Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 4.pdf/18

 will note, excessive caution about the aeroplane, which is foretold as likely to arrive "very probably before 1950." Before 1910 the writer himself had experienced the pleasure of flight. Perhaps the most living part of the work is the analysis of democracy and the study of the development of new social elements in the second and third chapters. In 1914 the author wrote a brief introduction to a cheap edition of "Anticipations." It is sufficiently amusing to reprint here, and it will be found at the end of the original text of that book.

Next after "Anticipations" the writer has printed a paper he read to the Fabian Society in 1902 on the relation of Locomotion to Administrative Areas. This title may suggest a rather narrow and specialised interest, but it is, as a matter of fact, a discussion of quite fundamental importance to his conception of the necessity of reconstructing the social organisation upon a physically larger scale.

In 1902 the author wrote and published in the Fortnightly Review and the American Cosmopolitan a series of articles which were subsequently reprinted in book form under the title "Mankind in the Making." They dealt with the general problem of education. They were of unequal value; much that he said in them he has repeated in better form and so he has preserved here only two chapters, one dealing with the question of eugenics, and the other stating a case against the institution of monarchy. It is a case that has never been answered. He has also included a short passage on "Thought in the Modern State." Next he has put a lecture delivered