“The need for a common knowledge of the general facts
of human history throughout the world has become very evident during the tragic
happenings of the last few years. Swifter means of communication have brought
all men closer to one another for good or for evil. War becomes a universal
disaster, blind and monstrously destructive; it bombs the baby in its cradle
and sinks the food-ships that cater for the non-combatant and the neutral.
There can be no peace now, we realize, but a common peace in all the world; no
prosperity but a general prosperity. But there can be no common peace and
prosperity without common historical ideas. Without such ideas to hold them
together in harmonious co-operation, with nothing but narrow, selfish, and
conflicting nationalist traditions, races and peoples are bound to drift
towards conflict and destruction. This truth, which was apparent to that great
philosopher Kant a century or more ago — it is the gist of his tract upon
universal peace — is now plain to the man in the street. Our internal policies
and our economic and social ideas are profoundly vitiated at present by wrong
and fantastic ideas of the origin and historical relationship of social
classes. A sense of history as the common adventure of all mankind is as
necessary for peace within as it is for peace between the nations.”—English
science-fiction author H. G. Wells (1866-1946),
The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind (1920)
