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Wells, H. G. (Herbert George), 1866-1946

"First and Last Things"

The house
appliances of to-day for example, are little better than they were fifty
years ago. A house of to-day is still almost as ill-ventilated, badly
heated by wasteful fires, clumsily arranged and furnished as the house
of 1858. Houses a couple of hundred years old are still satisfactory
places of residence, so little have our standards risen. But the rifle
or battleship of fifty years ago was beyond all comparison inferior to
those we possess; in power, in speed, in convenience alike. No one has a
use now for such superannuated things.

3.18. WAR AND COMPETITION.
What is the meaning of war in life?
War is manifestly not a thing in itself, it is something correlated with
the whole fabric of human life. That violence and killing which between
animals of the same species is private and individual becomes socialized
in war. It is a co-operation for killing that carries with it also a
co-operation for saving and a great development of mutual help and
development within the war-making group.
War, it seems to me, is really the elimination of violent competition as
between man and man, an excretion of violence from the developing social
group.


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