ENGLAND IN 1930.

Levin Daily Chronicle, 3 November 1917, Page 4

ENGLAND IN 1930.

The Strand Magazine recently asked several prominent men to ] prophesy as to what England would | be like in thirteen years' time. Some < of the answers are illuminating, but others appear merely to be the echo of other people's stereotyped opinions.

Sir Arthus Conan Doyle considers that after we have won a complete victory, we can safely reduce our military expenses to a minimum, and therefore it will be possible to institute many measures of social reform. "The money saved from the fighting services should give us enough to increase the present old age pensions which are too low, to subsidise scientific research, to encourage education on a large scale, and to deal with the whole subject of poverty and disease in a drastic fashion." He hopes that temperance legislation will take the ! form of the regulation of the stren- c gth of the intoxicant, and looks to | profit sharing and co-operation as j the solution of the inevitable labour I troubles which must come. In con- | elusion he says:—"I believe that, | taking the history of the last twenty | years, we have., in spite of some ameliorating influences, lived in the most wicked epoch of the world's history, so that all changes are likely to be for the better."

Dr. C. W. Saleeby, who is an au- j thority on eugenics, deplores the fact that the next generation will be born of fathers inferior, as a whole, to those whom the war has taken, but he considers that the organised attempt to reduce the infantile mortality is already bearing fruit, and that the beneficient result in the physique and happiness of the next generation of citizens will be a strange, but blessed, result of this war. He expects that the standard of public health and efficiency will be permanently raised. Mr Oswald Stoll is frankly pessimistic. He says:— "If without compensating financial concessions the Government takes from the many by inevitable £500,000,000 annual budgets the means whereby they might live and prosper, and hands over these vast sums to the comparatively few in the process of reducing a quota of •our £4,000,000,000 of war debt, England will be a hard place to live in. The few resting on their laurels will invest their funds in in-come-producing securities throughout the world. The country will be gradually depleted of great factories and engaged commercially in the shipping of our choicest raw materials abroad for productive use elsewhere. From a decreasing population, the vigorous youth, with their spirit of enterprise, will go to newer lands where work will pay better, where the burden of war debt will not compel the Government to take so much of their earnings, where living will therefore be easier, the rearing of a family a pleasure, and enterprise bring reward as well as responsibilities."

The Government, in his opinion, must arrange for compensating financial concessions to induce people who have money to employ it for productive purposes only; then production will abound, he says. The demand for labour will be multiplied, and all problems of wages and employment solved. In time financial democracy will take the place of financial oligarchy.

Mr Ashmead Bartlett thinks that perhaps the greatest issue of 1930 will be the feminist one. "If the war lasts another year we shall have reduced the vitality of our man power to deplorable lengths. Meanwhile the brain power and independence of the female sex is increasing; man is being displaced." He concludes: —"We shall not know England in 1930 as we knew her before the war. Happy-go-lucky, irresponsible, with the divergent political elements ever quarrelling in public, but generally ready to meet at a dinner-table, a fancy-dress ball, or a private party. In 1930 we shall be lifted out of ourselves, so to speak. In 1930 we shall have learnt the relative importance of domestic, foreign and Imperial questions. We shall be saner, but life will have lost much of its old charm. Democracy does not make for the comfort of the few at the expense of the many. With the smashing of the Huns, the last bar- i rier of servitude, both national and domestic, is swept away. The servant question will become acute, and the housewife will live to curse the day that discipline was destroyed in the cause of liberty. For years we shall groan under almost unbearable taxation. Old family estates will have to be broken up. I think the law of primogeniture will go, and small estates will become the, order of the day. Marriage laws will have to be changed if we are to get back our lost population. Sport and pleasure will be modified. We shall find ourselves in a world of realities made absolutely necessary by the awful strain imposed on us by the war. All the old trappings of mediaevalism will have disappeared. Titles will be limited to those who have performed some great service to the State. The highest positions in the Government round the throne will be open to merit alone, and to the competition of the entire nation. The Bishop of Birmingham considers that England could be a real federated Empire, with all branches sharing in its management, and concludes: — "England in 1930 should, socially, be a land in which those who desired to live luxurious lives should receive the contempt of their fellows. We have learnt that slackness, indifference, self-pleasing, are curses in citizenship. The cumberers of the ground must be uprooted. Democracy must be a real thing, beloved by all, and its teachings practised by all. The fear which is in some of our hearts is lest, after the war, with all its energy and devotion, people should revert to langour; and

it is against this danger that active steps will have, no doubt, to be taken." The most interesting contribution j of all comes from the pen of Mr H. ! G. Wells, who says: — i "What will Great Britain be like in 1930? That is a tremendous challenge to the guessing mind. It depends, as indeed the whole future of the world depends, upon the ideas that prevail in the peace settlement that must come somewhere before the end of next year. These are creative days. What men have the courage to think and decide to-day will become hard fact for centuries ahead. And there are two main sets of ideas struggling for predominance now in men's minds, one of which leads plainly to human welfare and the other to an ever more destructive struggle for life. The first group looks to a sinking of private interests in public service and to sinking of national sovereignty in I some form of world-unity, a League | of Nations, the United States of the | World, the one central idea of ,j world- unity. With it go naturally I ideas of universal (not partial) | free trade, of a world control of 1 shipping, of a world control of I natural resources and the like. With it, too, go ideas of universal education, of that universal participation in the ideas of government which is called 'democracy," and of a universal sharing of the burthen of labour. On the other hand is the second group of ideas, ideas of national jealousy, of suspicious sovereignty, of the cut-throat competition of peoples and races, of loyalty to little monarchies, and traditions, tyranny over 'inferior' peoples, discipline for 'labour,' and disloyalty to mankind. Many of us British seem to be tremendously obsessed

by a narrow conceptiton of our socalled 'Empire' and by the idea of making it into a close system, knit

by high tariffs and financial and transit manipulation, against the outer world. That is the path of death. If we broaden our views from 'Empire' to 'League,' then in 1930 we may be, with our American kindred, with the Latins and the Russians, leading mankind into a new age. The world may be already largely disarmed; it may have recovered altogether from the vast wastes and exertions of these war years; it may be such a scene of hopeful activity and human happiness as only Utopians have dreamt of hitherto. But if we cling to the old mean Imperialist dream, then the 'British Empire' in 1930, heavily armed, heavily ruled, monstrously taxed, and with exasperating tariffs and maddening obstacles stuck in the path of every other State's prosperity, will be drifting towards the role that German militarist Imperialism plays to-day, as an intolerable nuisance to mankind. Internationalism or Imperialism; these are the alternatives. I, myself, am far too deeply involved in these disputes to be able to guess which side is winning. But is it plain which side T want to win."