Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 4.pdf/387

 will show, I think, that in this field also there has been a discovery of the future, an increasing disposition to shift the reference and values from things accomplished to things to come.

Yet though foresight creeps into our politics and a reference to consequence into our morality, it is still the past that dominates our lives. But why? Why are we so bound to it? It is into the future we go, to-morrow is the eventful thing for us. There lies all that remains to be felt by us and our children and all those that are dear to us. Yet we marshal and order men into classes entirely with regard to the past; we draw shame and honour out of the past; against the rights of property, the vested interests, the agreements and establishments of the past the future has no rights. Literature is for the most part history or history at one remove, and what is culture but a mould of interpretation into which new things are thrust, a collection of standards, a sort of bed of Procrustes, to which all new expressions must be lopped or stretched? Our conveniences, like our thoughts, are all retrospective. We travel on roads so narrow that they suffocate our traffic; we live in uncomfortable, inconvenient, life-wasting houses out of a love of familiar shapes and familiar customs and a dread of strangeness; all our public affairs are cramped by local boundaries impossibly restricted and small. Our clothing, our habits of speech, our spelling, our weights and measures, our coinage, our religious and political theories, all witness to the binding power of the past upon our minds. Yet we do not serve the past as the Chinese have done. There