H. G. WELLS The NEW WORLD ORDER ( January 1940.)

IN THIS SMALL BOOK I want to set down as compactly,
clearly and usefully as possible the gist of what I have learnt
about war and peace in the course of my life. I am not going to
write peace propaganda here. I am going to strip down certain
general ideas and realities of primary importance to their
framework, and so prepare a nucleus of useful knowledge for
those who have to go on with this business of making a world
peace. I am not going to persuade people to say "Yes, yes" for a
world peace; already we have had far too much abolition of war
by making declarations and signing resolutions; everybody
wants peace or pretends to want peace, and there is no need to
add even a sentence more to the vast volume of such
ineffective stuff. I am simply attempting to state the things we
must do and the price we must pay for world peace if we really
intend to achieve it.
Until the Great War, the First World War, I did not bother very
much about war and peace. Since then I have almost
specialised upon this problem. It is not very easy to recall
former states of mind out of which, day by day and year by
year, one has grown, but I think that in the decades before 1914
not only I but most of my generation - in the British Empire,
America, France and indeed throughout most of the civilised
world - thought that war was dying out.
So it seemed to us. It was an agreeable and therefore a readily
acceptable idea. We imagined the Franco-German War of
1870-71 and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 were the final
conflicts between Great Powers, that now there was a Balanceof Power sufficiently stable to make further major warfare
impracticable. A Triple Alliance faced a Dual Alliance and
neither had much reason for attacking the other. We believed
war was shrinking to mere expeditionary affairs on the
outskirts of our civilisation, a sort of frontier police business.
Habits of tolerant intercourse, it seemed, were being
strengthened every year that the peace of the Powers remained
unbroken.
There was in deed a mild armament race going on; mild by our
present standards of equipment; the armament industry was a
growing and enterprising on; but we did not see the full
implication of that; we preferred to believe that the increasing
general good sense would be strong enough to prevent these
multiplying guns from actually going off and hitting anything.
And we smiled indulgently at uniforms and parades and army
manœuvres. They were the time-honoured toys and regalia of
kings and emperors. They were part of the display side of life
and would never get to actual destruction and killing. I do not
think that exaggerates the easy complacency of, let us say,
1895, forty-five years ago. It was a complacency that lasted
with most of us up to 1914. In 1914 hardly anyone in Europe or
America below the age of fifty had seen anything of war in his
own country.