New-York tribune., 1921-03-07
Books u.yv,sS Sy B,,..

"You say your admiration for Ma
poleon has never done you any harm, -
writes Floyd Dell. II suppose II. G.
Wellss answer to that would be 'Ah,
but think of what you might have been
II you hadn't admired him.'
But, psycho-analytically speaking,
1T seems to me that any one who hates
Cesar, Napoleon and Alexander as
much as H. G.. Wells does must
be repressng strong desire to
emulate them Just as certain peo-
rle hate whisky and Anthony Comstock
hated what he called indecency,
they can't take it or leave it
alone; their only protection is to
abolish it! l suspect Wells of having
passed through a Napoleonic period as
funny as Bunker Beams. In his book
on Russia he confesses to having hated
the capitalist system as boy and
wanting to destroy it, Well, the man
who wrote about the atomic bomb in
The World Set Free is the same bow.
and in the book ne destroys the hateful
capitalist system with a new, and ter
rlble explosive. He-imaginatively at
least-conquers the whole world | sus-
pect he once intended to do it in reality
and has been little scared of himself
ever since! He had struggle with
himself, put by the temptation and de-
cided not to wade through slaughter to
Utopia except in books. That's why
he disapprovcs of the Bolsheviki; thev
have more or less gone and done what
he wanted to and wouldn't. He is cross
at them in consequence; he is all for
love and fine thinking as opposed to
the dictatorship of the proletariat.' If
he isn't going to do the debating him
self, he isn't going to let anybody else
do it, so there!"
With this criticism Of Wells we are
not in accord at all. To our mind he
is the one essentially right person in
the world to-day, and his is the only
method of remodeling man and his
kingdom which is ever going to have
the slightest effect of permanencc. We
believe in crying over split blood.
Utopias rest uneasily, we think, upon
bayonets.
In the present temper of the world
we find the greatest difficulty in de-
tccting tho difference between mem
bers of the National Security League
and revolutionaries. Only the other
day we were speaking with man who
was sneering at the possible effective
ness Of words in our world. He said
that nothing ever mattered much ex-
ccpt guns and what they could say, and
he developed the belief that unless you
armed to the teeth and kept your
weapons pointed at your neighbor he
was sure to be at your throat
Naturally, VIC supposed he was argu-
ing for huge navy in the Pacific
Ocean and universal compulsory mill
tary service and all the rest But at
the end he said quite simply that if
the radicals of America would only
emulate the practical Russians and
cease dreaming we could establish the
peace of the world by fighting war
with England.
Of course, this was to be the last
war. Men of this mind seem to us like
poker players who arc positively going
to have one last round and then stop
There is always time for one more and
then 8 consolation pot. In wars, as in
poker games, there is invariably an in
equality in the distribution of the
chips, which leads to a prolongation OF
the test.
The whole jargon of the partisans of
Russia grows more and more like the
talk of the Germans. They didn't go
frankly into Poland because they
wanted Poland, but only to free TIE on