In the Fourth Year: Anticipations of a World Peace
In the Fourth Year: Anticipations of a World Peace
H.G. Wells turns from imagining Martians to imagining peace. Written in the spring of 1918, as the Great War finally staggers toward its end, this collection gathers Wells's recent essays on the question haunting every thinking person in Europe: what comes after? He sketches the architecture of a world order that might actually hold, a league of nations, mechanisms for arbitration, the audacious hope that sovereign states might learn to cooperate instead of slaughter. Wells wasn't just dreaming; he was drafting. The League of Nations wouldn't formally exist for another eighteen months, but here is one of Britain's most prescient minds attempting to design it from scratch, in real time, while the shells still fall. This is neither prophecy nor fiction but something rarer: an intelligent man's working notes for a future worth building. For readers who want to understand how the twentieth century's great hope was born, and how fragile it always was, this is a front-row seat to the drafting table.
X-Ray
