In the Fourth Year is a collection of essays H.G. Wells assembled discussing the problem of establishing lasting peace at the end of World War I. These essays are mostly devoted to plans for the League of Nations and the discussion of post-war politics. Wells states in his preface that the notion of a war to end war had seemed Utopian when he advanced it in 1914, but that in 1918 it had achieved "an air not only of being so practical, but of being so urgent and necessary and so manifestly the sane thing before mankind that not to be busied upon it, not to be making it more widely known and better understood, not to be working out its problems and bringing it about, is to be living outside of the contemporary life of the world."