Chapter The Rout of Civilisation of The War of the Worlds - Study Guide by H G Wells

political creed to emerge from Darwin's theory of natural selection. Social Darwinism was concerned with allowing the mechanisms of Darwinian to act upon society and maintaining laissez-faire socio- economic policies; and it attributed social inequalities to biological differences. It was the great champion of Social Darwinism, Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest' (though Darwin did judge it "more accurate" and "sometimes equally convenient" to his own phrase of 'Struggle for Existence'." However, the artillery-man appears to reject the laissez-faire approach to life espoused by Social Darwinism. His fear is that in the aftermath of the Martians invasion, without strong controls, "The risk is that we who keep wild will go savage - degenerate into a sort of big savage rat" - a real risk given his proposals for the survivors to live in drains, railway tunnels and subways. Again, there is an echo of Wells' Morlocks in their subterranean world.

The Narrator's encounter with the artillery-man was absent from the first serialised version of The War of the Worlds - perhaps editorial attitude deemed the passage a little strong - and it is damning in its view of the petite bourgeoisie, "all those damn little clerks", skedaddling back and forth between work in businesses "they were afraid to take the trouble to understand" and wives "they married, not because they wanted them, but because they had a bit of money that would make for safety in their one little miserable skedaddle through the world... And on Sundays - fear of the hereafter. As if hell was built for rabbits!" Wells' frustration at the oppressed routine of lower-middle-class life can be found in his early non-scientific fiction, but in The War of the World the indictment of these lives is completed by the artillery- man's casting of them as potential collaborators to the Martian overlords: "the Martians will just be a godsend to these. Nice roomy cages, fattening food, careful breeding, no worry. After a week or so chasing about the fields and lands on empty stomachs, they'll come and be caught cheerful... They'll wonder what people did before there were Martians to take care of them." He even supposes that "Very likely these Martians will make pets of some of them... get sentimental over the pet boy who grew up and had to be killed. And some, maybe, they will train to hunt us... there's men who'd do it cheerful." And Wells lends support to the artillery-man's advocacy by the Narrator ability to "find nothing to bring against this man's reasoning. In the days before the invasion no one would have questioned my intellectual superiority to his - I a professed and recognised writer on philosophical themes, and he, a common soldier; and yet he had already formulated a situation that I had scarcely realised."