of
a few intellectuals; what is necessary is a sub-
stitution for the present teaching of patriotic
prejudice in schools, colleges, newspapers,
pulpits, homes and every channel of diffusion
and suggestion, of a teaching at least as effec-
tive and comprehensive of the idea and the
means of realising the idea of a common
world organisation to keep the peace and
exploit the resources of the race and of the
earth collectively in the common interest.
Failing such a change of general direction in
the matter of education we are bound to
assume that the present system of sovereign
states each violently competitive against the
other must continue in the future, however
wasteful and socially destructive, however
monstrous the war possibilities that it must
ultimately realise. World unity may be
thoroughly practicable and quite urgently
desirable, but unless we can see the necessary
effort to attain it really being made, we are
not justified in assuming an anticipation of its
early attainment.

Whatever our dreams and desires and fears
may be we are, I think, forced back to the
conclusion that the present system of com-
peting and warring sovereign states may and

[24 ]© Keystone View Co

The Pan-American Building in Washington, where the meetings of the Washington Disarmament
Conference were held in 1922

 

© Keystone View Co.

The Roosevelt Dam, Salt River, Arizona, built in 1911 at a cost of $4,091,000. It is one of the
largest in the world, being 280 feet high and 1,125 feet in length, with a storage capacity of 425,235
million gailons.Left: Example of a ‘‘zoning envelope,” i.e., the
form inside of which a building under the New
York zoning law must be built. Sketch by Harvey
Wiley Corbett.

st

EEE A OES

saa, Ce

seca

Right: Projected building
under New York’s new zon-
ing law. Helmle and Cor-
bett, architects.

 

© Helmle & Corbett
NEW YORK’S CHANGING SKY-LINE

The purpose of New York’s new zoning law is to prevent the shutting
off of light and air from the street below, as occurs when ‘‘sky-
scrapers” are permitted to ascend in a sheer vertical line from the
pavement. An unexpected result has been immensely to increase
the beauty of the building itself and of the general aspect of the city.A Forecast of the World's Affairs

probably will continue for many generations
to come.

4. THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS NO HELP
TO WORLD UNITY

Tus probability is, for anyone with sufficient
imagination to picture what a real civili-
sation might be, a very melancholy con-
clusion.

There is, however, a possibility that it may
not be a true conclusion. Movements of the
human mind will sometimes gather as rapidly
as a summer thunderstorm and sweep across
the world. Very swift, coming out of a
handful of desert dust, was the onset of Islam;
almost as swift was the storm of the Crusades.

The community of intelligent people and
people of good-will throughout the world may
be a stronger thing than it seems to be in
these dark days. The moving forces in human
life are still for the most part blind or short-
sighted forces; they thrust their way and feel
their way rather than take their plain and
logical way. A force may drive into a blind
alley. It may waste itself for a time upon
inappropriate and misleading forms of expres-
sion. Then it has an effect of becoming con-
fused and baffled. It accepts a temporary
defeat until it finds some new and perhaps
more effective method of realisation. Now
it is hard to estimate what was the real
strength behind the world-wide acclamation
of President Wilson and the League of Nations
in 1918-1919. It is even harder to guess what

[25]

Mr. GarRvIN,who
wrote the introductory
chapters to ‘‘These
Eventful Years’’,
states that white civili-
sation is a broken thing
and that, unless war is
eliminated, all our prog-
ress will be perverted
to a final self-destruc-
tion, making the leg-
end of Frankenstein
the symbol and epitaph
of the white world.

“No, Germany has not
experienced a_ revolu-
tion; she has only fe-
vered through a convul-
sion caused by over-
exertion and fright.” —
MaxiMILIAN HARDEN,
in “These Eventful
Years”’.THE League of Nations
finds an authoritative
spokesman in ‘“‘These
Eventful Years”’, where
its functions and its
achievements are clear-
ly described by Léon
Burgeois, who was
chiefly responsible for
drafting the Covenant
of the League.

“THESE EVENTFUL
YEARS is distinct evi-
dence that history is
safe in the hands of its
contemporaries.’ —

Cleveland Plain Dealer.

  

A Forecast of the World s Affairs

 
  
   
   
    
    
  
 
 
  
  

strength may lie behind the present League
of Nations movement throughout the world,
and how far that may not presently be de-
voted to more hopeful attempts at political
synthesis.

The League of Nations is very typical of
those blind alleys into which creative forces
will sometimes pour themselves to futility.
There can be little doubt that the world-wide
support this organisation still receives is not
due to any very strong belief in its present
constitution but to a rather uncritical desire
for some form, however delusive, of world
unity. In many minds this desire is at once
present and rather hopeless, and so they cling
to this cluster of bureaus, this council of
Foreign-Office agents and this debating society
of second-rate politicians, on the pathetic
supposition that it may presently grow into
something more powerful, fundamentally dif-
ferent and altogether more satisfactory.
It is a hope that the present writer does not
share. The League of Nations as it was con-
ceived by President Wilson and his admirers
and realised at Geneva is planned on funda-
mentally wrong lines. Its well-meaning
founders had no sense of history, no grasp of
the real significance of human communities,
no understanding of how they may coalesce,
divide, melt into larger combinations and the
like. They considered nationality not as the
supreme nuisance in human affairs but as
something sacred; they thought that a sov-
ereign nation on its particular grade of syn-

[26 ]A Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

thesis, was as well-defined an individual as an
individual man is on his. They transferred
the leading principle of modern democracy,
“one adult, one vote,”’ straight away to the
sovereign states of the world.

So while the Scotchman, the Rajput or the
Welshman find neither voice nor vote for
their distinctive qualities upon the League,
being merged in political groupings of a
higher order, the barbaric little Abyssinian
world, and the decadent republic of Hayti
send delegates who sit side by side with Hol-
land and Denmark and France. So far from
the League of Nations overriding nationalist
limitations, it merely provides a fresh field of
encounter and conflict. The line towards
human unification lies not in the confirmation
of national sovereignty and the recognition of
every recalcitrant group of backward peoples
that chooses to assert as a “‘nation”’ its dissent
from the general life of mankind, but in the
creation of an organised will for world con-
trols in the great civilised population of
America and Europe and eastern Asia. It is
not the difference between one people and
another we want to assemble but the interests
that all have in common.

For the time, however, the good-will of
ereat numbers of people who should be work-
ing for world peace and unification is diverted
into the League of Nations cul-de-sac, and
while this is so there is little prospect of an
effective movement of opinion towards the
broader, more difficult constructive effort re-

[27]

“OnE of the admirable
traits of “‘These Event-
ful Years” is the entire
freedom with which the
authors have written.”
—JuLian Park, Pro-
fessor of History, Uni-
versity of Buffalo.

Hayt1, Abyssinia, Hol-
land and Denmark, no
less than the greater
countries of the world,
are described in “These
Eventful Years” by
men eminently qualified
to describe the course of
their history during this
great quarter-century.Ir is interesting to
compare Mr. Wells's
opinions on finance and
business with those of
some of the recognised
leaders in those fields.
See, for example, the
chapter in “These
Eventful Years” writ-
ten by Dr. Julius Klein
entitled Zhe Intricate
Web of World Commerce
and that by Mr. Charles
M. Schwab, called Some
Reflections on Big Busi-

ness.

O. P. AusTIN in his ar-
ticle on Zhe Wealth of
Nations in “These
Eventful Years” esti-
mates the wealth of the
world as over 750,000
million dollars, more
than half of which is in
the countries without
great armies, Great Bri-
tain, its colonies and the
United States.

  

A Forecast of the Worlds Affairs

 

    
      
   
   
   
   
   
    
    
    
  
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
  
   
     
  
    
   
  
 

The League of Nations blocks the
way. Yet the League of Nations is being
more and more effectively criticised, and the
release of the good-will in men from this un-

quired.

fortunate obsession may come sooner than
the superficial appearances seem to indicate.

5. POSSIBILITY OF REVOLUTIONARY STORM

WuaAt are the elements in human thought
and imaginative activity that might presently
be favouring a new movement for world con-
trols of currency, transport, staple production,
armaments and the like? It is extremely
difficult to estimate these under-currents.
One might think that the financial world
It is; ‘tova
certain extent. But it is at its heart a curi-

would be international-minded.

ously secret and secretive world; one cannot
imagine it using its power over human re-
sources to forward a creative propaganda and
great educational development. Finance has
never been an organising and creative force;
it watches, estimates, counts, gets and keeps.
The synthetic forces in the world have also
led to great aggregations of plant and ma-
terial capital. But the big industrial organ-
isers were created by a competitive system,
and competition is in their blood. When in-
dustrial capital has combined so far it has
combined for competition and battle. The
big industrialists find so congenial a weapon
and ally in nationalism, with all its prejudices,
tariffs and subsidies, that so far, in the larger
states and empires, they have stuck at national

[28]© Underwood & Underwood

Post-war unemployment in England.
along the Thames Embankment in the direction of Trafalgar

British agitators.

A typical procession of unemployed in London marching
Square, the chief meeting-ground fora

The DeWitt Clinton locomotive on the New York Central Railroad below Riverside Drive after 76
years of inactivity. This train made its first trip in 1831 when it carried passengers from Albany to
Schenectady.

me

    
  
 

 

:

ASF, Rates Sgure

© Keystone View Co.

Mr. Percy Rockefeller starting an electric locomotive of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul
Railway on its first trip over the Continental Divide. This railway possesses the longest electrified
line in existence.A Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

and imperial boundaries. There is the closest
alliance between big privately owned indus-
trial capital and militant nationalism and
imperialism, and that alliance seems likely to
remain. The two will probably stand or fall
together until the end.

Marxists and other socialists are always
denouncing the ‘‘capitalist system.” There
is really no “capitalist system” in the world
at all. There are a number of capitalist sys-
tems in conflict, and conflict seems to be so
much in their nature that it is more probable
that they will break each other up in an incur-
able warfare than achieve any world coales-
cence for the common good.

The so-called “capitalist system,” divided
against itself by flags and nationalism, has
been fighting in a very poor fight for existence
in the world since 1918. It has failed to
maintain a world monetary system; its credit
system is a crazy wreck of what it was before
the World War; it has lost huge areas of the
world that it formerly exploited. It has
manifestly no common intelligence. In view
of its present failure we cannot look reason-
ably to it for any guidance towards a world
management in the future. So far from sav-
ing the world it is doubtful if Business will
even succeed in saving itself.

But we have to remember that large parts
of the world’s surface are now under Com-
munist or Socialist or at least nominally Com-
munist and Socialist control. And we have
to remember too that we are now much more

[29 ]

“GERMANY has drunk
the cup of monetary and
financial misery to the
very dregs.’”’—J. L.
LaAuGHLIN, in “These
Eventful Years.”

THE conflict between
capital and labor is dis-
cussed in “‘ These Event-
ful Years” by Mr.
Philip Snowden, former-
ly Chancellor of the Ex-
chequer. He draws a
lesson from the failure
of Russian communism
and states that progress
can only be made and
permanently maintained
by carrying with it the
intelligent approval and
co-operation of the
people.WeLuncton Koo, in
his article on China,
From Empire to Re-
public, brings out some
extraordinarily interest-
ing facts regarding the
introduction of the cap-
italistic system into
China and about that
country’s social life and

changing ideals.

FERMENT in India is in-
formingly treated in
Sir Thomas Holder-
ness’s article on India’s

Arduous Journey.

TurKey, the home of
arbitrary tyranny in
government and ortho-
doxy in religion, has re-
cently deposed the sul-
tan and divorced the
church from the state.
The movements lying
behind these spectacu-
lar changes are de-
scribed in “These
Eventful Years” by
Professor Philip M.
Brown of Princeton
University, formerly
Secretary to the Amer-
ican Embassy at Con-
stantinople.

  
   
    
  
    
 
  
  
   
 
   
  
   
  
  
   
  
     
   
      
    
 
 
 
  
  

A Forecast of the World s Affairs

 

 

out of touch with what is going on in the
minds of Japan, China, India and Central
Asia than we were half a century ago. We
may reasonably guess that now-a-days there
are intellectual ferments at work and intel-
lectual activities going on, there and also in
the wide world of Islam, quite out of com-
parison with the sluggish, submissive and
receptive mental processes of those regions
half a century ago. We of our western
Atlantic world, who are still living under the
tradition of national and business competition,
may be quite unaware of very considerable
beginnings outside the sphere of attention of
our ill-informed and uninforming modern
newspapers. It is possible that a conception
of world solidarity may be gathering strength
already in regions beyond our ken.

It has to be remembered that in 1918-1919
there was not only a great wave of feeling for
world unity and the idea of a world league of
peace, but there was also a great wave of

It has

receded. But it may return. It may have

Socialist and Communist feeling.

receded to gather fresh strength, to digest the
lessons of its defeat and reconstruct itself
upon more acceptable and practicable lines.
In Russia the conceit and dogmatism of the
Communists have met with some hard lessons.
Suppose that our warring business combines
and our mutually destructive nationalisms,
encumbered with a hopeless burden of unpay-
able debts, found themselves challenged, in
times of great distress and privation, by a

[30]A Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

new and wiser and more experienced social-
ism. Perhaps the day of revolution has not
passed, and presently out of the East and
out of the darkened and distressed workmen’s
homes on which our comforts and securities
rest there may spring some new revolution-
ary conception, as vigorous as Islam in its
opening years and as wide as the world. .. .

I do not think that anyone can prophesy
such a gale in human affairs, but it has cer-
tainly to be counted as one of the possibilities
in reserve behind any of our forecasts. I do
not see the world regenerated by such a revo-
lutionary storm, but I do see the possibility of
an immense clearance of obstructive debts,
claims, institutions and ownerships that our
present world lacks the vigour to scrap, and
therewith the opening up of a clear and un-
impeded, even if devastated, road to a new
and more simply organised world order.

6. POSSIBILITIES OF HUMAN RETROGRESSION
INSTEAD OF PROGRESS

Havinc admitted this possibility of a storm
of enthusiasm and revolution that may upset
all our calculations, we may return now to
our study of the current forces in operation
in the world.

We have shown how little reason there is for
anticipating any rapid intelligent movement
of mankind towards a reorganisation of politi-
cal affairs upon a world basis. The material
things are all here, but not the mental things.

[31]

  

“THE new Turkey is in
effect a Fascist Repub-
lic with Mustapha Ke-
mal as its Mussolini.” —
J. L. Garvin, in “These
Eventful Years”

A cLEeAR and forceful
statement of the world’s
situation in regard to
war debts is made in
“These Eventful Years”
by Mr. Bernard M.
Baruch, economic ad-
viser to the American
Peace Commission. He
discusses the relation
of the inter-allied debts
to reparations and in-
dicates how the debts
may be paid.“THESE EVENTFUL
YEARS is remarkably
free from one of the
chief iniquities of the
World,War—propa-
ganda.’’—Brooklyn
Eagle.

“THESE EVENTFUL
YEARS seems to me
an extraordinarily use-
ful book, not merely
with reference to the
actual facts presented,
but also because of the
competence of the per-
sons who have contri-
buted the materials.’”’—
Pror. GeorceE M.
DuTcHER, Wesleyan
University.

 
  
   
  
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
 
  
    
  
   
  
   
  
 
 
 
  
  

A Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

There is no clear recognition either of the op-
portunity, the need or the dangers of our time.
Man is still so far an animal that his destinies
are determined by forces beyond the control
of his will. He has as yet neither wit nor will
enough to master his fate.

It does not follow, however, that because
no ideas of world reorganisation arise com-
mensurate to the new material conditions
man has created for himself, that the na-
tionalist and imperialist ideas that have ruled
throughout the last century will remain as
they are. Ideas are living things, doomed like
all living things to continual change; and
when they are not growing they are decaying.
The new forces may fail to produce new
social and political ideals, but they may
nevertheless have a corrosive effect on the
social and political ideals that have served to
sustain such civilisation as has existed
throughout the last half-century. There are
many signs of such a corrosion. ‘There are
many facts which seem to point to a degener-
ative process in the order and discipline of our
existing communities.

We can recognise almost everywhere to
some extent, and in some countries we see to a
very conspicuous extent—in Italy and south
Germany for example and in some parts of
the United States of America—a decrease in
respect for the law, for representative govern-
ment, and for the slow and rather ineffective
but comprehensive public conceptions of the

last two or three generations. These con-

[52]A Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

ceptions are now palpably misfits. Failing
an extension to the new scale that has been
set there may be a relapse upon associations
like the Fascisti and quasi-secret societies
like the Ku Klux Klan based upon narrower
but intenser loyalties than mere loyalty to
the law and the commonwealth.

It is quite possible that over large parts of
the world that we now call civilised the
quality of the collective life may deteriorate
from a broad-minded reasonableness towards
violence and sentiment. And it may rest at
that lower level. The recuperative activities
of school and literature and reasonable pro-
test may be sufficiently checked and sup-
pressed to prevent recovery. The history of
the next centuries, instead of being an ascend-
ant series of communities, may present a
descendant series. At the end of such a series
is terroristic brigandage pure and simple.

And even over large regions of the earth
where the retrogression does not attain as yet
to the conspicuous and extravagant degree of
Fascism and Klansmanism, there is still a
considerable movement towards disorder and
indiscipline observable. One curious result of
our mechanical progress has been to increase
the effective range of the newspaper out of all
proportion to the range of the deliberative
assembly. Production, distribution, illus-
tration, methods of exciting presentations,
have made enormous advances. The result
has been that the Press which was once the
humble servant of parliamentary parties has

legge

In Dynamic Italy, one
of the most interesting
chapters of ‘These
Eventful Years’, ex-
premier Nitti of Italy
discusses Mussolini and
his Fascisti.

LITERATURE in the
twentieth century is de-
scribed in a masterly
fashion in “These
Eventful Years” by Dr.
Henry Seidel Canby,
editor of The Saturday
Review of Literature.

Tue Ku Klux Klan is
subjected to a searching
analysis by Professor
John H. Latané of
Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity in his chapter in
“TheseEventful Years”
on The United States
Becomes a World Power.“THese EventFul
YEARS gives both sides
of the question; it pre-
sents a world-wide view,
and so it is to be accept-
ed as tangible proof of
the growth of historical
mindedness in men.”’—

Kansas City Star.

In his chapter on Gov-
ernment by Propaganda,
Bertrand Russell gives
many interesting ex-
amples of the way in
which the newspapers
employ striking dis-
plays to influence the

public mind.

 

  

A Forecast of the World s Affairs

 

now become capable of shouting down deliber-
ative assemblies altogether.

Moreover, the new mechanical methods,
especially in such highly centralised countries
as France and Great Britain, have facilitated
the concentration of newspaper ownership
in a few hands. As a consequence a new
class of big adventurers, the newspaper own-
ers, without political traditions to guide them
or any apparent sense of public responsibility,
intrude into the direction of collective action
—and invariably on the side of crude action
and intolerant violence. The newspaper
proprietor, in Great Britain especially, is now
the personal rival of the statesman and the
loud enemy of the teacher. The headline is
the brigand of thought. The newspaper pro-
prietor in Great Britain seems to be under-
mining the prestige of representative institu-
tions in such a way as to make the organisa-
tion of ultra-legal associations such as Fascism
a possibility in British public life. Public life
in Great Britain is still far above the general
Fascist level, but it is possible that it may
sink towards it.

This increasing violence in public life is not
a new thing. It has always been there poten-
tially; it has simply been released through the
confusion and enfeeblement of the counter-
vailing forces of education and civilised usage.
It is a relapse, a falling-in. It is a relapse from
which recovery may be a very long and diffi-
cult process.

Or conceivably over a period of time long

C34]A Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

by the scale of written history though short
in comparison with the long career of man on
earth, there may be no recovery. Most of us,
born and bred in a period of rapid progress
and development, do not realise the strong
probability of such a phase of set-back. There
are no bounds to retrogression, however high
the barriers one must surmount in the path of
progress. We have passed through a period
of increasing range of intercourse; but with a
decay in social discipline a period of diminish-
ing range of intercourse is possible, a period in
which security may be insufficient to main-
tain the complex system of roads, railways,
docks and so forth, on which our present
communications depend.

Such a decay has already happened in
the case of the road system several times in
history; during the decline of the Roman
Empire for example. In Asia Minor, in the
Balkans, in North Africa, you have regions
from which a flourishing system of roads and
cities has practically disappeared. Over large
areas of Europe to-day the railway system is
altogether less efficient than it was in 1913;
it is a system in visible decay. The roads go
unrepaired. Book publishing is ceasing there.
The school organisations, religious organisa-
tions, show a parallel decadence, and no
forces are at present apparent adequate to
arrest that decadence. For a time the inertia
of the progressive period may continue to
carry some things forward; there may be a
development of air routes, a dwindling con-

C351]

  

WE seldom realize how
long man has lived on
the earth. Professor
Breasted points to evi-
dence that the human
race dates back a mil-
lion years, yet most of
our commonest every-
day devices on which
our civilization depends
are, comparatively
speaking, of yesterday
or today.

In contrast to Mr.
Wells’s view that our
civilization may fall
like that of Rome, other
historians have pointed
out certain fundamental
differences between the
20th century and the
5th century. In the
earlier period, for ex-
ample, society was sup-
ported largely by slave
labor and there was no
such encouraging de-
velopment in science as
we have today.Tue extraordinary rate
at which the population
of the world tends to
increase is pointed out
in a recent book, where
it is calculated that if
each couple has, on the
average, 2% children,
the population will mul-
tiply by 3 in 100 years;
if each couple has 5
children, the population
will multiply by 97 in
the same period.

Mr. WELLs’s outspoken
words about France
may profitably be com-
pared with those of the
French statesman AIl-
bert Thomas in “‘ These
Eventful Years”. The
latter’s chapter on
France Again the Domi-
nant Power on the Con-
linent narrates France’s
conspicuous réle in re-
cent history and out-
lines the problems
which she faces in the
future.

 

A Forecast of the World's Affairs

    
    
  
  
   
     
   
 
   
  
 
  
   
   
   
  
     
  
  
  
  
 
  
   

tinuation of new building, spasms of recon-
structive energy, and in spite of the general
misery even a further increase of population.
For much of Europe the trend over a sufficient
number of years seems likely to be downward
for a lifetime or so at least. But in other parts
of the world, in North and South America
notably, there are no such clear manifesta-
tions of decline. Ku Klux Klan phenomena,
in spite of their superficial parallelism with
those of Fascism, may be infantile rather than
decadent.

7. FRANCE DOMINANT TO-DAY

Let us take a more particular view of the
present condition of the chief Powers and
regions of the earth. The central figure of
the European drama at the present time is
France. All over the earth now we ask what
does France mean, what does France intend,
what will France do? France is central now
just as Germany was central ten years ago,
and for precisely the same reason, because
she has the most definite will and because her
national action is more concentrated and
systematic than that of any other Power.
Her policy lies open now to the world. It is
the fragmentation and destruction of Ger-
many at any cost; by an insistence upon the
terms of the Treaty of Versailles where that
serves her ends, and by a disregard of that
treaty where it does not do so. France seems
at present to be rigidly obsessed by concep-
tions of foreign policy that date from pre-

[56]© Keystone View Co.

 
    
  
  
 
  
     

A characteristic modern German mise-en-scéne. German stage directors, borrowing their ideas
from Futurist painters, have made many innovations in mounting theatrical productions.

ES

 

 

© Keystone View Co.
The opening scene of Shaw’s Back to Methuselah, as produced in Birmingham, England. The play
begins in the time of Adam, and attempts to forecast the remote future.View Co. © Keystone Vie Co.

© Keystone

  
   
 
   
  

Lady Rhondda, who contributes the chapter on Lady Astor, the first woman to sit in the House
The Political Awakening of Women. of Commons.

 

© Keystone View Co. © Keystone View Co.
Mrs. Chapman Catt, the American champion Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, the originator of
of the rights of women. the militant ‘‘Votes for Women” move-

ment in England.
FOUR FAMOUS FEMINISTSA Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

revolutionary days. Her contempt for any
such new aspiration towards an associated
action of all Powers as the League of Nations
seeks to express, is open and manifest. She
has resumed the alliance of the Grand Mon-
arch. Beyond Germany cluster her dependent
allies, with inflated armies trained by French
officers and paid for by monies that a less
realistic people would have devoted to the
discharge of their American and British debts.

The question of how far France may succeed
in permanently disabling and dominating
Germany is a very subtle and interesting one.
There are few examples in history of a lan-
guage community being broken up or stamped
out. Even without much printing or reading,
such people as the Armenians, the Bulgars,
the Czechs, the Irish and the Welsh have held
to their traditions of unity and difference
through long periods of suppression and even
of massacre. France has got Germany down
at the present time, but the prospect opens
before her of having to go on year by year
holding Germany down, with such assistance
as her precariously balanced Polish, Czech
and other allies can give her. It is not a
pleasant prospect for a comfort-loving pros-
perity-loving people.

As remarkable as the intensity of French
political vision are the limitations of its range.
Beyond the frontiers of Poland the vision ot
the Grand Monarch did not extend, and the
amazing and incredible France of to-day, the
France of Poincaré, still looks with vague un-

[37]

““AMERICA was instru-
mental in striking us
down and has as yet not
taken occasion to re-
deem the promises
which President Wilson
made to us.”’—Grand
Admiral von T1RPITZ, in
“These Eventful
Years.”

AUTHENTIC narratives of
the recent history of
these peoples will be
found in “These Event-
ful Years” written by
men who in a special
sense are entitled to be
their spokesmen. The
story of Ireland, for ex-
ample, is told by Sir
Horace Plunkett, who
has done more perhaps
than any other man for
the rehabilitation of
agriculture in Ireland.THE signs of Russia’s
recovery are set forth
by Michael S. Farbman
in the concluding sec-
tion of his chapter on
Holy Russia in “‘These
Eventful Years”. This
chapter gives a num-
ber of intimate letters
from the Tsaritsa to
the Tsar which throw a
lurid light on the affairs
of the Russian court be-
fore the Revolution.

Tue story of Spain, in-
cluding her internal
developments, her Mo-
roccan wars and the
recent dictatorship is
told clearly and briefly
in “These Eventful
Years” by Professor E.
Chapman of the Univer-
sity of California,
long known as an au-
thority on Spain and
Spanish America.

    
  
  
 
  
 
   
  
 
 
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
    
   
  
    
  
  
 
  
 
 
 
 
  
  

A Forecast of the World s Affairs

 

France is
disposed to regard Russia as out of effective

seeing eyes beyond the Vistula.

intervention in international politics for the
next twenty-five years. This may be a mis-
take. The hope may be father to the thought.
It is the rdle of the French to make mistakes
about Russia. Voltaire did. Napoleon did.
The French investors between 1871 and 1917
did. France may yet find herself caught in
the net of her own eastern European diplo-
macies, and assailed by the armies she has
created there and with the munitions she has
supplied. The policy of the balance of power
is always a dangerous one when there is any
serious risk of disturbance to that balance
from some unexpected direction or unforeseen
movement,

The neighbouring Latin countries may
gravely affect the position of France in the
future. Spain is a country with its own in-
ternal troubles very manifestly before it.
It suffers from a wasting disease of war in
Morocco, sustained by a military interest at
home. But it must watch the spreading ad-
ventures of France in North Africa with any-
thing but pleasure, and so too must Italy.

For France is not only obsessed by the old
idea, the idea of the Grand Monarch, of
dividing and dominating Germany and sus-
taining a complex fabric of alliance to the
east of Germany to restrain her; she is also
fascinated by a new idea, the idea of assimilat-
ing and using the African for her purposes.
France, says M. Poincaré, is not a country of

[38 JA Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

 

forty million people; it is a country of a
hundred million people. Sixty of these mil-
lions are Arab or Berber or Negro, and most
of them profess Islam. The coloured popula-
tion of North Africa is being drilled and
taught the elementary secrets of militarism
by the French, and great strategic railways
are now under construction by which these
armed barbarians can be poured by the
It is possible that the
French overrate the romantic appeal to the

million into Europe.

negro mind, and that Islam may prove to be
a more congenial propaganda in Africa than
French citizenship. Hayti may have a gigan-
tic replica in North Africa. And it is possible
that the French underestimate the power of a
hostile Britain or a hostile Italy to prevent
the transportation of these dusky reinforce-
ments across the Mediterranean. Here again
the French people, in a mood of sanguine
imaginativeness, seem to be facing greater
dangers than they realise.

For both Italy and Spain must be deeply
concerned by this development of “Black
France.” Italy in particular has a steadily
increasing population with very limited out-
lets. Her population overhauls that of White
France very rapidly. She may reasonably
covet much of the old Roman Empire on the
south shores of the Mediterranean; for she
could populate that from her own loins. To
the north her material welfare is deeply in-
volved with the economic life of Central
Europe, which France is destroying. Assum-

[39]

No one living is so well
able to discuss Africa
as the veteran traveller
and explorer, Sir Harry
Johnston, who contrib-
utes to “These Event-
ful Years” the chapter
on Zhe Dark Continent
AsTItIs Today. He tells
of an African buffalo,
recently become extinct,
which had horns four-
teen feet in length.

Just how rapidly Italy’s
population is increasing
is shown by ex-Premier
Nitti in his chapter on
Dynamic Italyin‘‘These
Eventful Years”. With-
in the 25-year period cov-
ered in “‘These Event-
ful Years”, the inhabit-
ants of Italy rose in
number from about 32
million to nearly 39

million.Reapers of ‘These
Eventful Years” will
find a long-needed ac-
count of Spanish Amer-
ica in Professor Har-
ing’s chapter, From
Mexico to Argentina.
It contains an excellent
picture of the famous
“Christ of the Andes’,
that unique symbol of
peace erected on the
frontier of Argentina

and Chile.

Tue extent to which
Britain depends on over-
sea trade may be gath-
ered from the fact that
the value of the food
imported into the United
Kingdom yearly
amounts to over £300,-
000,000.

     
   
  
  
  
    
  
    
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
  
   
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
  
  
 
  
    
  

A Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

ing, as we feel bound to do, for the reasons
already given, that the game of competing
sovereign states is to go on in Europe for
another century or more, then by all the rules
of that game when France has her need for
those millions of ‘‘Black Frenchmen”’ Italy
will be bound to strike at her under the water
and in the air and on her frontiers—or pass
into the position of her helpless dependant.

And it is difficult to see how bullied and
restricted Spain, so weak in Europe and so
interesting to her kindred in America, could
keep out of the next great war that the
criminal creation of ‘‘Black France” and this
silly system of strategic railways so manifestly
contemplates. The necessity of France will be
Spain’s opportunity.

8. GREAT BRITAIN vs. FRANCE—BREAK UP OF
THE BRITISH EMPIRE POSSIBLE—-HOPE IN
AMERICA

Vis-a-vis to a European continent dominat-
ed by France will stand Great Britain, her
age-long antagonist. There has been a tre-
mendous change in the conditions of war-
fare, and probably in all this world of swaying
and tottering political systems none is posed
more dangerously than the British Empire.
It is an empire made by the sea-going ship
and particularly by the steamship, and its
power in the past has been sea-power—which
is no longer the decisive factor in war. The
aeroplane places London at the mercy of a
French air raid. It is not an hour’s flying

[40]Of 0

© International Newsreel
The Khutukhta of Mongolia, the ‘‘ Representative of God on Earth,” photographed in Moscow
while signing an agreement between the Soviet Government and the new Mongolian National
Government.

  

 

© Keystone View Co.
President Yuan Shi-k’ai of China, elected in March,
1912. In 1915 he attempted to found a new Imperial
Dynasty in his own person. He failed, but refused
to resign the presidency and died in harness in 1916.© John Claude White

The Palace of the mysterious Dalai Lama of Tibet at Lhasa, the ‘‘ Forbidden City.”

Buddhism.

The Dalai Lama is the supreme head of the Lamaistic hierarchy of

The palace stands on Potala Hill, and its gilded roofs, countless windows and sloping walls, combine to make it unique in appearance.A Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

from the French coast to London; it is a good
two from London to Paris. An outbreak of
war between France and Great Britain would
mean therefore enormous reciprocal injuries
through air raids on the capitals, with a
probable balance in favour of Paris. But on
the other hand the economic life, the indus-
trial and mining regions of Great Britain,
are none of them as accessible to air attack as
the mining and industrial regions of the north
of France. At sea the French submarine
attack, quite apart from the technical im-
provements of the intervening years, will be
far more deadly than the German. There
would be no bottling-up that immensely long
coast, no barring the Channel. France might
be able to starve Great Britain out. But
the British population, as the World War
showed, can exhibit very great tenacity in a
conflict it believes in, and is probably quite
equal to tiring out the French im an endur-
ance competition. The French as a people
have neither the high technical abilities of
the Germans nor quite the same persistence
on a great productive-destructive effort.
We have shown good cause for supposing that
Italy and Spain would come in against France
in a vital struggle. And even the repetition
of that magic word “Lafayette” would not
prevent the United States rushing to the
assistance of Great Britain if she was invaded
with a black or partially black army.

A Franco-British war would indeed be so

frightful for both France and England that
[411]

A STRIKING confirma-
tion of Mr.Wells’s point
is found in the fact that,
while for many years
the British government
rejected plans for con-
necting France and
England by tunnel,
there are now three air-
plane lines operating
daily between Paris and
London.

Writinc in “These
Eventful Years”, Gen-
eral Mangin, the hero
of Fort Douaumont,
states that the French
army during the war
included 573,000 colon-
jal or black troops be-
sides 300,000 colonials
engaged in non-military

services.“THESE EVENTFUL
YEARS seems to me not
only what we call ‘an
invaluable work for the
reference library’; it is
contemporary history
made fascinating by
writers who know how
to tell us what we want
to know.”—BooTH
TARKINGTON, well-
known novelist.

“‘GRAVE writers on po-
litical theory seldom
mention ‘movies’, be-
cause there is nothing
about them in Aristotle;
but they are one of the
most powerful political
forces of our day.”’—
BERTRAND RUSSELL, in
““TheseEventful Years”’.

 

A Forecast of the World's Affairs

the reader may well ask why we should take
if as a serious possibility. But everybody
said much the same of a German war before
1914, and it has to be faced in our forecast
because the present policy of France drives
logically and inevitably towards such a war
as its culminating stroke. It is an empty
policy if it does not finally thrust Britain out
of the Mediterranean and out of North and
Tropical Africa. But there are many things
French
policy does not fully express the intellectual
quality of France at the present time. It is
an old-fashioned policy, and what we call

that may arrest in the encounter.

France to-day, Poincaré’s France, is merely
the front France turns to the world and not
the whole of France. Suppressed, persecuted,
restrained, there is a more modern-minded
and intelligent France, represented by strug-
gling papers like the Quotidien, and by stifled
statesmen like M. Joseph Caillaux. It is just
possible that there may be political changes in
France so great that this conflict may be
averted.

A war between France and Great Britain
would almost certainly end the thin-flung
predominance of French phantasy and intrigue
in the Western world. As certainly it would
precipitate the fall of London from its pre-
eminence in the English-speaking world. And
in any case, whether there is a Franco-British
war or not it seems almost inevitable that
the structure of the British Empire system
should undergo great strains and probably

[42]A Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

breaking strains in the coming half-century.
In the face of a Balkanised Europe London
sinks to the level of a second Constantinople
Both London and New York are
Europe-facing cities. Their predominance is
rooted in European prosperity. The British
Empire did not come out of the war without
grave damage. At Versailles it showed itself

or lower.

fatigued, and with no mental vigour to meet
the heads of the new occasions. And in small
things and great we still see it stiff-minded
and dull. There has been something stupid
and typical in the restoration of the busbies
and red uniforms of the Guards in royal
London, and in the general reversion to the
old sickly royalism that almost all the rest
of the world has abandoned. There seems
to be real hostility in Great Britain to changes,
or to even the discussion of constructive
schemes. The patient is so ill as to refuse his
medicines, and rolls over and says it will be
all right presently if only he is left alone.
Faust, one remembers, was to have been
damned when he desired the passing moment
to stay with him, and that is precisely the
attitude of the conservative elements in the
British Empire at the present time.

Two urgent problems advance upon the
British Empire now and will not be shirked
although the most desperate attempts are
being made to shirk them. One is unemploy-
ment and overpopulation in Great Britain
due to the permanent ruin of its European
trade by French policy. Great Britain has

[43 J

Lonpon sunk to the
level of a second Con-
stantinople recalls
Macaulay’s vision of a
New Zealander standing
on the remains of Lon-
don bridge and con-
templating the ruins of
a vanished’ empire.
“These Eventful
Years”, however, pre-
sents abundant evi-
dence to show that, at
present, the position of
Great Britain is re-
markably sound.

Tuis urgent problem of
unemployment and ec-
onomic maladjustment
in Great Britain is dis-
cussed lucidly by Sir
John Marriott in his
chapter Great Britain
Sees tt Through in
“These Eventful
Years”. He deals also
with England’s_ rela-
tions with Ireland and
South Africa, each of
which countries will also
be found treated in

special chapters.THE modernisation of
India is undoubtedly
one of Great Britain’s
most serious problems
and it has not been
made easier by the
astonishing popularity
of that mystic and saint,
Gandhi. A discussion
of the significance of
Gandhi and the non-
codperative movement
in India is one of the
many valuable features
of Sir Thomas Holder-
ness’s chapter on Jndia’s
Arduous Journey in
“These Eventful

Years”’.

A Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

lived by foreign trade and cannot keep its
excessive population fed in any other way.
It is threatened now, it has almost the sure
prospect of a permanent cancer, a breeding
mass of unemployed urban people congre-
gating in all the large industrial centres of
the country. It has no idea of what has to
be done about this.

The second problem before Great Britain is
the modernisation of the Indian population.
That population can no longer be restrained
by the old methods of prestige. It looks, it
asks questions, it reads newspapers, it resists
and makes trouble. The modernisation of
India, the making of a new India, might be
the tremendous and fascinating task of the

But the

conventions of the British ruling class, its

best brains in Britain and India.

class jealousy of education and the provincial
and pedantic traditions that rule Oxford and
Cambridge, have so prevented the develop-
ment of social and _ political education in
Great Britain that there is now no sufficient
supply of educated and public-spirited men
even to deal with its problems at home, much
less so to deal with the tangled and impatient
problems of India. I do not see anything in
progress to avert a developing series of con-
fused insurrectionary thrusts in India. This
may mean disasters to the Indian population,
but the question before us now is not whether
things are likely to be good or evil things but
whether they are likely to happen. They
seem likely to happen, and we have no reason

[44]A Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

to suppose that France will not take the fullest
advantage of such trouble in covert aid to the
antagonists of Great Britain and even in open
attack.

One turns to a brighter prospect in the new
world. There may be very grave social and
economic struggles before these new popula-
tions, but one does not see there vast armies,
nearly exhausted resources, education decay-
ing and swarming masses of urban unem-
ployed. One does see vast areas of country,
with enormous undeveloped wealth, the pros-
pect for a long time of plentiful food and
reasonable security for life, growth and
creative effort. A growing artistic and
scientific impulse appears, particularly in the
United States of America. Within fifty years
America may be leading the world in art,
science and literature. Before another half-
century North and South America may be
the recognised heads and centres of the
English-speaking and Spanish-speaking civili-
sations. Some realisation of pan-American
dreams may have organised a permanent
peace between them all. We are probably
in the opening phase of another great west-
ward movement of the centres of civilisation,
comparable to the drift from Asia and Egypt
and Greece towards Italy and Gaul round
and about the beginnings of the Christian era,
and their drift northward and westward in
Europe at the Renaissance.

It is a disagreeable thing for an English
writer with patriotic prepossessions to face

[45 |]

  

THE part played by Pro-
hibition in the social and
economic life of Amer-
ica is discussed by Pro-
fessor T. N. Carver
in his chapter on The
Greatest Social Experi-
ment of Modern Times
in “These Eventful

”

Years.

REGARDING America’s
contribution to litera-
ture, John Gould Flet-
cher, in his chapter of
“These Eventful
Years” on The New
Poetry, remarks:
“Nothing is more start-
ling, or more inexplica-
ble, than the sudden
outburst of poetry in
America, which has
largely taken place in
the last ten years. The
new poetry of America,
despite its failings, is
far and away the most
interesting body of work
that any modern na-
tion has produced, with
the exception of
France.”““No one dare set limits
to what science can clo
for man.’’—J. A.
THOMSON in “These
Eventful Years’’.

M. HANnrTHARA, Japanese
ambassador to the Un-
ited States, writing in
‘These Eventful
Years’, gives us an
interpretation of pres-
ent day Japan in an
article which lays bare
the sources of social un-
rest in this far-eastern

empire.

 

A Forecast of the World s Affairs

 

the possibility of his motherland sinking to a
secondary place in a reconstituted world, but
it has to be admitted that the trend of the
facts points all in that direction. But this
does not necessarily involve a subordination
of the English traditions or of the English
language and the English strain. The old
nest may be left as the still older nests in
Friesland and Schleswig and Denmark were
left long ago, but the English-speaking people
may live on in a unified federation of commun-
ities round and about the earth.

9. POSSIBILITIES OF NEW CIVILISATION IN
ASIA AND EASTERN EUROPE—A FINAL FORECAST

Ir we go on in our survey from America a-
cross the Pacific we come to Japan, a teem-
ing, highly intelligent country, disabled for a
time by a great natural convulsion, and
threatened in the near future it may be with
grave social trouble. But the World War has
been of inestimable benefit to all the peoples of
eastern Asia because it has put an end for an
indefinite time, and perhaps a permanent end,
to the aggressions of the Europeans upon
Asia. Both Japan and China will now prob-
ably be allowed to work out their own prob-
lems with a greatly reduced encumbrance of
European intrigue. The United States of
America has always sustained a policy of non-
intervention in Chinese politics combined
with a keen educational and industrial propa-
ganda. It is probable that the Americans will
be sufficiently influential and powerful to

[ 46 |]A Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

restrain Japan from any extensive imitation
of European imperialism at the expense of
China. China has behind her a century of
stimulating indignities and misfortunes; she
may have before her a century of opportunity.

It is hard for us who live in the western
European tradition to imagine how this far
more ancient social and economic system may
react to the development of the new means of
communications as they really penetrate the
vast areas and masses of the land. We are
too apt to imagine that the political and
financial devices of western Europe that have
appeared in response to these innovations are
devices of universal applicability. Had we
retained our ascendency we should no doubt
have done our best to put all Asia into the
misfitting garments of our own peculiar ex-
pedients. But now that our ascendency de-
clines, the prestige of our representative
government, our private capitalism and our
peculiar educational methods will decline also,
and the Asiatic peoples will be more disposed
to contrive their own characteristic adapta-
tions to the railway, the telegraph, the news-
paper and so forth. The world before us,
whatever its confusions and fragmentations,
is still likely to be a world of more rapid inter-
changes than the world of the past, and we
may see a number of parallel social and politi-
cal and economic expedients of an extensive
sort going on in China and Japan, and in
India, all more or less consciously and wil-
fully seeking to frame out distinctive types

[47]

  

REFERRING to two nota-
ble chapters of ‘“‘These
Eventful Years”, the
London Daily Herald
states: “‘ Jellicoe will tell
you how he smashed
the Bosche at Jutland
and Admiral Scheer will
tell you how he didn’t.”

“OnE could spend
weeks with the volumes
of “These Eventful
Years” with great de-
light and profit and al-
ways feel that he had
an arsenal of vital in-
formation at his elbow
concerning the world’s
life for the last ten years
which would be of the
greatest service to him
at every turn in the tide
of events.”-—GEORGE
W. CoLeMaAN, President
Babson Institute, Wel-
lesley Hills, Mass.

”THe downfall of the
Russian Empire and its
terrible sequel is de-
scribed in “These
Eventful Years” by
Michael S. Farbman,
author of many books

on Russia.

“As described in
‘These Eventful
Years’, the world
drama assumes the sub-
tlety and inevitability
of a Greek drama.”—
Universalist Leader,
Boston.

   
  
    
   
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
   
  
   
  
 
 
 
  
  

A Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

of a new and larger community. But it seems
to me that the population of India is too
various and divided by far too many linguistic
barriers and too unequally educated, to
achieve any such rapid unification as might
be possible in China. One vast area of the
world, Russia, carrying with it most of north-
ern Asia, is already knowingly committed to
such an experiment as I am here foreshadow-
ing. We hear much clamour about the un-
deniable failure of its first crude and harsh
trial of Communism, but it would be the most
stupid thing in the world to assume that that
failure involves a necessary return to the
social, political and business methods of 1914.
The experimenting Government is still there;
the experimenting spirit is still there and the
imperative necessity for experiment; the idea
of creating fresh institutions boldly to replace
traditional ones must by this time have satu-
rated the minds of the great majority of that
exceptionally original and intelligent popula-
tion. The dull pertinacity of France is driving
vast multitudes of German people into the
same realisation at which the Russians arrived
in 1917, that for them our present system of
social and economic organisation has nothing
but evil, and that they may as well perish
experimentally as perish without an effort.
The first Russian Communism has failed.
But between the Rhine and the Pacific still
lies the possibility, the high possibility, of a
new Communist or collectivist attempt, which
may have learnt much, which may have

[48 JA Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

learnt the need of strenuous education, of
deliberation in construction, of compromise
and of a humane tolerance of contradiction.
If Russia should after all struggle through to
an educational republic, more collectivist than
any which has hitherto existed, its survival,
its success, would have a tremendous gravita-
tional pull upon the broken but resistent
German mass in Europe and a very great
exemplary influence upon China and Japan,
which are still feeling their way towards the
solution of their problem of modernisation.

And so peering into the dim possibilities
of a century ahead, it seems probable to one
amateur prophet at least, that most of the
leading stars of world politics to-day, Imperial
France, Imperial London, Italy and indeed
the entire western and central European con-
stellation, once stars of the first magnitude,
will be missing then or shrunken to secondary
importance in the heavens of human affairs,
and that instead of the old worked-out story
of their rivalries and ascendencies which
These Eventful Years has had to relate, it
will be a new story, a story telling how
greater and more elaborately organised com-
munities of a new type, vast federal unifica-
tions, an Anglo-Spanish, a Chino- Japanese,
a Slavo-Germanic community, have come to
dominate the earth.

It may be, a hundred years hence, that it
will be a modernised Russia and its associated
peoples, a renascent and federated Japan and
China and a confederation or federation of

[49 J

“‘TueE big thing is done.
There is nothing like it.
“These Eventful Years’
is not only a work for
reference but a book for
reading which contains
in its 1400 pages the
equivalent of a whole
private library.’”—The
London Observer.

MaxiMILiAN HARDEN,
writingin “These
Eventful Years”, num-
bers among present and
future “world trusts’’,
Pan-America, the Brit-
ish Empire, the Russo-
Slavic and the Yellow-

Mongolian systems.CuTTING across. the
rampant nationalism of
our day are many for-
ces making for inter-
nationalism. These are
described in “These
Eventful Years” in
such chapters as The
League of Nations, What
Science Can Do For
Man, The Harvest Time
in Medicine and Sur-
gery, Psychical Research
and the Invisible World,
The Intricate Web of
World Commerce, The
Political Awakening of
Women, International
Sport, and the chapters
on twentieth - century
literature,music, poetry,
drama, and the other
arts.

 

A Forecast of the World's Affairs

 

the English, Spanish and Portuguese-speaking
communities in America and round and about
the world, which will be taking the lead in the
last step towards human unification, the estab-
lishment of the world peace on the only pos-
sible basis for such a peace, namely upon
universal free trade, a common world cur-
rency, a world control of the production of
staples, an extension of a world parcel-post
to cover the transport of all goods by land or
sea at fixed rates, and a merger of sovereignty
in a world control to maintain mimimum
standards of education and welfare and a
watch upon the movements and expansion of
population and a common supreme court,
a final court of appeal for all the world.THESE EVENTFUL YEARS

An Epoch-Making Book

Mr. WELLs’s brilliant and challenging “ Fore-
cast of the World’s Affairs,”’ reprinted here,
is only one of the 84 chapters of the new and
epoch-making work, THESE EVENTFUL YEARS.
Regardless of whether you agree with Mr.
Wells or not, no one can read his striking
article without being impressed with the
need for further information on the serious
questions which he touches. That informa-
tion will be found in THESE EVENTFUL YEARS
—and nowhere else. The writers—eighty in
number—are all men of first rank. Their
names are household words and, like the
essay of Mr. Wells, their chapters are as
deeply interesting as they are informative.

Turse EvENTFUL YEARS is a book about
our own times. It describes what has hap-
pened in the years of this century; where the
world stands today, and the outlook for the
future.

The idea behind this book was to penetrate
the mass of prejudice and half-truth that still
clouds contemporary events. But the book
goes further than that. It sorts out the facts,
gives, if necessary, two versions of the same
happenings—in fact, gives such a sane and
reasoned history of the period that the
reader at last has a chance of forming his

[51]

“For range of theme,
vividness of presenta-
tion and directness of
appeal to all sorts of
readers “‘These Event-
ful Years” can look
back to no_ exact
parallel in literature,
and is not soon likely,
in either scope or value,
to be followed by a suc-
cessor.”’—Boston Eve-
ning Transcript.

“THESE EVENTFUL
Years is ‘a recofd and
mirror of our own
times’ and as such is
profoundly troubling,
with here and there as
much reason for opti-
mism as hr.man beings
during these centuries
of sentience have ever
been vouchsafed.”—

The New York World.‘THese EvENTFUL
YEARS seems to be a
very valuable help to
anyone desirous of get-
ting a picture of what
really happened to the
world in the last few
years.”—H. B. Tuay-
ER, President American
Telephone and Tele-
graph Co.

“Tue literary sensation
of the year. ‘These
Eventful Years’ is writ-
ten by the history
makers themselves.’”’”—

Beaumont Enterprise.

“Tuese books will be
of great value to every
student of world condi-
tions, and I am de-
lighted to have them in
my library.”—A. B.
Hovucuton, U. S. Am-
bassador to Germany.

    
   
 
   
 
 
  
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
      
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
   
  
  
   
  

These Eventful Years

 

own opinions on the present and future of
his own and all other nations.

Eminent Men Say What They Really Think

Tue foremost men of our day were asked
to state their opinions freely and frankly;
and they were assured that whatever they
said would be printed exactly as they wrote
it. The editors and publishers have had no
policy to promote except that of affording
these men the opportunity of telling the
undiluted truth.

The result is an unusual book. Its con-
tributors have taken the time and trouble
to set down now and for all time their own
personal convictions. The articles are all
signed.

Each man has written knowing that his
particular contribution may appear alongside
those of other contributors who entertain
opposite beliefs and that the reader will, of
course, be able to judge for himself the merits
of the argument.

Intelligent people today are willing and
even eager to hear both sides of a moot
question; in fact, they would rather know
the truth than be misled by propaganda.
Propaganda allows only one side to appear;
truth emerges from knowledge of both sides.

New Articles Written Solely for This Book

IN writing for THESE EveNTFUL YEARS,
the contributors have not only expressed
their opinions with complete frankness, but

[52]These Eventful Years

 

they have attempted, in relatively brief
compass, simply and clearly to put down the
ultimate facts as they see them, glad of the
opportunity to present their authentic state-
ments to the public under the auspices of an
institution like the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
THESE EvENTFUL YEARS, however, has
no other connection with the Encyclopaedia
itself, being neither a supplement nor even
built on the usual encyclopaedia plan. It
is divided into eighty-four chapters written
by eighty authors, each one of whom is an
acknowledged expert on the subject on which
he writes, a large proportion being men and
women for whom the publishers may confi-
dently claim world-wide renown as out-
standing figures of the present century. And
these chapters are no mere “‘hit-or-miss’’
collection of jumbled facts and opinions.
On the contrary, they follow a very care-
fully thought-out plan of structure; that is,
to cover from every point and angle the
entire history of the present century, chroni-
cling not merely the events of this astonishing
period, but.also ‘its iriteliectual'progréss and
moral tendencies and ‘its'literary and artistic
currents. Nevertheless, the’ book: need not
be read consecutively, ‘and for this reason it
will possess a deep attraction for the business
man for that odd half-hour before dinner.
Every chapter in the two volumes is an
original contribution written especially for
them, and it may well be believed that only
an organisation with the prestige of the

ogi

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

““As one closes ‘‘These
Eventful Years” he
cannot but feel that it
far outruns all reason-
able expectations and
that it should serve to
raise our thinking about
all public questions upon
a new and_ higher
plane.”—PROFESSOR
James Harvey Rosin-
son, in The Saturday
Review.

“However well-inten-
tioned and valuable the
work of the various
authors and editors of
“Outlines” of this and
that, so numerous since
the war, it is all com-
paratively insignificant
in the face of this monu-
mental achievement of
the Encyclopaedia Bri-
tannica Company.”—

St. Paul Daily News.“Tue most remarkable
publication of the cen-
tury. Nothing of the
kind has ever been
achieved before in liter-
ary history. . . . Outside
of the ENCYCLOPAEDIA
BRITANNICA itself no
modern English work
contains contributions
from so many eminent
minds. To read it is
the most liberal educa-
tion any adult can hope
to obtain.” —Montreal

Daily Star.

“‘A NOTABLE contribu-
tion to the knowledge
and stimulus to the in-
tellect of the world.” —
OswaLp T. Tuck, head
of the Admiralty his-
torical section of the
British navy.

“‘T HAVE NEVER learned

so much of permanent

value from any one
work.”” — _ Brigadier-
General Sir PERCY
SYKES, Author of

Through Deserts and
Oases of Central Asia.

These Eventful Years

 

 

 
    

Encyclopaedia Britannica behind it could

have assembled so remarkable a number of

distinguished contributors and otherwise car-

ried through this great project to a successful

conclusion.

The History of Our Own Times

THE leading essay in the first of the two
volumes is written by Mr. J. L. Garvin, one

of the world’s great editors.

This article

alone, if printed separately, would fill an
ordinary book; its length is about 100,000

words.

Mr. Garvin’s intense vitality and his genius

for detached and trenchant criticism have

reminded many of his readers of Macaulay

at his best.

Mr. Garvin as editor of the

Observer has steadfastly opposed international

passions and prejudices, and his influence is
deeply felt throughout the political world.
He has made this journal a great intellectual

and moral force.

Mr. Garvin was a historian before he be-

came an editor, and his vigorous plain-speak-

ing and wonderful. literary style make the
article probably the most brilliant piece of

historical writing of our. time.

It is all the

more interesting because Mr. Garvin’s posi-
tion as editor of the Observer has given him

unusual

opportunities

for

the

knowledge

and study of what has happened in recent
years and what is happening today.

With extraordinary vividness and great
literary charm he succeeds in rivetting the

[54These Eventful Years

 

reader's attention as he traces, in bold and
picturesque strokes, the course of world
events from the time of Bismarck’s dis-
missal—characterized by Mr. Garvin as a
“far-reaching disaster’’—to those so recent
as the great Japanese earthquake, the Mexi-
can insurrection of 1923-24 or the advent of
a Labor Government in Great Britain. With
the Paris Peace Conference and its conse-
quences, Mr. Garvin deals at length. He
reminds us that it was signed in the same
Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, where, fifty
years before, Germany had throttled France
and with a gesture of intolerable arrogance
reéstablished the German Empire; and he
also reminds us that “‘by their great memories,
the gods are known,” adding a little grimly,
that “it is certain that what the Germans
forgot in 1871, the Allies did not remember
at the end of June, 1919.”

Mr. Garvin’s summing up of the world
situation of today, although none too optim-
istic, is not without hope. He has told us of
the dangers ahead but adds that “men do
not commonly succumb to dangers so gen-
erally foreseen. At the least, we might say
to pessimists that these are early days for
despair.”

Our World as it is Today

THE cause of truth secured one unparalleled
advantage from the World War. Never
before have the archives of three great powers
been open for complete and thorough inspec-

[55

“THE reading is as ex-
citing as it is informa-
tive.”’—Henry S. Can-
BY, editor of the Salur-
day Review of Literature.

“BEING an editor, I can
perhaps appreciate bet-
ter than those not in
that profession the im-
mense amount of
thought, investigation
and planning required
to produce so notable a
publication as ‘These
Eventful Years.’ All
the articles have such
literary charm that they
are easy to read and
therefore immensely in-
formative.” —GILBERT
GrosvENoR, President
National Geographical
Society, Washington,
1D), (Ch“Writinc each week
for my newspaper syndi-
cate, [haveused “These
Eventful Years’ as my
reference library, and
have found them com-
pletely adequate and
enormously valuable.”
—Frank H. Simonps,
military editor of the
American Review of

Reviews.

“Ir WOULD appear to
me that as a work of
modern history, these
volumes are of great
interest as a valuable
record of the most im-
portant happenings and
developments in the
various countries in the
world in recent years in
the spheres of Politics,
Industry, Science,
Sport, etc.’’—Viscount
Leverhulme.

 

These Eventful Years

 

tion almost immediately upon the heels of
the events of world importance. Never be-
fore have historians been able to learn the
exact facts about the contemporary intrigues
of diplomatists and war makers.

Nevertheless, while all this information is
theoretically public, the influence of propa-
gandists has been so strong that the average
newspaper-reader is even today quite un-
aware of the importance of these documents
that have been brought to light.

The information in these archives relates
not merely to the war, but to a whole series
of events which have followed it. It explains
to a remarkable extent why the world is today

at sixes and sevens.
Russia in a Stnister Light

Wuitst Germany has hitherto been con-
sidered to have been the chief instigator of
that crime against civilization, the World
War, Professor Hayes actually proves that
Russia’s hands were by no means clean, and
roundly accuses Sukhomlinoy and Yanush-
kevich, the military heads of Russia, of having
deliberately disobeyed the Tsar’s orders in
allowing a general mobilization to continue,
while at the same time concealing this fact
from both their master and the Germany
military attaché. ‘‘Nevertheless,” continues
Professor Hayes, ““Sukhomlinov, and Sazanov
(Minister of Foreign Affairs) too, knew that
general war would follow and with criminal
levity they now welcomed it.” This informa-

[56]-
i
x
E

PAPILIO,

These Eventful Years comes in two
volumes, 1400 pages, 160 full page

plates and numerous mapsThese Eventful Years

 

tion is fresh and has given rise to wide dis-
cussion.

Puritanism and Immorality Mingle
al the German Court

“GERMANY’S PLACE IN THE SUN,” by the
irrepressible Maximilian Harden, is one of
the keenest and most vivid of all the historical
chapters. It is characterized by many de-
lightful touches of irony and sarcasm, usually
at the expense of William II, ex-German
Emperor and King of Prussia. Harden
describes the reéstablishment in 1871 of the
German Empire, when the heads of all the
German states, intoxicated by their victory
over France, swore to an “Eternal Union”
in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. In the
same Hall on June 28, 1919, two men sent
by the new German Empire signed the
Treaty of Versailles and ‘‘the German
dynasties stepped down from their thrones,
their ‘Eternal Union’ having lasted for forty-
eight years.” Harden’s aspersions on the
morals of the ex-Emperor and his description
of the immorality of his Court are certain
to awaken wide interest. Even the dead
ex-Empress, although he admits her to have
been a “good housewife and mother,” does
not escape the vitriol in which this writer so
often dips his pen.

An Extraordinary Company of Writers
Tue stirring tale of Great Britain in THESE

EventFuL Years is told by Sir John Mar-

[57.1

“T FOR ONE cannot see
how anyone can read
novels when he can get
so much excitement out
of the two volumes of
These Eventful
Years.”—Henry T.
FINCK, musical critic
with the New York Eve
ning Post.

“THE contributors are
men of great note and
altogether the publica-
tion is both unique and
invaluable.” — Senator
Carter Glass.“Tue eighty-four chap-
ters of the book read
with the perfect rhythm
of a connected story;
yet all of them have a
different tale to tell.” —

Time, New York.

“Tl HAVE read with the
greatest interest the
two volumes of ‘These
Eventful Years.’ Not
only are they most com-

plete in presenting both

sides of the war issues
and its operation and
results by those in
charge, but they in-

clude the most impor-
tant period of develop-
ment of science and
topics of historical in-
terest in all its phases;
they are truly years of
fate.”,-—C. H. Mayo,
noted surgeon, Mayo
Clinic, Rochester,
Minn.

   
  
   
  
  
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
  
 
   
   
  
   
  
 
   
  
  
 
  
 
 
  
  

These Eventful Years

 

riott, who is not only an eminent historian
but a leading figure in present-day politics.
The story of France is written by M. Albert
Thomas, a notable statesman as well as an
accomplished writer; that of Germany by
Maximilian Harden, whose remarkable reve-
lations are described above; and that of the
United States by Prof. John H. Latane.

And these are only a few from the extra-
ordinary list of writers who have contri-
buted to this section of the book.

Certainly these chapters are indispensable
to any student of contemporary affairs and
will prove to be more valuable as time goes

on.
Achievements of Science

But the book deals not merely with events.
The editors, with the assistance of the eighty
contributors, endeavouring, in the words of
Matthew Arnold,
to see it whole,” have included articles on

“to see life steadily and

the intellectual advance of the period. Among
these contributions is one on Science by J.
Arthur Thomson; on the discovery of Radium
and its revolutionary possibilities by Madame
Curie; on Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud.

The Modern Point of View

THESE chapters present new ideas. Some of
the ideas may be corrected by the results
of future research, some may prove untenable
in actual practice; nevertheless the editors
feel that it is helpful to give currency to those

[58 JThese Eventful Years

 

new ideas which are now occupying the atten-
tion of all thinking people.

Writers of first-rate importance deal with
the Arts, and the reader will find these
chapters intensely interesting, since the au-
thors, without exception, approach their
subject from a distinctively modern point
of view. Clive Bell, for example, writes on
Aesthetic Truth and Futurist Nonsense; Henry
Seidel Canby writes on Literature; Henry T.
Finck on Music and St. John Ervine discusses
the Decay of the Drama.

The Tomb of Tutenkhamon

THE discovery of the Tomb of Tutenkhamon
has focused attention recently on the truly
wonderful achievements of mankind at a
very early period in history. Prof. J. H.
Breasted, who was present when the Tomb
was opened and assisted in deciphering the
hieroglyphics in the inner chamber, not only
tells the story of this discovery, but gives
the reader a comprehensive account of all
the important archaeological discoveries that
have been made in recent years.

Social Experiments of Our Time

THE editors and the contributors to THESE
EveNTFUL YEARS have combined to give a
real insight into these various social move-
ments; thus, Philip Snowden discusses Social
and Revolutionary Unrest; Lady Rhondda
describes the Political Awakening of Women;

[59]

“As A NARRATIVE of the
history of our own
times, it is at once the
most elaborate and the
most thorough presen-
tation imaginable.”—
The New World, Chi-

cago.

“Tr 1s a supremely im-
portant work. For any
person to possess it and
digest it is a step tow-
ard the understanding
by which alone pro-
gress can be made.”’—
The Nashville Tennes-

wean.“THERE is nothing like
it in the world of books.

. ‘These Eventful
Years’ simply clamors
for a place in every lib-
rary.”’—Rochester Dem-

ocrat & Chronicle.

. « UNSURPASSED in
fascination and value.

. The undertaking
is an unique and amaz-
ing triumph of literary
organisation and_ hu-
man usefulness, and
will be absolutely indis-
pensable to every up-
to-date library wheth-
er public or private.”
—Hethodist Times,
London.

These Eventful Years

 

and Prof. T. N. Carver (of Harvard Univer-
sity) writes on Prohibition in America.

Coming to economics, Prof. A. L. Bowley,
of the University of London, discusses Wages
and Prices; Prof. J. Laurence Laughlin writes
on the Madness of Paper Money Inflation;and
Charles M. Schwab, Chairman of the Bethle-
hem Steel Corporation, gives his views on
Big Business.

THESE EventruLt YEARS also covers the
more important educational and _ religious
movements of our times. Dr. J. R. Angell,
President of Yale University, writes on the
Democratic Tendencies in Education, and Prof.
Shailer Mathews contributes a chapter on
Religion.

A chapter on Propaganda by Bertrand
Russell is also concerned with the question
of Education, since Mr. Russell believes that
as long as children are wrongly taught and
wrongly educated, the evils of propaganda
will continue.

Applauded by Critics

THE extracts from reviews and letters quot-
ed in these pages are typical of hundreds of
others received from all parts of the world.
Their unique unanimity in praise of the work
is convincing evidence that THESE EVENTFUL
YEARS is itself not the least of the events in
these great years.

Turse Eventrut YEARS as a record and
mirror of our own times, is without prece-

[ 60 JThese Eventful Years

dent in the world of books. It stands alone
as an instance of a great age successfully
writing its own history.

Intelligent people everywhere are reading
this book and are talking about it. It is
indispensable, in fact, to all who wish to
understand the tangled web of twentieth-
century events and achievements.

It should be in every home, and every
person who would keep abreast of the times
should order these two volumes.

Published by

The Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
342 Madison Avenue
NEW YORK

“THESE EVENTFUL
YEARS is a monumental
work. There has prob-
ably never been a book
like this for the produc-
tion of which so many
eminent writers from all
over the world have co-
operated.”—TZhe Kan-
sas City Star.An “All Star’

History oF Our Own Times, by J. L.
Garvin In
Editor of The Observer (London) since 1908.
CAUSES OF THE WorLD Wak, by Carl-
ton J. H. Hayes.

Professor of History, Columbia University.
SECRET TREATIES AND OPEN COVE-
NANTS, by Charles Seymour.
Professor * History, Yale University. Mem-
ber of the American Peace Delegation, 1919. 4
How tHe War Was FoucutT AnD Won,

by Maj.-Gen. Sir Frederick B.
Maurice.
Director of Military Operations, British Gen-
eral Staff, 1915 to 1918
GERMANY NEVER DEFEATED, by Ma).-
Gen. Ludendorff.
Chief Quarter-Master-General.
Ludendorff’'s Qwn Book.
Vicrorious ARMIES OF FRANCE, by
Gen. Mangin.
Member of the Superior War Council. Captor
of Fort Douaumont.
AmerICA ENTERS THE War, by Frank
H. Simonds.
Military Editor of the American Review of
Reviews. Author of History of the World War.
Tue GerMAN Navy IN THE War, by
Grand-Admiral A. von pas
“Father of the German Navy”. Formerly
Secretary of State for the Imperial Navy.
Tu > Barrie OF JUTLAND, by Admiral
Tell icoe.
The personal narrative of the British Com-
mander-in-Chief.
THE BATTLE OF
Scheer
The personal narrative of the German Ad-
miral in Command.
Rear-

Author of

JuTLAND, by Admiral

MISTAKES OF THE Nev by
Admiral Sims, U. S. Navy.
Commander of American Naval ‘Operations
in European Waters.
GOVERNMENT BY PROPAGANDA, by
Bertrand Russell.
Late Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge.
Author of Problems of Philosophy; etc.
THe Leacue or Nations, by Léon
Bourgeois.
French statesman and member of the Council
which drafted the League Covenant.
InteR-ALLIED Desrts, by Bernard M.
Baruch.
Well-known Financier. Economic Adviser for
the American Peace Commission.

“THESE EVENTFUL YEARS”

CHAPTERS AND

   

AUTHORS

List of ‘Contributors

SOCIAL AND REVOLUTIONARY UNREST,
by Philip Snowden.
Ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer. Chairman of
The Independent Labour Party.
THe WEALTH OF Nations, by O. P.
Austin.
Statistician, National City Bank of New
York.
GreAT Britain SEEs IT THRouGH, by
Sir John A. R. Marriott.
M.P. for York and Honorary Fellow of Wor-
cester College, Oxfor
IRELAND'S Pronceus: by Sir Horace
Plunkett.
Member of Parliament, 1892-1900. Chair-
man of Irish Convention, 1917-1918
AMERICA AS A WorLD Power, be John
Latané.
Professor of American History in Johns Hop-
kins University. Author of History of the
United States; etc.
“Canapa A Nation,” by W. S. Wal-
lace.
Librarian of the University of Toronto.
Editor of Zhe Canadian Historical Review.
FRANCE AGAIN A DomINANT PowER,
by Albert Thomas
Director of the Deena Labour Office,
League of Nations, Geneva.

BeLcIuM AS I Saw It, by Brand Whit-
lock.
American Ambassador to Belgium.
of Memories of Belgium.
Dynamic ITALy, by Francesco Nitti.
Formerly Premier of Italy.
JAPAN ENTERS THE WorLD ARENA, by
M. Hanihara.
Japanese Ambassador to the United States,
Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs.
Tue CuHInEsE Repustic, by Vi Kuyuin
Wellington Koo.
Minister of Foreign Affairs, China.
PALESTINE FREED, by Albert Monte-
fiore Hyamson.

Formerly editor of Zionist Review. Author
of Palestine; etc. :
Inp1a’s Arpuous JourNEY, by Sir

Thomas W. Holderness.

Late Permanent Under-Secretary for India.
Author of Peoples and Problems of India.
Tue Dark ConTINENT To-pAy, by Sir

H. H. Johnston.
een Special Commissioner, Com
mander-in-Chief, and Consul-General for the
Uganda Protectorate; Author of d History
of the British Empire in Africa; etc.

AuthorFERMENT AND FANATICISM IN EcGypt,

by Sir Valentine Chirol.
Formerly Director of the Foreign Depart-
ment of Zhe Times (London). Author of
The Egyptian Problem; etc.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE, by

Henry Seidel Canby.
Editor of the Literary Review of the New York

Evening Post; Lecturer in English, Yale
University.
Tue New Poerry, by John Gould
Fletcher.

Poet and Critic. Author of Fire and Wine;
‘ome Contemporary American Poets; etc.
DeEcAY OF THE Drama, by St. John

Ervine.
For several years Dramatic Critic of The
Observer (London).
Main CurrENTS IN TWENTIETH-CEN-
tury Music, by Henry T. Finck.
Musical Critic of the Vew York Evening Post
since 1901.
ZESTHETIC TRUTH AND Futurist Non-
SENSE, by Clive Bell.
Art Critic. Author of drt; Since Cfzanne.

A ForECAST OF THE WoRLD’sS AFFAIRS,

by H. G. Wells.
Author of The Future in America; Mr. Brit-
ling Sees it Through; Outline of History; Men
Like Gods; etc.

Tur GERMAN DEBACLE, by Maximilian
arden.
Editor of Die Zukunft, Berlin.

“Hoty Russia,” by Michael S. Farb-

man.
Russian Correspondent of The Observer
(London). Author of Bolshevism in Retreat.

Wuat SciENCcE Can Do For Man, by
J. Arthur’ Thomson.
Professor of Natural History, Aberdeen
University. Editor of The Outline of Science.
Author of The Wonders of Life; etc.

Rapium, Irs Discovery AND Pos-
SIBILITIES, by Madame Curie.
Doctor of Science, Professor of Radiology,
who first discovered and isolated Radium.

Man’s Earty History IN THE LIGHT
oF Recent Discoveries, by
James Henry Breasted.

Professor of Egyptology and_ Oriental

History, and Director of Haskell Oriental

Museum, University of Chicago.
Harvest TIME IN MepicineE, by Ray
Lyman Wilbur.

President of Stanford University. President
of the American Medical Association.

CHAPTERS AND AuTHORS—Continued

Printed in U.S. A.

Tue Hippen RECESSES OF THE MIND
by Sigmund Freud.
Founder. of Psychoanalysis.

Translation by Dr. A. A. Brill.

Authorised
PsycHICAL RESEARCH, by Sir Oliver
Lodge.

President of the Society for Psychical Re-
search, 1901-1904. Principal of the Univer-
sity of Birmingham, 1909-1919.

DEMOCRATIC TENDENCIES IN
tion, by James R. Angell.

President of Yale University. Former Pre-
sident of the Carnegie Corporation.

Moprrn RE icious TENDENCIES, by
Shailer Mathews.

Dean of the Divinity School University of
Chicago. Formerly Editor of Zhe Biblical
World.

Bic Business, by Charles M. Schwab.
President of the United States Steel Corpora-
tion, 1901-1903. Chairman of the Board of
the Bethlehem Steel Corporation.

PoLiTicAL AWAKENING OF WoMEN, by
Viscountess Rhondda.

Leader in the movement for the admission of
women to membership in the House of Lords,
Chairman British Fire Insurance Co.,

Tue GREATEST SOCIAL EXPERIMENT OF
MoverN Times, by Thomas N.
Carver.

Professor of Political Economy, Harvard
University. Author of Government Control
of the Liquor Business.

EXPLORATION AND Dyscovery, by
Gilbert Grosvenor.

Editor-in-Chief of the Wational Geographic
Magazine.

ANGLO-AMERICAN RELATIONS AND

Wortp Peace, by Col. House.
Personal representative “of the President of
the United States to European Governments.

OTHER CONTRIBUTORS
Julius Klein, F. R. A.
Seligman, H. Charles Wood, J. L.
Laughlin, Carl Pribram, Karl Brock-
hausen, Marshall H. Saville, Lawrence
Perry, Pieter Geyl, Robert ©! Brooks,
Charles E. Chapman, Aubrey F. G.
Bell, Jacob Hartmann, Roman Dy-
boski, Baron Meyendorff, Hamilton
Fish Armstrong, J. N. Mavrogordato,
Brig.-Gen. Sir ‘Percy Sykes, Frank R.
Gana, James Brown Scott, John Foster
Dulles, Clarence H. Haring, aL,
Bowley, Capt. Oswald Tuck, R. N.,
Harrison E. Howe, M. S., Rt. Hon
William M. Hughes.

Epuca-

Georg Brandes,Is White Civilization a

Broken Thing?

Tus question with all its amazing possibilities
confronts us today. It is the keynote of a sen-
sational book just published—These Eventful Years.

Eighty of the greatest scientists, statesmen,
writers and soldiers of our age have co-operated in
making this book.

H. G. Wells in his contribution sees “the strong
probability” of a setback that may last for genera-
tions. He predicts another world war, between Eng-
land and France, asserting that even now France is
planning to use the African Negro to further her
dream of Empire.

Mr. Wells’ brilliant article in These Eventful
Years has caused a sensation. And no less stimu-
lating is the survey of contemporary history written
by J. L. Garvin of The London Observer. Mr.
Garvin does not hesitate to say, after a searching
analysis, that white civilization appears today a
broken thing. Then he points the way to a solution.

Greatest Modern Minds

The contemporary leaders in every field tell other
phases of the fateful story of the age in which we

 

 

,
Men Who Made This Book

A Forecast of the Future H. G. Wells
Germany Never Defeated
Gen. Ludendorff
Dynamic Italy Ex-Premier Nittl
Anglo-American Relations Col. House
Psychical Research Sir Oliver Lodge
Propaganda Bertrand Russell
Social Unrest Philip Snowden
Decay of the Drama St. John Ervine
Hidden Recesses of the Mind
Sigmund Freud
Chas. M. Schwab
Woman’s Progress Lady Rhondda
Radium Discoveries Mme, Curle
Mistakes of the American Navy
Admiral Sims

Big Business

Other Contributors

J. L. Garvin, Gen. Mangin, Frank H.
Simonds, Chas. Seymour, Brand Whit-
lock, Sir Horace Plunkett, Maximillan
Harden,'Leon Bourgeols, Georg Brandes,
Wellington Koo, Sir Harry H. Johns-
ton, Bernard M. Baruch, John Gould
Fletcher, Clive Bell, Von Tirpitz and
50 others.

 

 

live. They have a single object—to penetrate the mass of present-day prejudice and
half truth in order that civilization may advance into a new era of order and progress.

Bertrand Russell exposes the sordid story of propaganda; Philip Snowden, Chan-
cellor of The Exchequer, reveals the real aims of Labor; Maximilian Harden tells of
the degenerate.carousals at the Kaiser’s court and the amazing story of Germany’s rise
and fall and future chances; Michael Farbman discloses the secret of the “Unseen

Trousers” that wrecked the Romanov dynasty.

Others of the 80 contributors to These Eventful Years are Sir Oliver Lodge, Sig-
mund Freud, Brand Whitlock, Henry Seidel Canby, Wellington Koo, General Luden-
dorff, Sir Horace Plunkett, Leon Bourgeois, Von Tirpitz, J. Arthur Thomson.

Everybody is discussing this new book These Eventful Years. “Far outruns all
reasonable expectations and should raise our thinking to a new and higher plane,
says Professor James Harvey Robinson, author of “The Mind in the Making.” “Noble

editorial conception splendidly carried out,” asserts Miss Ida M. Tarbell.

Lloyd

George, Dean Inge, Princess Bibesco, Viscount Leverhulme, Senator Glass and scores
of others have likewise expressed their appreciation of this brilliant provocative book.

“These Eventful Years”

The Book of The Century

These Eventful Years comes in two volumes of 700 pages each, 160 full page illustrs-

tions, and numerous maps.ALDERMAN LIBRARY

The return of this book is due on the date
indicated below

DUE DUE

 

 

Usually books are lent out for two weeks, but
there are exceptions and the borrower should
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