BAD OLD DAYS

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 65, 8 June 1927, Page 15

BAD OLD DAYS

A GRADUAL BETTERMENT REVIEW BY H. G. WELLS Mr. 11. G. Wells, writing in the San Francisco “Examiner,” says that squalid life remained the common life until the third or fourth decade of the nineteenth century. There seemed little hope of any improvement. There were great social changes, an Increase of productivity and population in the eighteenth century, but they brought no perceptible amelioration of the common lot. The common man remained dirty and ignorant, needy or incessantly laborious. The first clumsy machines brought trouble rather than relief; they threw multitudes out of employment; they needed drudges to prepare the way for them: they needed drudges to supplement their mechanical imperfections. Eliminating the Drudge It was only after the middle of the nineteenth century that the real significance of mechanical inventions and the practical applications of scienthi-: knowledge and methods became apparent. Then it began to dawn upon mankind that the age of the mere drudge was at an end. The outbreak l of universal education in Western Europe was the practical recognition | of this. Meanly and grudgingly planned against the resistance of many privileged people and much disturbed bv their intense jealousy of their ‘ social inferiors,” the establishment of compulsory education marks nevertheless a new phase in the history of our j species. It is the beginning of at least I a chance for everybody.