A copy of the Evening Standard newspaper makes its way from 1971 back to one Mr. Brownlow in 1931, and the narrator relates to us the queer happenings from forty years in the future. Would that the political aspects of his world would have materialized!
It means, I take it, that in only forty years from now the great game of sovereign states will be over. It looks also as if the parliamentary game will be over, and as if some quite new method of handling human affairs will have been adopted. Not a word of patriotism or nationalism; not a word of party, not an allusion. But in only forty years! While half the human beings already alive in the world will still be living! You cannot believe it for a moment. Nor could I, if it wasn't for two little torn scraps of paper.

Variants

(1)
  1. “The Queer Story of Brownlow’s Newspaper” by H. G. Wells, in Ladies’ Home Journal, February 1932.
    2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by traditional storytellers