Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 4.pdf/262

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ANTICIPATIONS

more clearly from the shareholder, the parasitic speculator and the wretched multitudes of the Abyss. The New Republicans will constitute an informal and open freemasonry. In all sorts of ways they will be influencing and controlling the apparatus of the ostensible governments, they will be pruning irresponsible property, checking speculators and controlling the abyssward drift, but at that, at an indirect control, at any sort of fiction, the New Republic, from the very nature of its cardinal ideas, will not rest. The clearest and simplest statement, the clearest and simplest method, is inevitably associated with the conceptions of that science upon which the New Republic will arise. There will be a time, in peace it may be or under the stresses of warfare, when the New Republic will find itself ready to arrive, when the theory will have been worked out and the details will be generally accepted, and the new order will be ripe to begin. And then indeed it will begin. What life or strength will be left in the old order to prevent this new order beginning?

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