Wells's most recent biographer has observed that "Considering their topical origin, the views they take have worn surprisingly well. Wells predicts an eventual war between the United States and Japan; he is disappointed by Labour's brief stint in power; he attacks the gold standard, Italian Fascism, the French occupation of the Ruhr and the lenient sentence handed out to Hitler after the Munich putsch; he advocates compulsory schooling to at least the age of sixteen, nursery provision for four-year-olds and global conservation policies to protect whales, gorillas and elephants."[2]
On Communism
On the future of Communism, Wells wrote on Aug. 9, 1924, that "there will probably be a big movement toward Communism in the industrial centres of India and China and Japan. But in Europe I think that the Communist drive has passed its maximum and that the popular mind is moving onward to a more constructive and hopeful type of Socialism. Just as art in a phase of extreme sterility escaped by going back behind Raphael and starting afresh from the Pre-Raphaelite phase, so I think Socialism will soon be getting behind the unfortunate misdirection of Marx and Engels to become once more Utopian and fruitful."[3]
References
^David C. Smith, H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 279.
^Michal Sherborne, H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life (Peter Owen, 2010), pp. 266-67.
^H.G. Wells, A Year of Prophesying (New York: Macmillan, 1925), p. 316.
