NOTE
These articles were written for great weekly newspapers upon both sides of the Atlantic, and I note rather than complain that they appeared after suffering a certain amount of mutilation. I expressed my disapproval of such changes as were made, as vividly as possible, but the remedies a writer has are uncertain and tedious and the editorial interference went on to the end. The paragraphs were cut to pieces; there was a brightly careless excision of phrases and sentences apparently done at the eleventh hour to fit space and there was a frequent insertion of uncongenial cross-heads and headings more satisfactory to the editorial mind. The article in which I replied to the repeated personal attacks of Lord Birkenhead and his son suffered exceptionally in the London version. America with ampler columns was more respectful to the general text, but made one magnificent cut of the whole article about Sacco and Vanzetti, paid for it without complaint and did not print a line of it.
I make this note in justice to myself rather than as an indictment of these big newspapers. It is a considerable stimulus to address one’s ideas to their Sunday morning audience, and it is amusing to try saying what one has to say in as editor-proof a form as possible. It is like shouting across an intervener at a crowd. I would be the last person in the world to object to the criticism that there is a distinct flavour of shouting and a disposition to reiterate in this book. Mercifully, I have removed the emphatic cross-heads in restoring my original text. Quips and quirks, fine phrases and fine qualifications, and, above all, suggestions and hints, one flings into such work to please oneself, praying God that the printer and sub-editor will at least in their final crisis of adjustment cut out rather than distort. And when all its defects have been discounted, this syndicated newspaper work still gives a handsome opportunity for saying things broadly and plainly, and obliges one, very wholesomely, to state one’s current state of mind about this, that, and the other thing in simple lucid terms. One has the sense of committing oneself to readers who may never have heard of one before, and who may, for example, base a life’s antipathy on a single rash assertion.
Inserted among these papers is a lecture given in Paris in 1927 called “Democracy Under Revision.” If I may so far assist the reader, I would point out that this is much more closely written than the rest of this book. It is natural to weigh one’s ps and qs when one faces the ordeal of presently reading it all aloud to an exceptionally intelligent audience. This lecture is something more than an essay upon methods of government. It is an essay upon social structure. It carries in it the statement of a general principle of artistic criticism and has various sentences capable of considerable expansion. As nearly everything else in the book is in a state of quite generous expansion this lecture may be stepped over unawares. But I will be glad to find what I have to say therein about the modern novel and the modern play, for instance, not altogether disregarded. And anyhow, I would like to underline the title to the extent of remarking that the revision of democracy is not its repudiation.
H. G. Wells