In the Fourth Year: Anticipations of a World Peace

In In the Fourth Year, Wells argues that the horrors of World War I have awakened humanity to the failures of imperialism and the need for political reform, framing the war as a conflict of ideas and proposing a “people’s league” based on democratic principles rather than elite diplomacy, insisting that such a League of Nations must truly represent global citizens and not just ruling powers, advocating for disarmament and shared responsibility as essential to sustaining peace, and ultimately envisioning a new political order founded on voluntary cooperation among the peoples of the world.