A gentle pop, and then a sudden whoosh as thousands of metric tons of air rush in to fill the gap. That is the feeling I get from reading the elite examinations of Interwar Britain.

The "War to End All Wars" is over and it is time to celebrate. I read these exams and see a young civil servant, whom we shall call Herbert George, as he navigates post-war England. HG is a product of examination. He first aced the Scottish Higher (SH) at the age of 17, then the Cambridge Entrance Examination (CEE) at 18, and finally the East Indian Open Competition at 25 (EIC). Herbert George's favourite book is 'Mr Wells's Open Conspiracy' (CEE 1931), and he has considered joining the Fabian Society; he endorses Utopianism, Imperial Cosmopolitanism, and 'government by experts' (EIC 1929). Naturally, HG believes himself to be an 'expert' and thus the appropriate hand to steer the mighty, rotten ship that is the British Empire.

Let us review his dossier. Britain has been utterly bankrupted by the Great War and is suffering from a deficit in her balance of payments. The empty coffers are felt in all corners of the land. British agriculture has lamentably collapsed and the coal industry is in distress (EIC 1923). The question of cuts to state expenditure have ceased to be an academic game and now press as a political inevitability:

Shall we institute a 'capital levy' (wealth tax) on the wealthy (EIS 1923), or shall we cut the provision of public services? In the end HG and the other socialists of the Labour party will institute large taxes on the landed estates which, in combination with a workforce shortage after the war, spell the end of the Great Estate. Together, alongside the decline in traditional arts (EIC 1932) and the implosion of British agriculture (EIC 1933), there is a feeling the gentle British countryside is being devoured by the omnivorous Urban centre. The exam questions reek of a desperate choice:

HG is not troubled by this romantic nostalgia: romanticism failed. Forget the countryside, forget the wildflowers in the evening: look at the power of industry and measurement. The country, although bankrupt, feels richer than ever. Working hours are falling and the possibility of the 'eight hour work day' is on elite lips (CCE 1928–29). Britain is increasingly becoming a nation of leisure and hire-purchase fuelled fun. At times, HG seeks 'attainment of leisure' (CEE 1933), and believes 'escape from manual labour is a proper goal for man' (CEE 1931). At others, HG worries leisure will soften the character of Britain. What are the effects of endless luxury on a nation? What will happen if the youth no longer experience hardship? Alongside this drive in consumption is a charge towards formality and professionalism; HG himself is part of the second generation of this new Bureaucratic Race:

On the one hand, professionalising the Professor and metricising the civil service is Rational and very Utilitarian. It suits the spirit of the age to 'reinvent social class', to allow family ties to weaken (EIC 1933), and emancipate the woman. On the other, it seems to lack a certain daring-do, a certain spontaneity and free spirit. HG cannot quite work out if he disdains the prudish, hypocritical, rather self-involved Victorians, or admires their ability to master the cosmos. Why did Britain cease to compete on the world economic stage in the 1880s; could it be that the sons of those Titans of the mid-century were decadent? Could they have lacked the adventuring spirit which allowed Britannia to conquer the waves?

Although HG is troubled by these thoughts, there is no place for them in his bureau. He has other, more quantifiable concerns. The Scale of Things is changing. Forget Coal – let the coal fields go bust – we are entering the era of Oil! (EIC 1933). Airships, trains, roads, synthetic fertilisers, town-planning, alloys, and mass-production at truly absurd scales. Although only dim aware of the fact, HG and his friends are reducing The World, in The Planet, a known, legible, traversable place:

Everything is being rendered MASS. Mass-culture, mass-media, mass-advertisements, mass-labour, the 'mass-man' (EIC 1931, 1934). Some worry individualism is being lost in the endless pursuit of Progress; others worry there is too much individualism. Many questions raise the disturbing centralising force of new media: the 'dictatorial' tendencies of the print barons, 'cinematograph', and radio. The minds of Britain are being massaged and standardised by the endless, mass-produced stream of Newspapers (CCE 1931). With the death of agriculture, their minds suitable match their surroundings. Countless questions discuss the new revolution in social norms: women and men enter the workplace together, paid the same, treated the same; industrialisation, machinery, trains, cars, planes! will revolutionise Britain:

English dialects disappear (CCE 1931) and farmers go bust, previously proud and independent, now helpless without state protection. What does our New England look like? See for yourself. Follow JB Priestley as he travels across the newly Massified English lands in 1934:

HG does not see this from central control. He sees only the potential problem of his map not matching the underlying territory. Centralisation, whilst efficient, runs the risk of an imbalance in the body politic's humours: 'apoplexy in the head, anaemia at the extremities.' (CCE 1928). Politics is not a science – yet – although economics has provided a way to metricise the everyday. HG thinks in terms of mass-schooling, tweaking the content of the new Cinematographic and Radio lessons, to somehow deliver just the right message to create Modern Individuals ( CEE 1929). And of those who resist his mass-methods? HG pities them, those who foolishly reject the Forces of Modernity. The culture revivalists, 'Back to Land' aficionados (CEE 1932), and preservation societies (CCE 1931), the proponents of 'peasant proprietorships' (EIC 1931), don't they know what time it is?

Forget this flim-flam: what matters is which levers we ought to pull. With man's mastery of biology, HG can now improve the human race itself. He is attracted by Eugenics and its potential to help meet 'Imperial Needs' (CCE 1928). Even if modern life seems to make Modern Mass Man spiritually and physically unwell, Modern Mass Man can be fixed with the application of biological science.

The man in the street might think this is disturbing and strange; more likely, "the man in the street enjoys the benefits of science without realising its implications." (CCE 1931). Only HG and his colleagues can know what is best for the nation because only they understand The Science. Thus, dictatorship is an endless pull and a constant debate. What has democracy got to do with scientific governance? How could relying on the scientifically illiterate masses make for optimal government? ( EIC 1931)

When HG goes down this path, he gets thinking: why, indeed, should we be reliant on Consumerism to power our nation? The limit on industry is capital (1923, EIC) and we seem to be re-directing vast expenditure according to the inane whims of advertising and mass-pleasure. It's a simple problem:

His favourite author Wells teaches HG that science is the driving force of progress, and it is looking increasingly like Socialism is the optimal driver of scientific advancement. Perhaps, as the examination questions go, "We are all socialists now?" (CCE 1928) Yet clearly this cannot answer all the problems of Britain. HG is not insensitive to the messy problems of morality, but his moral universe is not that of the 19th century Admiral. HG tends to regard morality as a form of 'emotional sign-language', (ASC 1938) and religion, that 'declining force' (CCE 1928), as an old superstition falsified by science. Even further, the existence or non-existence of God has itself become an 'obsolete conflict' (CEE 1931). We no longer talk in absolutes or chase the promise of true connection to the divine. Now we have a deeper problem which emerges in that heavenly vacuum:

See, the problem is that a strong modern nation requires some kind of unifying principle fit for the average, ordinary MASS men. Traditionally, in Britain, that glue had been supplied by religion: Le Royalisme, c'est le patriotism simplifie (CEE 1933), suitable for the High and Low. After the death of God, however, a new solution was required. The going consensus, at the time HG is answering his tests, is that Nationalism has filled the breach.

HG's peers are not happy with this substitution. They prefer a world where God is replaced purely by aesthetic sensibility, in Matthew Arnold's words, "The grand old fortifying classical curriculum." (EIC 1925). There is some chance, perhaps, of this occurring with the elitist control of the new central media forms. What if, in the timeless phrase, we can Give the People not What They Want, but What They Need? Thus, a long string of questions on 'state opera', the 'elitism of the radio', a 'state ministry in fine arts' (1928 EIC), the use of state-funds to better the public taste. These smash against an equally powerful drive the countervailing modern drive for egalitarianism and the feeling the new Era calls for a new Social Order:

The only problem, it would seem, is that modern culture has stopped resembling the fine culture of the pre-war era. It has become weird and strange. From the 1920s to 1930s, the examiners ask question after question about the seeming degeneracy, inaccessibility, and abstruseness of "modern art."

For those who believe Culture=Civilisation, this is a rather disturbing finding. What does our unnatural modernist architecture say about Present Conditions? (EIC 1931). Is modern poetry the product of industrialisation? (EIC, 1928). Are there elements in present society profoundly inimical to good literature? (EIC 1933). HG, like his hero Jeremy Bentham, has never really believed in all this. The idea of training the Heart and ensuring there is 'Humanism' to go along with 'Mass-Production' has never gripped him (CCE 1931). Instead, he has a different objection: nationalism is not very technocratic.

In the map-lined, chart-filled world of HG's office, the optimal state of affairs is, obviously, a frictionless World State, and the best vehicle for the World State is the Empire. Thus, he asks himself which difficulties have to be overcome to "make the British Empire a single economic unit" (CCE 1930); how a 'United States of Europe' (SH 1926) could be achieved; he speculates with his friends at the pub over how long it will take before 'Canada will form part of the United States of America.' (CCE 1928). It seems that 'sovereignty is an outworn concept' (EIC 1930) and the new powers of an international educated elite, perhaps combined with the International Finance, have made the Nation irrelevant.

And yet Nationalism, following WWI, appears to be the most successful of all modern ideologies. Everyone can see that they have entered an Era of Nations, where those who can unify their nation will survive, grow, and thrive, whilst those which cannot will face absorption in turn. It is the season of national self-determination (EIC 1919) and 'New Countries' (CEE 1932). The problem with nationalism, besides its incompatibility with cosmopolitanism and killing the Imperial Federation (ASC 1938), is that it leads to war. The League of Nations, by all accounts, is a bust – lacking a "Sword", it is but empty words(ASC 1938). Disarmament also becomes increasingly unlikely, from a going concern with potential disarmament conventions to a sad realisation that it

Why, HG wonders, is his ostensibly rational and utilitarian ideology heading once again down the irrational and iniquitous path of War? Was this somehow HG's doing? Not material progress, but barbarism (CEE 1933): warfare by industrial nations now willing to countenance 'Gas-warfare' (CEE 1932), the 'Submarine threat' (CEE 1931), and 'Aerial warfare' in the place of naval combat (ASC 1938). And in this new struggle for existence, how can HG's Europe compete? Economically weak (EIC 1922) and demographically old, it seems destined to be overtaken by younger, hungrier competitors:

As the years rock on new, sinister events fill HG's dossier – the 'economic slump' of '29 (EIS 1930), the Indian mutiny, the continued disastrous state of the Balance of Payments, and the build-up of armaments across Europe. HG, unable to concentrate on his figures under these gloomy spectres, finds his mind drifting back to that terrible Romantic Nietzsche. What if, Dear Not-God, war is a rational response to the burden of history?

HG exits out narrative here, for he and his friends have little to say about the strange and disturbing powers rising in Europe. They have been blasted into silence. Moral science and political economy, his two great weapons, seem hopeless in a world of 'violence', 'mysticism', and 'superstition', where politicians speak in terms of expediency rather than principle (EIC 1930), and the old formulae cease to apply: "Can the relations between states be significantly discussed in moral terms?" (1938). The winds of change seem to be blowing; democracy, or in Mussolini's terms, the 'pluto-democracies' (ASC 1938), seem fated to die one nation at a time, leaving only plucky Britain as the last man standing.

One gets the sense that the British elite are fundamentally unserious about world affairs. They talk constantly, year after year, in terms of 'Games.' If only, they wish, the other nations could play by our sporting rules? If only we could simply settle things on the cricket field and walk home as friendly rivals?

In the late 1920s and early 1930s the British elite remain vaguely hopeful; maybe the Kellogg pact has rendered war impossible? (EIC 1930). Maybe if everyday citizens, those who will end up fighting, could come together to acheive world peace?

The questions take on a sombre tone as the prospect of war becomes unavoidable. As the late '30s start to roll into their bitter end, examiners set question after question on the hopefulness of 'good game playing', repetition as a virtue in a statesman, and the possibility of peace. The hope is never fully snuffed out. In 1939, the last exam year for All Souls College before a six year hiatus, the following is given for their famous one-word essay: