Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 4.pdf/103

 neers out of the base and servile tradition of the old idea of industry will in the coming years of progress simply get a disproportionate share of the rejected element, the trade will go elsewhere, and the community will be left in possession of an exceptionally large contingent for the abyss.

At present, however, I am dealing not with the specific community, but with the generalised civilised community of A. D. 2000—we disregard the fate of states and empires for a time—and in that emergent community, wherever it may be, it seems reasonable to anticipate, replacing, and enormously larger and more important than the classes of common workmen and mechanics of to-day, a large fairly homogeneous body—big men and little men, indeed, but with no dividing lines—of more or less expert mechanics and engineers, with a certain common minimum of education and intelligence, and probably a common class-consciousness—a new body, a new force, in the world's history.

For this body to exist implies the existence of much more than the primary and initiating nucleus of engineers and skilled mechanics. If it is an educated class, its existence implies a class of educators, and just as far as it does get educated the schoolmasters will be skilled and educated men. The shabby-genteel middle-class schoolmaster of the England of to-day, in—or a little way out of—orders, with his smattering of Greek, his Latin that leads nowhere, his fatuous mathematics, his gross ignorance of pedagogics, and his incomparable snobbishness, certainly does not represent the schoolmaster of this