Free The Secret Places of the Heart by H. G. Wells Page B

handled as one
affair in the general interest."
    "The world, did you say? You meant the empire?"
    "No, the world. It is all one system now. You can't work it in bits. I
want to call in foreign representatives from the beginning."
    "Advisory—consultative?"
    "No. With powers. These things interlock now internationally both
through labour and finance. The sooner we scrap this nonsense about an
autonomous British Empire complete in itself, contra mundum, the better
for us. A world control is fifty years overdue. Hence these disorders."
    "Still—it's rather a difficult proposition, as things are."
    "Oh, Lord! don't I know it's difficult!" cried Sir Richmond in the tone
of one who swears. "Don't I know that perhaps it's impossible! But it's
the only way to do it. Therefore, I say, let's try to get it done. And
everybody says, difficult, difficult, and nobody lifts a finger to try.
And the only real difficulty is that everybody for one reason or another
says that it's difficult. It's against human nature. Granted! Every
decent thing is. It's socialism. Who cares? Along this line of
comprehensive scientific control the world has to go or it will
retrogress, it will muddle and rot...."
    "I agree," said Dr. Martineau.
    "So I want a report to admit that distinctly. I want it to go
further than that. I want to get the beginnings, the germ, of a world
administration. I want to set up a permanent world commission of
scientific men and economists—with powers, just as considerable powers
as I can give them—they'll be feeble powers at the best—but still some
sort of SAY in the whole fuel supply of the world. A say—that may grow
at last to a control. A right to collect reports and receive
accounts for example, to begin with. And then the right to make
recommendations.... You see?... No, the international part is not the
most difficult part of it. But my beastly owners and their beastly
lawyers won't relinquish a scrap of what they call their freedom of
action. And my labour men, because I'm a fairly big coal owner myself,
sit and watch and suspect me, too stupid to grasp what I am driving at
and too incompetent to get out a scheme of their own. They want a world
control on scientific lines even less than the owners. They try to think
that fuel production can carry an unlimited wages bill and the owners
try to think that it can pay unlimited profits, and when I say; 'This
business is something more than a scramble for profits and wages; it's a
service and a common interest,' they stare at me—" Sir Richmond was
at a loss for an image. "Like a committee in a thieves' kitchen when
someone has casually mentioned the law."
    "But will you ever get your Permanent Commission?"
    "It can be done. If I can stick it out."
    "But with the whole Committee against you!"
    "The curious thing is that the whole Committee isn't against me. Every
individual is...."
    Sir Richmond found it difficult to express. "The psychology of my
Committee ought to interest you.... It is probably a fair sample of the
way all sorts of things are going nowadays. It's curious.... There is
not a man on that Committee who is quite comfortable within himself
about the particular individual end he is there to serve. It's there I
get them. They pursue their own ends bitterly and obstinately I admit,
but they are bitter and obstinate because they pursue them against an
internal opposition—which is on my side. They are terrified to think,
if once they stopped fighting me, how far they might not have to go with
me."
    "A suppressed world conscience in fact. This marches very closely with
my own ideas."
    "A world conscience? World conscience? I don't know. But I do know that
there is this drive in nearly every member of the Committee, some drive
anyhow, towards the decent thing. It is the same drive that drives me.
But I am the most driven. It has turned me round. It hasn't turned them.
I go East and they go West. And they don't want to be turned round.
Tremendously, they