s, it is strictly true to say that their good is evil. The
light in their bodies is darkness, and the highest objects of such men
are the lowest objects of ordinary men. Their peace is mere safety,
their friendship is mere trade; their international friendship is mere
international trade. The best we can say of that school of capitalism is
that it will be unsuccessful. It has every other vice, but it is not
practical. It has at least the impossibility of idealism; and so far as
remoteness can carry it, that Inferno is indeed a Utopia. All the
visible manifestations of these men are materialistic; but at least
their visions will not materialise. The worst we suffer; but the best we
shall at any rate escape. We may continue to endure the realities of
cosmopolitan capitalism; but we shall be spared its ideals.

But I am not primarily interested in the plutocrats whose vision takes
so vulgar a form. I am interested in the same thing when it takes a far
more subtle form, in men of genius and genuine social enthusiasm like
Mr. H. G. Wells. It would be very unfair to a man like Mr. Wells to
suggest that in his vision the Englishman and the American are to
embrace only in the sense of clinging to each other in terror. He is a
man who understands what friendship is, and who knows how to enjoy the
motley humours of humanity. But the political reconstruction which he
proposes is too much determined by this old nightmare of
necessitarianism. He tells us that our national dignities and
differences must be melted into the huge mould of a World State, or else
(and I think these are almost his own words) we shall be destroyed by
the instruments and machinery we have ourselves made. In effect, men
must abandon patriotism or they will be murdered by science. After this,
surely no one can accuse Mr. Wells of an undue tenderness for scientific
over other types of training. Greek may be a good thing or no; but
nobody says that if Greek scholarship is carried past a certain point,
everybody will be torn in pieces like Orpheus, or burned up like Semele,
or poisoned like Socrates. Philosophy, theology and logic may or may not
be idle academic studies; but nobody supposes that the study of
philosophy, or even of theology, ultimately forces its students to
manufacture racks and thumb-screws against their will; or that even
logicians need be so alarmingly logical as all that. Science seems to be
the only branch of study in which people have to be