Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 4.pdf/37

 possibly to co-operate in various ways with the manufacturers of special types of motor machines.

In the next place, and parallel with the motor truck, there will develop the hired or privately owned motor carriage. This, for all except the longest journeys, will add to all the small conveniences of first-class railway travel a fine sense of personal independence. It will be capable of a day's journey of three hundred miles or more, long before the developments to be presently foreshadowed arrive. One will change nothing—unless it is the driver—from stage to stage. One will be free to dine where one chooses, hurry when one chooses, travel asleep or awake, stop and pick flowers, turn over in bed of a morning and tell the carriage to wait—unless, which is highly probable, one sleeps aboard. The historian of the future, writing about the nineteenth century, will, I sometimes fancy, find a new meaning in a familiar phrase. It is the custom to call this the most "Democratic" age the world has ever seen, and most of us are beguiled by the etymological contrast, and the memory of certain legislative revolutions, to oppose one form of prevailing stupidity to another, and to fancy we mean the opposite to an "Aristocratic" period. But indeed we do not. So far as that political point goes, the Chinaman has always been infinitely more democratic than the European. But the world, by a series of gradations into error, has come to use "Democratic" as a substitute for "Wholesale," and as an opposite to "Individual," without realising the shifted application at all. Thereby old "Aristocracy," the organisation of society for the glory and preservation of the Select Dull, gets to a flavour even of freedom. When the historian of the future speaks of the past century as a Democratic century, he will have in mind, more than anything else, the unprecedented fact that we seemed to do everything in heaps—we read in epidemics; clothed ourselves, all over the world, in identical fashions; built and furnished our houses in stereo designs; and travelled—that naturally most individual proceeding—in bales. To make the railway train a perfect symbol of our times, it should be presented as uncomfortably full in the third class—a few passengers standing—and everybody reading the current number either of the Daily Mail, Pearson's Weekly, Answers, Tit Bits, or whatever Greatest Novel of the Century happened to be going But, as I hope to make clearer in my later papers, this "Democracy," or Wholesale method of living, like the railways, is transient—a first makeshift development of a great and finally (to me at least) quite hopeful social reorganisation.