to be
inexpressibly shocked at the _unreasonableness_ of war. It is true it is
somewhat difficult to tell just what Melmount did think or feel, for
Melmount is in one particular like Boston's distinguished _litterateur_,
Mr. Lawson,--he appears to be constantly on the point of uttering some
great thought, but never utters it. But so far as light is given us
Melmount after the Change seems to have looked on war much as Carlyle
did long before. Every one remembers Carlyle's two groups of
peasants,[36] living hundreds of miles apart, who never heard of each
other, and had not the slightest quarrel, the one with the other, but
who none-the-less obeyed the orders of their respective kings, and
marched until they met, and at the word of command shot each other into
corpses. Most of us will agree with Carlyle and Melmount that, viewed
from the peasants' standpoint, this was unreasonable to the point of
sheer folly.

But, if I understand Mr. Wells aright, he seems to elevate the reason of
the peasant into something very like the "eternal reason" of Diderot and
Rousseau. He apparently forgets for the nonce that Engels long ago
pointed out that "this eternal reason was in reality nothing but the
idealized understanding of the eighteenth century citizen, just then
evolving into the bourgeois." The difficulty that Mr. Wells will
encounter in trying to bring human society into harmony with "eternal
reason" is the impossibility of getting different classes of men to
agree as to what is reasonable. No one outside of dolls' houses any
longer believes in "eternal reason." Every man and every class has an
ideal of what is reasonable, but these ideals vary. War is unreasonable
to the peasant-target; it is also unreasonable to Melmount and Mr. Wells
so far as they are representatives of the citizens of the classless
society of the future, a society based on social solidarity, on
world-wide brotherhood. But to the socialist materialist, war, in a
world based on private ownership of the means of production used to
produce commodities, with its concomitants, the wage-system,
competition--domestic and international,--and ever-recurring
"over-production," is so very far from unreasonable that it is
absolutely inevitable.[37]

Mr. Wells evidently brought something with him when he left the Doll's
House.

We now begin to realize what a very difficult matter it is to rid the
mind completely of the effects of what Professor Veblen calls "the