ed in Graham's name, a
trust that has obtained possession of so immense a capital that it
controls the chief activities of the world--is figured in the command
of a certain Ostrog, who, with all the dependents that profit by the
use of his wealth and such mercenaries as he can hold to himself,
represents one party in opposition to the actual workers and
producers, generically the People. The picture is the struggle of our
own day in more acute form; the result, in the amended edition, is
left open. "Who will win--Ostrog or the People?" Mr Wells writes in
the Preface referred to above, and answers: "A thousand years hence
that will still be just the open question we leave to-day."

I am not concerned in this place to question the validity of that
answer, nor to suggest that the Wells of 1914 would not necessarily
give the same account of his beliefs as the Wells of 1909, but I must
draw attention to the attitude displayed in the book under
consideration in order to point the change of feeling recognisable in
later books. In _The Sleeper Awakes_, even in the revised version, the
sociological theory is still mechanical, the prophecy at once too
logical, and at the same time deduced from premises altogether too
restricted. The world of A.D. 2100 is the world of to-day, with its
more glaring contrasts still more glaringly emphasised; with its
social incongruities and blindness raised to a higher power. And all
that it lacked has been put into a romance called _In the Days of the
Comet_ (1906), a book to which I shall now leap, returning later to
consider the comparatively irrelevant theses of three other romances
that chronologically intervened.

The great change wrought by the coming of the Comet might be
sentimentally described as a change of heart; I prefer to call it a
change of reason. All the earlier part of the work, which is again
told in the first person, presents the life of a Midland industrial
area as seen by one who has suffered it. The Capital-Labour problem
bulks in the foreground, and is adequately supported by a passionate
exposition of the narrowness and misery of lower-middle-class life in
the jumble of limitations, barriers and injustices that arise from the
absolute ownership of property. Also, into this romance--the only one,
by the way--comes some examination of the relations of the sexes. And
all this jumble is due, if we are to believe the remedy, to human
misunderstanding. The influence of the Com