Now since his own idea of the purpose of life is the development of the collective consciousness of the race, his idea of the Good is that which contributes to this synthesis, and the Good Life is that which, as he says, "most richly gathers and winnows and prepares experience and renders it available for the race, that contributes most effectively to the collective growth." And as a corollary to this, Sin is essentially "the service of secret and personal ends." The conflict in one way or another between this Good and this Evil forms the substance of each of the main group of his novels. Aside from the novels of shop-life, each of his principal men begins life with a passionate and disinterested ambition to gather and prepare experience and render it available for the race; each one falls from this ambition to the service of secret and personal ends. Lewisham, Capes, Ponderevo, Remington, Trafford are, each in his own way, human approximations, with all the discount of actual life, of the ethical standard of Wells himself as it is generalized in the New Republicans and the Samurai. They illustrate how fully the socialism of Wells is summed up in a conception of character.
But before turning to the actual men and women who form the substance of his novels, I must add something about those wraith-like beings, the Samurai of _A Modern Utopia,_ which fully embody his ideal.
The name Samurai, to begin with, is not a random choice, for it is plain that the Japanese temper is akin to that of Wells. The career of the Japanese as a nation during the last fifty years perfectly illustrates his frequent contention that in modern warfare success falls to the nation that has most completely realized the socialistic, as distinguished from the individualistic, notion of society. "Behind her military capacity is the disciplined experience of a thousand years," says Lafcadio Hearn, who proceeds to show at what cost, in everything we are apt to regard as human, this disciplined power has been achieved--the cost of individual privacy in rights, property, and conduct.
But aside from social ideals and achievements one instinctively feels that Wells likes Japanese human nature. In one of his early essays, long since out of print, he remarks: