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New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 383, 25 October 1946, Page 17

é Sir-I confess that I was somewhat disappointed in your leading article on H. G. Wells. However, contrary to the opinion of GH.D. I prefer to believe that, you intended "Homo Sapiens" to mean "wise man." Certainly the name is futile when applied to the human race as a whole. It is sometimes wise to be violemt. Jesus, for example, did not suffer fools gladly; even he drove the jackals from the Temple before the whip lash. It is perhaps because the restrained, scholarly eremite is too ineffectual; too aloof, to influence the common tun of man, that G-H.D. prefers this type of "wise man." Certainly Wells’ enemies are mostly those who hoped that their "omnipotent God" would humble this disturbing iconoclast, but were disappointed. Wells, almost from his "teens, was a man with a mission, a mission to produce World Order from World Chaos; equality and universal plenty from the horrors of class and monetary distinction; to do this without authoritarianism, by combining individual freedom with co-ordinated intelligent resourcefulness which he labelled Collective Mind. To achieve this for men he toiled through his life. His attacks on religion, snobbery, outworn conventions, and other humbug were incidental to this greater aim. These impeded those advances which the prophet believed could make mankind happier. He abominated the hypocritic sanctity of commercialised Christendom; a view shared to-day by notable English clerics; even more, he detested the inflexibility of obsolete rituals in Church and State. To describe Wells’ fight for "the unlimited right ... to think, discuss and suggest" as a "battering down of open doors" is wilful myopia. It was_no thug whom Anatole France described as "the greatest intellectual force in the Eng-lish-Speaking World." It was no fool who at the dawn of this century predicted the horror of Atomic Warfare; nor was there any meanness of spirit in the man who said "For the greater part of: my life I have given most of my working time to the problem of the human. future."

G. A.

McCRACKEN

(Auckland).